LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles Rams wrapped up practice at their training complex Friday under blue skies with bruise-colored clouds of wildfire smoke lurking on the horizon.
The players and coaches then joined a traveling party of 355 people, six dogs and two cats and headed to the airport, where the Arizona Cardinals had sent two team planes to aid their journey to Phoenix.
The Rams (10-7) have been preparing for their biggest game of the season amid the catastrophic wildfires besieging the Los Angeles area. The players and coaches tasked with separating football from real life are finding it difficult, but they are determined to meet the challenges on all fronts when they “host” the Minnesota Vikings (14-3) at the Cardinals’ State Farm Stadium on Monday night.
“Our community is hurting right now, so our organization is hurting,” Rams chief operating officer Kevin Demoff said. “But we have a chance on Monday, whether it’s in person or on television, to provide hope and a respite to our fans and our city, and to so many people who need it.”
Only a few Rams employees had been affected by the fires until Thursday afternoon, when the Kenneth Fire broke out a few miles from the team’s training complex in suburban Woodland Hills, sending smoke high into the sky with alarming speed.
Many players, coaches and staff members live in the general area, and many of their families were either given an evacuation order or left out of caution — a group that included coach Sean McVay’s wife, Veronika, and their 1-year-old son, Jordan, who met McVay at the training complex.
“Fortunately, they got those things under control, but as soon as I got off the practice field and because of where they were, I saw them right away,” McVay said. “That was all I needed. It felt a lot more real. … I don’t want to say that, because you don’t want to minimize the importance and how many people were affected, but when you can start to see it physically as the smoke rose up yesterday, there’s a lot of guys that live in proximity, and that hits home in a different way.”
Demoff, a Los Angeles native, said the team remained optimistic that its playoff game against Minnesota could be held at SoFi Stadium until Thursday. The new fire and the maddening persistence of the other blazes made it clear that the Rams and the NFL had to implement Plan B.
“Shortly before the Kenneth Fire, we had a conversation with local public safety officials, and they began to express doubt about whether they could adequately staff the game,” Demoff said. “And not only that, but you could hear the pain, the struggle in their voices, and it was pretty clear that the right thing to do was not to play the game. That was before we went to practice and had players evacuated because of the Kenneth Fire, and the flare-up that we could all see.”
The league announced Arizona as its backup location for the game early in the week, and the Rams have praised the Cardinals’ willingness to help. Along with the jets sent by the Bidwill family, the Rams will use the Cardinals’ training complex to prepare for the game, and State Farm Stadium will be made up to look somewhat like a Rams home game complete with painted grass and signage.
The stadium also must be filled, and Rams season ticket members bought 25,000 tickets in the first hour of their availability Friday. The team has arranged for at least 15 buses to drive fans from Inglewood to Glendale for the game, and more travel aids are being contemplated.
Demoff called the league’s relocation of the game “the right decision.”
“It’s heartbreaking for our fans, for our players,” he added. “Our players earned a home playoff game, which is a great testament to (them), but this situation merits that we play somewhere else. It doesn’t take away from what they earned. It doesn’t take away from the amazing season that we’ve had. It’s just a recognition that there’s some things bigger than football, and we owe this to our community to make sure that this game can be played safely and not be a distraction.”
McVay, some of his assistants and a few remaining players — including right tackle Rob Havenstein and receiver Cooper Kupp — had experience with this type of uncertainty in 2018.
The Rams endured some difficult days due to the Woolsey Fire, which forced thousands to flee an area on the border of Los Angeles and Ventura counties near the team’s former training complex, before their historic Monday night game against Kansas City, which had been relocated from Mexico City to Los Angeles at late notice because of concerns about the field at Azteca Stadium.
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