Why Eastern Michigan Has America's Only Gray Football Field
Ypsilanti — College football season is officially in full swing, and after Week 1 you could be feeling great, nervous, or maybe even a little embarrassed depending on who your team is. Regardless, it’s off to a very interesting start.
Over at Eastern Michigan University, things are business as usual. Students are back on campus and the Eagles are preparing to take on my alma mater, Michigan State, at Spartan Stadium this Saturday, and they better lose.
Just like my alma mater, EMU’s colors are famously green and white, and almost everything you see around campus is green to match.
Except for the one thing you would EXPECT to be green: the football field.
Eastern Michigan’s home football field at Rynearson Stadium, better known as “The Factory,” is gray! And it’s the only gray football field in the entire country.
There’s nothing in the NCAA rulebook that says a football field has to be green, which is why you also see fields like the blue “Smurf Turf” at Boise State and the teal-colored “Surf Turf” at Coastal Carolina.
If you've ever watched an EMU game on TV, you know how weird the field looks. It almost looks like you’re watching the game in black and white, except the players are somehow still in color.
But the field hasn’t always been gray. It’s only been this way since 2014, when Chris Creighton took over as the Eagles’ head coach.
At the time, EMU had been one of the worst football programs in the country for decades, so Creighton wanted to give the team a whole new identity and the field a new look. He decided to pay tribute to Southeast Michigan’s blue-collar roots and give his team that same hard-working mentality.
That’s when he came up with the idea to call the stadium “The Factory.” And factories aren’t green, they’re gray, so he decided that his football field needed to be gray, too.
Some other changes were made to help fit this new identity as well. The stadium got diamond-plate details to match the Factory theme, the team adopted its “E Tough” mentality, and a 51-pound pipe wrench became one of its sideline traditions.
And then Creighton took it one step further by having the team smash down a cinderblock wall every time they took the field for a home game at The Factory.
You may have actually seen that one before because a few years ago, one of the first times they tried this, it was a total failure and videos went pretty viral online. The blocks were apparently a little tougher to knock down than expected, and the video shows players trying attempt after attempt to break through the wall with not much luck.
But besides that, the rebrand has actually worked for them a little bit.
Before Creighton arrived in 2014, Eastern Michigan had played in just two bowl games in its entire history. Since then, the Eagles have made six, giving the program one of its most successful stretches in decades.
In 2023, Eastern Michigan named the gray turf “Crosby Field” for Las Vegas Raiders star and EMU alum Maxx Crosby, after he donated $1 million to his former athletic department.
While I can appreciate a fellow Michigan school finally finding some football success, I just hope the gray field hasn’t brought them enough good luck to beat my beloved Spartans this weekend.
Go Green.
