Matthew Giacelli got the call he expected Thursday morning: The NFL was moving the Rams’ playoff game to Arizona because of the wildfires burning in Los Angeles, and the league needed 200 gallons of Pronto paint.
Monday’s game between the Rams and Minnesota Vikings will now be played at State Farm Stadium outside Phoenix, and it should have looked like it was being played at the Rams’ usual home, Sophie’s Field. This included painting the field with team and league logos and colors. However, the hometown Cardinals did not have some coveted colors on hand, including the Rams’ blue and yellow.
Giachelli’s company, World Class Athletic Surfaces in the small city of Leland, Missouri, provides coatings for most NFL and top college teams. Within hours, he and his teammates loaded five-gallon buckets of nine custom paint colors, along with stencils of NFL playoff logos, onto a truck that departed Thursday afternoon for the 1,500-mile trip to Arizona.
“I’m certainly sorry about what’s happening in California, but I’m glad we were able to meet their needs,” said Giachelli, vice president of production and distribution.
Getting the paint right was just one of hundreds of details the league, the Rams, Vikings, host Arizona Cardinals, and ASM Global, which manages State Farm Stadium, had to juggle after the NFL decided to move the wild-card round game.
The NFL has canceled preseason games and postponed and moved regular season games over the years due to hurricanes, blizzards and other disasters. But it has not moved a winner-take-all playoff game since 1936, when the location of the championship game was changed from Boston to New York to increase ticket sales.
A phalanx of people — from front-office staff to the coaching staff to thousands of game-day staff — was mobilized on short notice. Every game, especially in the playoffs, generates tens of millions of dollars for TV networks, advertisers and stadium operators, and as the season heads into its final few weeks, there is little margin for error.
“We have to have a contingency plan for everything,” Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill said in an interview. “There’s a huge ripple effect” if the games aren’t played.
The Cardinals helped the Rams beyond just loaning their stadium. Bidwill sent two team planes to Los Angeles to help the Rams transport their 300-person entourage and equipment to Arizona. Players’ families have been allocated nannies, doctors and even an ice cream parlor.
Tickets had to be sold out. Beginning Friday morning, Rams season ticket holders were given the first opportunity to purchase seats, followed by Cardinals season ticket holders one hour later. (Those with tickets to the game at SoFi Stadium can get a refund or apply the tickets as a credit toward their 2025 season tickets. Glendale tickets had to be purchased separately.)
Two hours later, 52,000 seats had been sold. The general public then got the remaining tickets.
Cathy and Kevin Page, a couple who live in Lake Elsinore, east of Los Angeles, bought their seats in the first wave, paying more than $500 for two seats in the lower part of the stadium, plus parking passes. They met up with their friends at Rams home games.
They are called “Watermelon Heads” because they wear carved watermelons in the games, and the “Pages” were happy that the game could still be played.
“Having the game here gives people a break from what’s going on,” Kevin Page said. “With all the reports of fires coming in, this gives us a chance to reboot ourselves.”
Page and his friends hung a sign on their tent that said, “Thank you Arizona Cardinals.”
Manuel Moreno, nicknamed “The Suspect, the Hooded Ram,” boarded one of dozens of buses that transported hundreds of Rams fans from Sophie’s Field to Glendale. “We appreciate the hospitality,” he added. “It’s a stress relief from 24-hour news about the fires.”
The main reason the NFL is the most valuable league in the world is scarcity. There are only 272 regular season games and 13 playoff games, so each game is of great importance to the 32 teams. (By contrast, there are about 400 games in Major League Baseball each month during the season.) It’s also extremely important to the owners of those teams and the league, as well as the broadcast networks, sponsors and other companies that spend billions of dollars annually. To associate their businesses and brands with the NFL
I have He did not escape notice One of those companies, State Farm, had its name attached to Monday night’s broadcast less than a year after it announced it 30,000 homeowners insurance policies will not be renewed And 42,000 insurance policies for commercial apartments in California. (The NFL donated $5 million to relief efforts in Los Angeles.)
With so much riding on each contest, the NFL does everything it can to play every game every year. When the league sets its season schedule each spring, it prepares contingency plans including an alternate location for each game. In 2022, when a massive snowstorm hit Western New York, the Buffalo Bills played a home game at Ford Field in Detroit.
During the pandemic, outbreaks in locker rooms forced the league to postpone several games, though none were canceled. When pandemic conditions deteriorated in Santa Clara County, California, the San Francisco 49ers moved to Arizona for a month, playing three home games at State Farm Stadium. Arizona was also a backup in 2003 when the Chargers moved their home game against the Miami Dolphins due to fires in San Diego.
This time, the fires spread so quickly that the League decided to move the match five days before its start. Rams president Kevin Demoff said the team had been in constant contact with officials in Los Angeles, who initially believed the game could be played at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, which was not affected by the fires.
But that changed midweek, when fires broke out near the team’s practice facility in Woodland Hills, forcing some players and staff to evacuate their homes and halting one practice. Demoff said he didn’t want to distract players and staff, nor did he want to divert city and county resources to the game when they could be used to help others in need.
Demoff said Friday that moving the game was “just an acknowledgment that there are some things bigger than football and we owe it to our community to make sure this game can be played safely and not distracted.”
ESPN was also on hold. Four of its production trucks were en route to Los Angeles from Pittsburgh when the league told the network Wednesday evening that the game could be moved to Glendale. The crew spent the night in Kingman, Ariz., on Thursday. The plan was to set up at both stadiums in case the league waited until Saturday to decide where to play. So the trucks continued on their way to Los Angeles while another group of trucks left for Glendale. When the NFL said Thursday that the game had been moved, the first group of trucks, arriving in Ontario, Calif., turned around and arrived in Glendale with time to spare.
“If it can be played, they play it, and in this case, it can be played in Glendale,” Joe Buck, who called the game, told ESPN. “Now we’re in the playoffs, and you have all this pressure to finish in the first round before Kansas City and Detroit, who were shut out in the first round, come back.”