Is L.A. finally embracing Rams?
Team set to host its first playoff game in Southern California in over 30 years
LOS ANGELES – A rookie head coach and a second-year quarterback are the obvious areas of postseason inexperience as the Los Angeles Rams prepare for a wild-card playoff game against last season’s Super Bowl runners-up, the Atlanta Falcons. But there also are questions about the readiness of Rams fans.
After all, the team hasn’t hosted a playoff game in Southern California since 1986, when the Rams beat the Dallas Cowboys 20-0 at Anaheim Stadium. And not since Jan. 7, 1979, when the Rams lost to the Cowboys 28-0 in the NFC Championship Game, has the franchise hosted a playoff game at Memorial Coliseum, where the Rams (11-5) will play the Falcons (10-6) on Saturday night.
“The bad thing about it is a lot of the new fans don’t really know the ins and outs of it,” said Joe Ramirez, 57, a truck driver in Los Angeles and a member of the So Cal Rams Booster Club. “Hopefully it’s going to be loud. It should be loud.”
On Wednesday, the average ticket price on StubHub for the Falcons-Rams game was $170, outpacing average ticket prices for wild-card matchups this weekend between the Carolina Panthers and New Orleans Saints and the Tennessee Titans and Kansas City Chiefs and trailing only the average ticket price of about $200 for the game between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars, StubHub spokesperson Cameron Papp told USA TODAY.
And with the franchise playing its first prime-time TV game at home since last season’s return to Los Angeles, the game could have a star-studded atmos- phere befitting of the city.
Rams coach Sean McVay acknowledged the team’s fans this week.
“I think people are excited, and that was our goal — is when we came back here to be able to provide a good football product that our fans can be proud of and they want to come out and support you,” he said at the team’s practice facility on the campus of California Lutheran. “We’re certainly excited about what that Saturday night atmosphere will look like for the playoffs.”
Ramirez, the truck driver, sounded a tad nervous. In an attempt to fire up the crowd at Memorial Coliseum after Rams first downs, he started a chant: “Onetwo-three, move the chains!”
“I try to get the crowd involved, but the crowd just doesn’t,” Ramirez said. “The fans still need some time.”
A year after the Rams left St. Louis and returned to Los Angeles, their fans entered the 2017 season as suspect as the team, coming off a 4-12 season and under the leadership of a 31-year-old head coach. In rankings generated by Michael Lewis, a professor at Emory University’s business school, the Rams’ fan base ranked 31st, ahead of only the Kansas City Chiefs’ fan base.
“The Rams are a special case,” Lewis wrote at the time. “While not a great brand in past years, the move to LA tends to punish the Rams because their results have not kept pace with the higher income and population levels in LA.”
In others words, despite the wealth and size of Los Angeles, Memorial Coliseum looked noticeably empty and overly populated with fans from opposing teams during 2016. But as the Rams unexpectedly soared behind McVay and second-year quarterback Jared Goff this season en route to winning the NFC West Division title, the fans have responded, McVay said.
“I think it’s helped being in year two a lot for the guys being able to get settled in and a little bit more familiar with the community where they can kind of be out there, be visual,” he said. “And it certainly helps that we’re getting some good results that we want.
“I can’t say enough about the response, and I think as the season progressed you saw the atmospheres improve.”
This season the Rams ranked 26th in the NFL in home attendance with an announced average crowd of 63,392 a game, though the team capped its ticket sales. And the team averaged almost 67,000 for its final two home games, according to Pro-Football-Reference.com.
“It’s definitely a cool thing after football’s been gone from here for so long and we come back in year two and are able to bring a playoff game to the Coliseum is very cool,” Goff said.
“We want to go out there and operate the same way we would weekly. It makes no difference that we’re in the playoffs now. Like I said, it is a little bit more meaning to it, but we want to treat it the same.”
Not so for fans such as Ralph Valdez, president of the So Cal Rams Booster Club.
“It’s like New Year’s Eve and Christmas every day,” he told USA TODAY. “You’ve got fans who obviously are jumping on the bandwagon, which is OK with us. The more the better.”
Tom Bateman, who emerged as one of the most visible and vocal Rams fans in Southern California during the effort to get the team back after a 22-year hiatus from Los Angeles, sees the playoff game Saturday as a big opportunity — for the team and its fans.
“We’ve been loud in games,” he said. “We’ll go toe-to-toe with any fan base. We’re not intimated by anybody’s fan base, certainly not the Falcons’.”