Matthew Giachelli got the call he was expecting Thursday morning: The NFL moved the Rams' playoff game to Arizona because of the Los Angeles wildfires, and the league needed 50 gallons of paint right away.
Monday's game between the Rams and the Minnesota Vikings would now be held at State Farm Stadium outside Phoenix, and it was supposed to look like it was being played at the Rams' usual home, SoFi Stadium. That included painting the field with the team and league logos and colors. However, the hometown Cardinals didn't have the necessary shades on hand, including the Rams' blue and yellow.
Giachelli's company, World Class Athletic Surfaces in tiny Leland, Miss., supplies paint to most NFL and top college teams. Within hours, he and his colleagues had loaded five-gallon buckets of nine custom paint colors, as well as stencils for the NFL playoff logos, onto a truck that left Thursday afternoon for a 1,500-mile trip to Arizona.
“I absolutely regret what's happening in California, but I'm glad we were able to meet their needs,” said Giachelli, the company's vice president of manufacturing and distribution.
Getting the right paint was just one of hundreds of details the league, the Rams, the Vikings, the host Arizona Cardinals and ASM Global, which operates State Farm Stadium, had to juggle after the NFL decided to cancel the wild-card round game move .
The NFL has canceled preseason games and postponed and rescheduled regular season games over the years due to hurricanes, snowstorms and other emergencies. But there hasn't been a winner-take-all playoff showdown since 1936, when the site of the championship game was moved from Boston to New York to boost ticket sales.
A battalion of people – from the front office staff to the training staff and the thousands of game day workers – were mobilized at short notice. Every game, especially in the playoffs, generates tens of millions of dollars for television networks, advertisers and stadium operators, and as the season approaches its final weeks, there is little room for error.
“We have to have a contingency for everything,” Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill said in an interview. “There's a huge ripple effect” when no games are played.
The Cardinals helped the Rams beyond just lending their stadium. Bidwill sent two team planes to Los Angeles to help the Rams get their 300-person entourage and equipment to Arizona. Babysitters, doctors and even an ice cream parlor were identified for the players' families.
Tickets had to be sold. Starting Friday morning, Rams season ticket holders had the first opportunity to purchase seats, followed an hour later by Cardinals ticket holders. (Those who had tickets for the game at SoFi Stadium could get a refund or have the tickets used as a credit toward their 2025 season tickets. Tickets for Glendale had to be purchased separately.)
After two hours, 52,000 seats had been sold. The general public then collected the remaining tickets.
Kathy 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 stadium's lower bowl, plus parking passes. They met friends who they tailgated with at Rams home games.
Called Melon Heads because they carry cut-out watermelons to games, the Pages were happy that the game could still be played.
“Having the game here gives people a reprieve from what's going on,” Kevin Page said. “With all the reports about the fires, this gives us the opportunity to restart ourselves.”
Page and his friends hung a banner on their tent that read, “Thank you Arizona Cardinals.”
Manuel Moreno, who goes by the nickname “Suspect, the Masked Ram,” rode one of the dozens of buses transporting hundreds of Rams fans from SoFi Stadium to Glendale. “We appreciate the hospitality,” he says. “It's a relief from the stress of 24-hour news about the fires.”
A big 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 every game is crucial for the 32 teams. (By contrast, there are about 400 Major League Baseball games each month during the season.) They are also critical to the owners of those teams and the league, as well as to broadcast networks, sponsors and other companies that spend billions of dollars a year. to connect their companies and brands to the NFL
It has not escaped attention that one of those companies, State Farm, had its name linked to Monday night's broadcast, less than a year after it announced it would not be able to service the policies for 30,000 homeowners and 42,000 commercial apartment policies in California. would extend. (The NFL has donated $5 million to the Los Angeles relief effort.)
Because there is so much potential in every game, the NFL makes every effort to play every game every year. When the league sets its season schedule each spring, it establishes contingency plans, including an alternate site 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, locker room outbreaks forced the league to postpone several games, although none were canceled. As pandemic conditions worsened in Santa Clara County, California, the San Francisco 49ers moved to Arizona for a month, where they played three home games at State Farm Stadium. Arizona also provided a safety net 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 game five days before kickoff. Kevin Demoff, the Rams' president, said the team had been in constant contact with officials in Los Angeles, who initially believed the game could be held at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, which was unaffected by the fires.
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 canceling one practice. Demoff said he didn't want the players and staff to be distracted, nor did he want city and county resources to be used for the game when they could be used to help others in need.
Moving the game was “just an acknowledgment that there are things bigger than football and we owe it to our community to ensure this game can be played safely and not be a distraction,” Demoff said Friday.
ESPN was also on hold. Four of the production trucks were en route to Los Angeles from Pittsburgh when the league told the network Wednesday night that the game could be moved to Glendale. The teams spent the night in Kingman, Arizona. The plan on Thursday was to set up in both stadiums 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 headed to Glendale. When the NFL said Thursday that the game had been rescheduled, the first set of trucks, which had reached Ontario, California, turned around and arrived in Glendale in plenty of time.
“If it can be played, they will play it, and in this case it can be played in Glendale,” said Joe Buck, who called the game for ESPN. “We're in the playoffs now and you have all this pressure to get this first round done before Kansas City and Detroit,” which had a first-round bye, “come back in.”
