How the NFL and Rams worked together to relocate playoff game amid an L.A. tragedy

The NFL will break new ground Monday, a heart-wrenching kind of history the league never wanted to make.

The first-round playoff game between the Rams and Minnesota Vikings, originally planned for SoFi Stadium, has been relocated to Arizona because of the Los Angeles wildfires. It marks the first time a natural disaster has prompted the NFL to move a postseason game to a neutral site.

In an exclusive interview Sunday with the Los Angeles Times, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell detailed the high-level coordination required to make the change — including rival teams going to extreme lengths to help each other — while staying focused on what is far more important than a game.

“The guiding principle for us has always been, don’t interfere and do anything that’s going to impact negatively on public safety,” Goodell said. “Make sure you’re not sapping resources from the responders.”

Read more: From scary surroundings to strange ones, Rams try to focus on football and feel normal

Moving a game on such short notice is no small feat. The Cardinals dispatched two of the team’s Boeing 777 airplanes to Los Angeles to pick up the Rams team, staff and families and bring them to Arizona. The Rams used their plane as well. That relocation included 355 people, six dogs and two cats — all transported within 24 hours of the decision to move the game.

All of the Rams’ equipment was trucked 400 miles to Phoenix, arriving at the Cardinals’ facility at 12:30 a.m. Saturday. The video, IT and athletic training staffs of both teams worked in tandem through the night to get the facility ready for Rams meetings and practices.

The Cardinals cleared out of their locker room to make room for their guests, emptying 74 player lockers and loading them with Rams equipment. For instance, Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford is using the locker of Cardinals counterpart Kyler Murray.

“We wanted to do everything we could to make it as seamless as possible when our players walked in,” Rams president Kevin Demoff said. “Shout out to the Cardinals operations staff for helping make it happen.”

There was much more. The field at State Farm had to be transformed into something that looked familiar to the Rams, even though the stadium is Cardinal red from top to bottom.

To achieve that, Cardinals turf manager Andy Levy arranged for 200 gallons of paint in the Rams’ royal blue and sol yellow to adorn the field and end zones. The north end zone reads “Los Angeles” and the south “Rams,” with the team logo at midfield. The stencils were shipped from Los Angeles.

It’s not as if those signature colors are available at Home Depot, either. They were driven 1,500 miles from World Class Paints in Leland, Miss., and arrived Saturday morning.

“You’ll see it on Monday night,” Goodell said. “It’s going to look like a Rams’ home game. The field will be marked — a lot of the markings will be what we hope are inspirational and powerful markings. We want to make sure we’re recognizing that the people are going through such difficult times in Los Angeles, and we want to thank first responders.”

Regular-season games have been relocated to the home of the Cardinals before, for both wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic. But a postseason game is different, in part because teams angle all season to secure home-field advantage in the playoffs. The Rams cemented that by winning the NFC West, coincidentally by beating the Cardinals in Week 17.

Of the five postseason games played so far, the Washington Commanders are the only visiting team to come away victorious.

“Talking about a football game and the challenges of moving it sound trite,” Demoff said. “We’re just talking about a football game when thousands of people have lost homes. You almost feel guilty having something to work on, having the ability to have all these resources at your disposal to evacuate when so many people get a notice, have to flee and never get to go home again. That juxtaposition isn’t lost on any of us.”

Nonetheless, the game will be played, and Demoff called the distraction of moving an entire operation — including players, coaches, families and fans — from one city to another “an oasis in the midst of so much awfulness.”

The Rams arranged for buses, including some rented by Kelly Stafford, wife of their quarterback, to transport almost 2,000 fans from SoFi to State Farm.

Demoff said that Rams owner Stan Kroenke has spared no expense to facilitate a smooth relocation, and that the Vikings have said, “Just tell us where to go and how we can help.”

Although the horrifically tragic and still evolving situation in Los Angeles is unprecedented, the Rams have something of a blueprint for staging a game on short notice. In 2018, a Monday night game between the Rams and Kansas City Chiefs was moved at the last minute to the Coliseum because of poor field conditions in Mexico City, which was to host the game.

That move came in the wake of California wildfires and a mass shooting in Thousand Oaks. The stands were filled with first responders, who were guests of the Rams, and the game — a duel between quarterbacks Jared Goff and Patrick Mahomes — proved to be one of the most exciting in club history with the Rams winning, 54-51.

“I remember the power of that game, that moment, honoring the first responders,” Demoff said. “Of seeing people wear their LAFD hats. I’ll never forget that. It’s one of my proudest moments as an Angeleno.”

Although he’s an East Coaster, Goodell has a special relationship with Los Angeles. Returning two franchises to the nation’s second-largest market is among the most notable achievements in his nearly two-decade tenure as commissioner. And before he got the most powerful job in sports, he was a top lieutenant to former commissioner Paul Tagliabue, who made him the league’s envoy to Los Angeles.

