Matthew Giachelli got the call he expected Thursday morning. The NFL was moving the Rams’ playoff game to Arizona due to wildfires raging in Los Angeles, and the league needed 200 gallons of paint immediately.
Monday’s game between the Rams and Minnesota Vikings, now scheduled to be played at State Farm Stadium outside Phoenix, had to look and feel like it was being played at SoFi Stadium, the Rams’ usual home. This included painting the field with the logos and colors of the team and league. However, the hometown Cardinals lack some of the colors they need, including the Rams’ blue and yellow.
Giachelli’s company, World Class Athletic Surfaces, is a small company in Leland, Mississippi that supplies paint to most NFL teams and top college teams. In a matter of hours, he and his colleagues loaded five-gallon buckets containing nine custom paint colors and stencils for NFL playoff logos into a truck that set off on a 1,500-mile trip to Arizona on Thursday afternoon.
“We certainly regret what happened in California, but we are 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 operates State Farm Stadium, had to juggle after the NFL decided to move the wild-card round games. .
The NFL has canceled preseason games and postponed and moved regular season games due to hurricanes, blizzards and other disasters. However, the winner-takes-all playoff matchup has not been moved since 1936, when the championship game was moved from Boston to New York to increase ticket sales.
From front office staff to training staff to thousands of game day staff, countless people were suddenly mobilized. Especially with each game in the playoffs generating tens of millions of dollars for television networks, advertisers and stadium operators, and with the season approaching its final weeks, there was little room for error.
“We have to be contingency prepared for everything,” Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill said in an interview. If you don’t play the game, it will have a huge impact.
The Cardinals helped the Rams with more than just renting their stadium. Bidwill sent two team planes to Los Angeles to help the Rams take 300 entourage and equipment to Arizona. Babysitters, doctors and even an ice cream parlor have been identified for the players’ families.
We had to sell tickets. Starting Friday morning, Rams season ticket holders were among the first to have the opportunity to purchase seats, and an hour later Cardinals ticket holders were given the opportunity to purchase seats. (Those who held tickets to a Sophie Stadium game can either receive a refund or apply their tickets as a credit to a 2025 season ticket. Glendale tickets had to be purchased separately.)
52,000 seats were sold out in two hours. The public scooped up the remaining tickets.
Kathy and Kevin Page, who live in Lake Elsinore, east of Los Angeles, were first in line and paid more than $500 for two lower bowl seats and a parking pass. I did it. They met up with some friends they were tagging along with at a Rams home game.
The Page family, known as the Melon Heads because they wear carved watermelons while playing the game, were glad the game could still be played.
“Playing games here gives people an escape from what’s going on,” said Kevin Page. “With all the reports coming out about fires, this gives us an opportunity to reboot ourselves.”
Page and his friends hung a banner in their tent that said, “Thank you, Arizona Cardinals.”
Manuel Moreno, nicknamed “The Suspect, the Masked Ram,” was on one of dozens of buses transporting hundreds of Rams fans from SoFi Stadium to Glendale. “We appreciate the hospitality,” he said. “Getting news about fires 24 hours a day relieves stress.”
A big reason the NFL is the most valuable league in the world is scarcity. With only 272 regular season games and 13 playoff games, each game is very important to the 32 teams. (Conversely, there are about 400 Major League Baseball games each month during the season.) It’s also important not only to the owners of those teams and leagues, but also to broadcast networks, sponsors and other companies that spend billions of dollars annually. To connect businesses and brands to the NFL
There was no escaping the fact that one of these companies, State Farm, had its name on the airwaves Monday night, less than a year after it announced it would not renew 30,000 homeowner’s policies and 42,000 commercial apartment policies in California. (The NFL donated $5 million to Los Angeles relief efforts.)
The NFL puts on a lot of games every year and does its best to play them all every year. When the league organizes its season schedule each spring, it prepares contingency plans that include alternative stadiums for each game. When a massive snowstorm hit Western New York in 2022, the Buffalo Bills played their home games at Ford Field in Detroit.
Locker room incidents during the pandemic have led the league to postpone several games, but none have been canceled. As the pandemic situation worsened in Santa Clara County, California, the San Francisco 49ers traveled to Arizona for a month and played three home games at State Farm Stadium. Arizona also served as a backstop when the Chargers moved their home game against the Miami Dolphins in 2003 due to the San Diego Fire.
This time the fire spread so quickly that the league decided to move the game five days before kickoff. Rams president Kevin Demoff said the team has been in constant contact with officials in Los Angeles. They initially thought the game could be played at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, which was unaffected by the fire.
But that changed midweek when a fire broke out near the team’s training facility in Woodland Hills, forcing some players and staff to evacuate their homes and halting one practice. Demoff said he doesn’t want players and staff to be distracted and city and county resources being diverted for games when they could be used to help others in need.
Moving the game “is just a recognition that there’s something bigger than football and we owe it to the community to make sure this game can be played safely and without disruption,” Demoff said Friday.
ESPN was also put on hold. Four of the production trucks were en route from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles when the league informed the networks Wednesday night that the game could be moved to Glendale. The team spent the night in Kingman, Arizona, and planned to set up at both stadiums on Thursday in case the league waited until Saturday to decide where to play. So the trucks continued on to Los Angeles, while another set of trucks left for Glendale. After the NFL announced Thursday that the game had been moved, the first set of trucks that had arrived in Ontario, California, turned around and arrived in Glendale with time to spare.
“If you can play, you can play, and in this case, you can play in Glendale,” ESPN’s Joe Buck said. “We’re in the playoffs now. We’re going to be under pressure to get out of the first round before Kansas City and Detroit get a first-round bye.”
