PREVIEW: The Weirdest NFL Playoff Game Ever
A vibes preview of the Los Angeles Rams vs. Minnesota Vikings matchup
The Los Angeles Rams are champions of the NFC West. This means they get home field advantage when they meet the Minnesota Vikings on Monday, January 13, in the first round of the NFL playoffs—except it’s not being played in Los Angeles. It’s being played in Glendale, Arizona, over 350 miles from where the Rams normally play their home games. Glendale, Arizona is not to be confused with Los Angeles County’s Glendale, California, parts of which are/were in mandatory evacuation zones.
For non-Angelinos who do not follow the news, as of this writing there are somewhere between four and four billion wildfires in Los Angeles county. The flames stretch across around 37,000 of the county’s 3,040,640 acres. That’s 1.2% of the county. That doesn’t sound like a lot until you realize having one percent of your house on fire would be a big fucking problem.
The local television affiliates are machine gunning wildly sensationalized human interest stories that do little more than invoke sadness and despair and fear in order to keep you watching. They are providing little actionable information because there is little actionable information. My inclination is to chalk up this style to ratings-seeking, but the local channels here don't appear to be advertising so there is no financial incentive for them to behave like this. This is just how they are. This is just what journalism is now. Meanwhile, our local, state, and federal leaders are going on TV and repeatedly slipping on banana peels and falling face first into vats of lemon meringue pie.
For Angelinos who are just hearing about this, I’ll rephrase the last three paragraphs into three sentences. I’ll use simple language that I think everybody here can easily understand. “BIG FIRE NEAR. BIG FIRE BAD. STAY AWAY FROM BIG FIRE.”
The parts of Los Angeles County that are not on fire smell like a bar circa 1974—smokey, ashy, putrid. The air quality is very, very bad. Football is a sport that ought to be played come rain or shine. It can be played in a blizzard of snow, but probably not in a blizzard of ash.
The NFL clearly agrees. The Rams football operations moved on January 10 following a regularly scheduled practice at their facilities in Woodland Hills, during which you could see plumes of wildfire smoke in the distance. They are now practicing and preparing in the facilities of the Arizona Cardinals.
This is the first NFL playoff game to ever be played on a neutral site, but the NFL is trying very hard to try and make this feel normal. On Sunday, the Rams flew out their groundkeepers and cheerleaders. The groundskeepers will reportedly repaint the Cardinals’ field so it’s decked out with the Rams logo.
But it will not feel normal. The NFL will insist on doing a moment of silence before our warmongering national anthem. The Rams players and sideline staff will reportedly wear Los Angeles Fire Department related paraphernalia during the game. Playoff broadcasts to date have pushed LA-related Red Cross donation campaigns very hard, with their producers taking great pains to find the sappiest, most cliche sad piano music in their libraries to play while announcers somberly read copy written by a white collar professional filling in a madlib.
The question is just how hard the broadcast will push it. It’s entirely possible that the Rams will make their playoff campaign completely about unfolding the tragedy. I can hear the speech in my head. “We’re here to represent LA! We’re here to make Angelinos proud!”
If they do this, then the funniest possible outcome is that the broadcast makes a big deal about how the Rams are putting the city on its back, and then the Vikings come out and utterly bodyslam the Rams. Picture it: Pass rushers Jonathand Greenard and Andrew Van Ginkel combining for 10 sacks of Matthew Stafford. Nose tackle Harrison Phillips stuffing Aaron Jones and Cam Akers into a trash can. Punter Ryan Wright sky kicking a decapitated Rams player’s head 50 yards down field. Fuck it, maybe in the fourth quarter the Vikings will trot out JJ McCarthy, a rookie quarterback whose right knee is currently held together by glue, duct tape, and the power of prayer, and have him throw for six touchdowns.
This is the most likely result when you look at this game through the Plagens Heuristic for Predicting Things in the 21st Century (“the funniest and/or most-ironic outcome possible is also the likeliest outcome possible”).
This newsletter is more interested in the emotional and narrative component of sportswriting than the analytical, let-me-help-you-gamble-slash-win-your-fantasy-league side, but just this once, I’ll make a score prediction:
VIKINGS: SCOREBOARD BROKEN, CANNOT COUNT THIS HIGH.
RAMS: 0