“It’s hard to watch, to see the loss and the fear and the suffering, it’s just very difficult,” Goodell said. “Your heart breaks for everybody and you pray for everybody. You always want to do something, and what can you do to help? That’s where a lot of people are, trying to figure out some way to help.”

The first move was to get out of the way. Initially, the Rams were hoping to keep the game in Inglewood, and worked on parallel paths with the NFL in case the event would take place at SoFi Stadium or State Farm Stadium.

Read more: Winds prolong fire risk as investigators probe electric tower as possible origin of Eaton fire

There is a contingency plan and alternate NFL stadium for every scheduled game, even though moving games is exceedingly rare. A Monday night game in 2003 between the Chargers and Miami Dolphins was moved to Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Ariz., because of wildfires in San Diego. Again, in 2007, wildfires in San Diego led to the Chargers preparing for a game at the Cardinals’ training facility in Tempe.

In 2020, amid the pandemic, the San Francisco 49ers moved their operation to Arizona for the final month of the season when Santa Clara officials enacted a ban on contact sports because of a rising number of COVID-19 cases in the area.

But this time, it was a high-speed operation with the Rams having hours, not days and weeks, to make pivotal decisions. Team officials worked in close coordination with NFL headquarters in New York, and particularly Dawn Aponte, the league’s chief administrator of football operations.

Donating $1 million each to relief efforts were the Rams, Chargers, Vikings and Houston Texans, who played host to the Chargers in the first round. The NFL matched that with a $1 million donation.

“We’re going to use our platform I hope in a way that’s powerful and inspires people to want to help,” Goodell said. “And that will be well beyond our games. When we get behind something — our communities are important to us, and the relationship between our teams and the communities is critically important. We will be there to continue that effort as Los Angeles rebuilds.”

It was serendipitous that the game was scheduled for Monday night, because the Rams had an extra day to navigate the situation and prepare the team to play. Team officials asked the league for as much time as possible to make the decision on a locale, setting Saturday morning as the deadline to make the call.

As of Thursday morning, the first day of practice, the Rams were confident they could keep the game in Los Angeles. They were having twice-daily calls with public-safety officials.

But on Thursday afternoon, on a call that included Otto Benedict, who oversees the SoFi campus, and an LAPD battalion chief, the tenor changed.

“For the first time, you could hear something in their voice,” Demoff said, referring to public officials. “They basically said they weren’t sure they could provide the resources for Monday night. The Palisades fire, they weren’t going to be able to pull personnel back. The Eaton fire, they couldn’t. The Hurst fire, they might be able to. But also they were getting concerned about what could happen over the weekend and into Monday, Tuesday with winds and new fires.

“You could just hear in their voices that they were, while heroic, beyond devastated. Just the pain and anguish of what they were going through.”

That’s when the Rams did a 180-degree turn. The game had to be moved.

“No person could be on that call and think that continuing the conversations was the right decision,” Demoff said. “You felt guilty for even having the call, that it was 10 minutes they were taking to talk to you that they could have been doing something else.”

Read more: Playoff game moving just another obstacle for Rams to overcome against Vikings

Upon hanging up, Demoff immediately called the league and said there was no reason to delay any longer. The game would move to Arizona.

Figuring out the ticketing was another major challenge. Sofi and State Farm have completely different configurations, so there wasn’t a direct Arizona equivalent to, say, a lower-level club seat in Los Angeles. What’s more, the Rams use Ticketmaster to distribute their tickets and the Cardinals use SeatGeek, and, in essence, those systems speak different languages.

The ticketing and marketing teams of the Rams and Cardinals had to work together to assemble a plan and manifest to create a game that didn’t exist. Rams season-ticket holders got a jump on buying tickets and 52,000 seats were sold Friday in the opening two hours. By the end of the day, the game was sold out, including more than 90 suites and all luxury seating.

The Cardinals got commitments from roughly 4,000 game-day workers to staff the event Monday night — always a difficult day and time — including those to work concessions, security and the rest. The entertainment staffs of the teams worked around the clock to ready all videoboard content and digital assets to look like a SoFi game.

Rams players and their families have taken over one of the resorts used for all four Super Bowls in Arizona, the most recent being two years ago between Philadelphia and Kansas City.

“We had a good day of practice Saturday,” Demoff said. “Players felt normal. For the first time this week, they could focus on football. Walk through the halls of the hotel and people are playing football, kids are running around.”

It’s a brief respite for a franchise that has two employees who lost homes, and two players who saw fires burn just to the edge of their properties.

“I know there will be a moment, whenever this playoff run ends, that the adrenaline of going through this will wear off,” said Demoff, born and raised in Los Angeles. “And the impact of what has happened will probably dawn on us the way it hasn’t. That’s going to be tremendously hard. The new normal, I don’t think anybody in our city is ready for what that can become.

“There is no way to help right now. The fire zones are too dangerous. The Red Cross doesn’t know what they need yet. Everybody wants to do something to help. For us, at least we know how we can help. We can put on the best entertainment we can to provide the distraction and bring the city together for three hours.”

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.