The first of the fleet of trucks carrying the sod from Graff’s Turf Farms in Colorado arrived at Spartan Stadium on Tuesday morning and crews of turf experts were hard at work to make sure it is in game shape before MSU opens its season Sept. 2 against Youngstown State.

“It’s going to take some time for the field to establish the way it was established — it was a well mature field,” Fouty said. “When you bring in a new surface, you can expect a good surface, but you can’t expect what we had.”

The sod was cut from Graff’s Turf Farms — which has sodded Wrigley Field in Chicago, Coors Field in Denver and Target Field in Minneapolis — on Sunday evening, loaded into refrigerated trucks and then sent on its way to East Lansing. Sod for the stadium has been growing in Colorado since April 2010 to replace the 9-year-old grass that previously held residence at Spartan Stadium.

The sod then was rolled on the field in 42 inch wide and more than 50 feet long rolls and set to be installed.

Trey Rogers, a turf grass management professor, said he and several of his students have been involved in the process at Spartan Stadium. Rogers, who was involved in the previous installation of grass nine years ago, said the process to install the sod is similar to the one done before each Super Bowl at a grass field.

“The soils are the same, the grasses are the same,” Rogers said. “The first field we built was built in modules and the modules are here still. Those modules, we put together and seeded. We seeded them with grass seed. This grass seed was seeded in Colorado.”

With the football season quickly approaching and high expectations for the finished product, Ianni said the project is on schedule and is expected to be completed by Friday.

“We’ve got about another two and a half days of sod installation and we’ve just got to babysit it for two weeks,” Ianni said. “We’ve got the folks from the turf grass company that are putting it in. We’ve got quite a mixture of folks going on here.”

Scoreboard update
Progress also is being made in the new additions at Breslin Center.

Ianni said the installation of the new digital video board, including an LED ring spanning the length of Breslin Center is going well and is expected to be completed shortly. Although Breslin Center has been a premiere spot for college basketball, Ianni said the video board and LED ring make the experience better for fans.

“If you’ve been to the Palace (of Auburn Hills), that’s the kind of feel you’re going to get but I think it’s a little better than that,” Ianni said. “It’ll change the whole feel of the Breslin Center.”