Matthew Giachelli got the call he expected Thursday morning: The NFL had moved the Rams’ playoff game to Arizona because of the wildfires raging in Los Angeles, and the league needed 200 gallons of paint pronto.
Monday’s game between the Rams and the Minnesota Vikings will now take place at State Farm Stadium outside of Phoenix, and it had to look and feel like it was being played at the Rams’ usual home, SoFi Stadium. This included painting the field with the logo and colors of the team and the league. But the hometown Cardinals didn’t have some of the necessary hues 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 co-workers loaded five-gallon buckets with nine custom colors, as well as stencils for NFL playoff logos, onto a truck that began its 1,500-mile journey to Arizona Thursday afternoon.
“I definitely regret what’s happening in California, but I’m glad we were able to meet their needs,” said Giachelli, vice president of manufacturing and distribution.
Getting the right color 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, have been juggling since the NFL decided to move up the wild-card round.
For years, the NFL has canceled preseason games and postponed and moved regular season games due to hurricanes, snowstorms and other disasters. But it hasn’t moved the winner-take-all playoffs since 1936, when the championship game was moved from Boston to New York to boost ticket sales.
A battalion of people – from front office workers to training staff to the thousands of game-day workers – were mobilized at short notice. Each game, especially in the playoffs, generates tens of millions of dollars for television networks, advertisers and stadium operators, and with the season down to its final few weeks, there was little room for error.
“If it’s playable, they play it, and in this case, it’s playable in Glendale,” said Joe Buck, who will call Monday’s game for ESPN. “Now we’re in the playoffs and you’ve got all this pressure to get this first round done before Kansas City and Detroit,” who had first-round byes, “come back.”
A big reason why 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 one is critical for the 32 teams. (In contrast, there are about 400 Major League Baseball games each month during the season.) They are also critical for those team and league owners, as well as for the broadcast networks, sponsors and other companies that spend billions of dollars a year to connect their companies and brands to the NFL- in
It didn’t go unnoticed that one of those companies, State Farm, would have its name attached to Monday night’s broadcast, less than a year after it announced it would not renew 30,000 home policies and 42,000 commercial property policies in California. (The NFL donated $5 million to help Los Angeles.)
With so much riding on each contest, the NFL does its best to play every game every year. When the league makes its schedule for the season each spring, it prepares contingency plans including an alternate venue for each game. In 2022, when a major snowstorm hit Western New York, the Buffalo Bills were playing a home game at Ford Field in Detroit.
During the pandemic, locker room outbreaks forced the league to postpone several games, though none were canceled. When pandemic conditions worsened 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’ home game against the Miami Dolphins was postponed due to a fire in San Diego.
This time, the fires spread so quickly that the league decided to postpone the game five days before kickoff. Kevin Demoff, president of the Rams, said the team had been in constant contact with officials in Los Angeles, who initially thought the game could be held 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 canceling one practice. Demoff said he doesn’t want players and staff to be distracted, or city and county resources diverted for the game when they could be used to help others in need.
Moving the game is “just a recognition 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 be a distraction,” Demoff said Friday.
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 night that the game might be moved to Glendale. The teams spent the night in Kingman, Arizona. On Thursday, the plan was to settle in both stadiums in case the league waited until Saturday to decide where to play. So the trucks continued to Los Angeles, while the other truck went to Glendale. When the NFL announced Thursday that the game had been postponed, the first group of trucks, which had arrived in Ontario, Calif., turned around and arrived in Glendale with time to spare.
The Cardinals also helped the Rams in ways beyond just borrowing their stadium. Team owner Michael Bidwill sent two team planes to Los Angeles to help the Rams get their entourage and equipment to Arizona.
