Matthew Giachelli got the call he was expecting on Thursday morning: The NFL was moving the Rams’ playoff game to Arizona because wildfires were raging in Los Angeles, and the league needed 200 gallons of paint immediately.

Monday’s game between the Rams and the Minnesota Vikings would now be played at State Farm Stadium outside of Phoenix, and it had to look and feel like it was being played at the Rams’ usual home stadium, SoFi Stadium. This included painting the field with the team and league logos and colors. However, the hometown Cardinals didn’t have some of the needed 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 colleagues had loaded five-gallon buckets with nine custom paint colors and stencils for the NFL playoff logos onto a truck that set off on a 1,500-mile journey to Arizona on Thursday afternoon.

“I’m definitely sorry about what’s going on in California, but I’m glad we were able to meet their needs,” said Giachelli, vice president of production and sales.

Finding the right color was just one of hundreds of details the league, the Rams, the Vikings, the host Arizona Cardinals and ASM Global, the operator of State Farm Stadium, had to juggle after the NFL decided to cancel the game the wildcard round.

Due to hurricanes, blizzards and other disasters over the years, the NFL has canceled preseason games and postponed and postponed regular season games. But there hadn’t been a winner-take-all playoff showdown since 1936, when the championship game’s venue was moved from Boston to New York to boost ticket sales.

A battalion of people – from the front office staff to the training staff to 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 with the season only in its final weeks, there was little room for error.

“We have to have an emergency for everything,” Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill said in an interview. “There is a huge ripple effect” when games aren’t played.

The Cardinals didn’t just help the Rams by providing their stadium. Bidwill sent two team planes to Los Angeles to help the Rams get their 300-man entourage and equipment to Arizona. Babysitters, doctors and even an ice cream parlor were found for the players’ families.

Tickets had to be sold. Starting Friday morning, Rams season ticket holders had their first chance to purchase seats, followed an hour later by Cardinals ticket holders. (Those who had tickets to the game at SoFi Stadium could receive a refund or have the tickets applied as a credit toward their 2025 season tickets. Tickets for Glendale had to be purchased separately.)

After two hours, 52,000 seats were sold. The general public was then able to secure 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 as well as parking passes. They met up with friends they hung out with at Rams home games.

They are called “Melon Heads” because they carry carved watermelons during games. The bellmen 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. “Given the many reports about the fires, this gives us a chance to restart.”

Page and his friends hung a banner from their tent that read, “Thank you, Arizona Cardinals.”

Manuel Moreno, nicknamed “Suspect the Masked Ram,” rode on one of several dozen buses that carried hundreds of Rams fans from SoFi Stadium to Glendale. “We appreciate the hospitality,” he said. “It’s a stress relief from the 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 each one is crucial for the 32 teams. (In contrast, there are about 400 Major League Baseball games played each month during the season.) They are also crucial for the owners of those teams and the league, as well as broadcasters, sponsors and other companies that spend billions of dollars each year Importance of connecting their businesses and brands with the NFL

It didn’t go unnoticed that the name of one of those companies, State Farm, was included on Monday night’s show, less than a year after it announced it would not renew 30,000 homeowners insurance policies and 42,000 commercial apartment contracts in California. (The NFL donated $5 million to the Los Angeles relief effort.)

Because there is so much to do in every competition, the NFL does everything it can to play every game every year. When the league prepares 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 were playing a home game at Ford Field in Detroit.

During the pandemic, outbreaks in locker rooms 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 and played three home games at State Farm Stadium. Arizona was also a backstop in 2003 when the Chargers postponed their home game against the Miami Dolphins because of fires in San Diego.

This time the fires spread so quickly that the league decided to postpone the game five days before kickoff. Kevin Demoff, the Rams’ president, said the team was in constant contact with officials in Los Angeles, who initially thought 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 training facility in Woodland Hills, forcing some players and staff to evacuate their homes and cancel a practice. Demoff said he didn’t want the players and staff to be distracted, nor did he want city and county resources diverted to the game when they could be used to help others in need.

Postponing the game was “just a recognition that there are some things that are bigger than football, and we owe that to our community to make sure that this game can be played safely and is not a distraction,” Demoff said Friday .

ESPN was also on hold. Four of its production vehicles were traveling from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles when the league told the network Wednesday night that the game could be moved to Glendale. The crews spent the night in Kingman, Arizona. Thursday’s plan was to settle in both stadiums in the event the league waited until Saturday to decide where to play. So the trucks continued on to Los Angeles while another group of trucks headed to Glendale. When the NFL announced Thursday that the game had been postponed, the first trucks that had reached Ontario, California, turned around and arrived in Glendale on time.

“If it can be played, they’ll 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’re under a lot of pressure to get this first round over before Kansas City and Detroit,” who had byes in the first round, “get back in.”