Rams May Not Have Home Field Advantage They Think vs. 49ers

Home field advantage is something that teams fight tooth and nail to earn in the playoffs. The higher the seed, the more games you earn on your home turf, as this weekend’s NFC Championship game between the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams takes place at SoFi Stadium outside of L.A.

However, there is one very important aspect of home-field advantage that doesn’t get discussed enough. What happens if your home stadium is full of hostile fans of the other team? Well, that is what is the likely scenario for this weekend in “LA''.

According to a tweet from Arash Mrkazi, the LA fans could be priced out of the game due to such high ticket inflation.

"The cheapest ticket to the game as of Monday is north of $600. According to a source at the stadium, a lot of 49ers fans were purchasing tickets, and “it’s going to be a sea of red again.”

The “again” is a reference to the Week 18 game between these two teams at SoFi when San Francisco fans took over the stadium. It seems that Rams fans are not too keen on paying big money for bad seats. 49ers fans, however, are happy to scoop up these tickets and make the trip South to SoFi. 

In an interesting twist to this story, the 49ers are actually trying to geographically ban tickets from being sold to the Bay Area.

Seriously.

In fact, ticket sales are being limited to those from the Los Angeles area exclusively. This step was seen by many, including myself, as a very weak move by the Rams. First of all, they made the decision before they had even won their Divisional Round game and were just anticipating a rush on tickets in San Fran. But, more importantly, this feels like a franchise manipulating the NFL fans to gain an advantage. And that is exactly what it is.

I am a fan of doing whatever it takes to win, but this goes beyond that in my book and is a pathetic attempt to gain an advantage off the field in a tough spot.