The natural grass purists are not gonna like this

At first, it reads like a rejected Home Improvement script. In a salute to astroturf, Tim and Al get to film on location at the re-astro-sodding of the Silverdome. Tim thinks the astroturf needs more power. Let's use fiber optics instead. Ho ho ho. Insert obvious joke here. Scratch crotch. What happened to my career?

But it's brilliant ideas like this that make whoever came up with this a likely millionaire, and guys like us unemployed, opining on sports, and coming up with ideas for episodes for sitcoms that went off the air a decade ago.

Fiber-optic field turf or "Turf TV" is apparently only about a year away from commercial production. Long the domain of tacky Christmachaunikwaanzivus decorations, this Ontario-based company is creating a stadium-sized version that can among other things, accurately judge foot positioning for out-of-bounds calls, convert from football lines to soccer lines to lacrosse lines to whatever lines in a matter of seconds, and even display the first-down line we've grown so accustomed to on TV, but feel lost without in the stadium.

There's no electricity at field level, just refracted light, so it could work for indoor and outdoor stadiums, the fibers simulate grass, so they'd stand up to a football player's contact, and their 1.7 million-dollar cost could be offset by advertising revenue during commercial breaks.

While a great idea, I think this needs to be stopped. If only to keep 100-yard wide commercials for Frank TV from contaminating our stadiums.