MCG a mystery to players but fans keen to be part of NFL Ram raid
The prospect of 100,000 fans watching NFL before lunch at the MCG has left even seasoned LA Rams veterans wondering about this unprecedented Australian experiment.
Greetings from Woodland Hills in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles where your humble correspondent has been dispatched to get comfy with the LA Rams, the NFL powerhouse who will play a regular-season match at the MCG next year.
As the 2022 Super Bowl champions practised at their makeshift training facility on Thursday afternoon local time, what fans in Australia want to know are: Who will they be playing and when?
If you listened to AFL chief executive Andrew Dillon this week, it will be Friday, September 11, or Saturday, September 12. Last month, Melbourne Cricket Club boss Stuart Fox foreshadowed a 10am kick-off so the match can be broadcast into US prime time.
Can you imagine that? A heaving crowd of 100,000 at the Mecca of Australian sport watching American football before lunchtime? It’s difficult to recall a scene like it.
“We’ve never played that early before,” Rams offensive lineman Steve Avila said. “That’ll be pretty interesting. I’m not sure how that would affect our bodies. If we do play at 10am, that would be historic; it will be a different experience for us. But, as athletes, we’re taught to take everything and adapt to it.”
Veteran tight-end Tyler Higbee reckoned the weird kick-off time wouldn’t be an issue for him and his teammates. “They’ll look at the science of it all and try to get us on the right sleep schedule and rhythm routine to get us peaking at the right time for game time,” he said. “I think when we’re over in London, the game started at 6am here.”
Asked what he thought of the MCG, Higbee asked: “What’s an MCG?”
Both the NFL and the Rams insist no date nor start time have been locked in, which hasn’t hurt interest from fans wanting to watch the first regular-season match played in Australia as part of a two-year deal with the Victoria government. More than 97,000 people so far have registered their interest in buying tickets.
The Rams’ NFC West rivals, the Seattle Seahawks, whom they play at SoFi Stadium on Monday AEDT, have indicated they want to come.
They share marketing rights to Australia along with the Rams, Las Vegas Raiders and Philadelphia Eagles (the team for whom Western Sydney’s Jordan Mailata plays) as part of the NFL’s Global Markets Program.
Few franchises play overseas as much as the Rams, who are owned by billionaire real estate magnate Stan Kroenke. Kroenke Sports & Entertainment owns a slew of sporting franchises, including the NBA’s Denver Nuggets and English Premier League giant Arsenal.
The Rams’ unspoken grand plan is to replace the Dallas Cowboys as the NFL’s strongest brand internationally and they intend to do that by taking matches around the world.
But that makes acclimatising an issue for their high-performance staff. Earlier this year, when they played the Jacksonville Jaguars at Wembley, they flew into London the day before the game and were out soon after.
In total, they were in England for 36 hours, but the strategy worked: they won 35-7.
Stellar Stafford
As you walk into the Rams’ training facility, you soon notice that the car spot closest to the front door belongs, unsurprisingly, to quarterback Matthew Stafford. For the record, he drives a black Ford Raptor that’s so big and chunky you could see it from outer space.
The 37-year-old is having one of the best seasons of his career and is the favourite to win the Most Valuable Player award.
Since the start of the season, Stafford has climbed up the record books, moving to ninth in career passing yards, ninth in career passing touchdowns, fifth in Rams passing yards and fourth in Rams passing touchdowns. Last week, in the win over the San Francisco 49ers, he threw his 400th career touchdown pass – only the ninth to do so.
Former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick has gone so far to compare him to the legendary Tom Brady. “I don’t want to put him in a class with Tom, but it’s reminiscent of Brady, where it keeps getting better and better and better,” he said. “He’s gotten smarter. He understands more. He knows how to use his weapons maybe just a split second quicker. He’s harder to fool.”
Stafford’s longevity can be partly attributed to a very expensive, state-of-the-art “rejuvenation chamber”, which looks like a shiny Greyhound bus on the outside but is effectively an anti-gravity bed inside.
It calms the central nervous system and leaves you in a “state of calm but caffeinated-like energy”.
The Rams’ training facility is only temporary. Kroenke has snapped up 100 acres of adjacent land and will, before 2029, turn it into Rams Village, which will house the team’s headquarters, retail shops, theatres and offices.
Upward spiral
LA Rams punter Ethan Evans has revealed how he adopted the drop punt from AFL to get more distance out of his kicks.
“When I first started punting in high school, I took a little bit from AFL, just because I didn’t know how to punt at the time,” he said. “But I was like, if I can just drop the nose and just swing straight up through it and get a 40-yard punt out of it, then it would make punting a lot easier for me.
“It took me a long time to learn how to hit the spiral. I mean, I didn’t start hitting spirals until my second year of college.
“But I’ve looked at all the Australian guys and how they did it, and just took all the influence from them and made my own drop punt of it.
“You have banana kicks now, helicopters, knuckle balls … All the types of ways you can kick a football around.
“Those guys brought that over from Australia and showed us different ways to kick a ball around, instead of just trying to hit in a high spiral.”
Trump kicks off
US President Donald Trump has had a big sporting week here in the US of A.
On Sunday, he attended the Washington Commanders game against the Detroit Lions, joining the television broadcast in the third quarter.
Two days later, on Veterans Day, he phoned into the Pat McAfee Show on ESPN and sounded off about the NFL’s kick-off rules, which sees the kicking team and the return team lining up closer together. It’s supposed to minimise concussions, but the commander-in-chief isn’t convinced.
“I do have to say, I’ll probably get myself in a little trouble for this, I hate the new kick-off in football,” Trump said. “I think it’s so terrible, I think it’s so demeaning, and I think it hurts the game. It hurts the pageantry. I told that to (NFL Commissioner) Roger Goodell.”
Bills payout
One of the weirdest storylines in the NFL this week has been about Miami Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel trolling Buffalo Bills fans after his side’s upset victory on Sunday.
An image showing McDaniel driving by a Fort Lauderdale bar frequented by Bills fans just hours after the match went viral on social media, although some questioned if it was AI-generated.
When reporters asked McDaniel the following day for clarification, his response was typically wacky.
“That’s why I like the good old days, the throwbacks of yore, where you could trust the internet and the images, because that is pretty detailed,” said McDaniel, who is under pressure to keep his job. “I do live in that area, but I mean, AI, right?”
Told that wasn’t really an answer, he said: “So, I mean, I live in that area. That’s what I got for you. For the record, I did not answer it. That’s the punch line of the humour.” Great chat.
Footy hacks
Just days after this column revealed ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys is trying to headhunt rugby league reporter Michael Chammas for an executive role at the NRL, news broke that Channel 7 had snatched the network’s leading AFL hack, Tom Morris.
Nine is digging in on Morris, threatening to enforce a six-month non-compete clause, and you can understand why: it threw him a television lifeline after Fox Sports sacked him in 2022 for his degrading, homophobic and sexist comments about colleague Megan Barnard.
So don’t expect Nine’s lawyers to let him immediately waltz across the road to the rival network without a fight.
The fallout from last week’s item about the NRL wooing Chammas – possibly as the head of strategy – has been, well, predictable. Club bosses were stunned while journos wanted to know if they could get a side hustle refereeing State of Origin.
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