Los Angeles Rams, Kansas City Chiefs Look Back On Monday Night Thriller 5 Years Later

The Los Angeles Rams' focus on Sunday will be on a big home divisional matchup against the Seattle Seahawks, but for football historians, Sunday holds a different significance.

On Nov. 19, 2018, the Rams hosted the Kansas City Chiefs at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in what many consider to be one of the greatest regular season games ever. The game, which was originally set to take place in Mexico City before being moved to L.A. due to field conditions, was a back-and-forth shootout that ended in a 54-51 Rams victory. With 105 total points, this Monday Night Football classic still stands as the third-highest scoring in NFL history.

Five years later, players are still having a hard time believing that game really happened.

“It’s still like a surreal night,” former Rams offensive lineman Andrew Whitworth told USA TODAY. “Even to now, it’s almost like that feeling of, ‘Was I dreaming all that?’”

For L.A. in particular, this game also carried an added emotional weight. In the days prior, a mass shooting took place in nearby Thousand Oaks that left 13 dead, and wildfires broke out over nearly 100,000 acres, affecting several Rams players and coaches in the process. After two weeks or so from hell, the Rams gave the city a sense of escape, no matter how brief.

"LA was going through so much turmoil that week as well," said ESPN announcer Joe Tessitore, who called the game. "The image, the look, the texture, the scene – that it felt like a movie. That night felt like cinema.

“An entire community needed to breathe and needed to be together … with their team, that was gaining all this traction.”

Even if the Chiefs didn't have the same emotional weight on their shoulders, the game was still just as surreal to them. Kansas City has been an offensive powerhouse for the past half decade under the guidance of superstar quarterback Patrick Mahomes, but even though they lost this game, it was still among their most memorable in recent history.

“Watching Pat, Kareem Hunt, [Travis] Kelce, Tyreek [Hill] … all those guys played their tails off. That was a very fun game to be a part of,” said former Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bienemy, who now holds the same position with the Washington Commanders. “Obviously, we came up on the losing end. But it showed a lot of character of who we were at that particular time or where we were going.”

Adding onto this game's legacy, both teams went on to have championship success soon after. The Rams appeared in Super Bowl 53 that same season and won it all three years later, whereas the Chiefs appeared in three Super Bowls over the next five years and won two of them. From pretty much every metric, this game captured lightning in a bottle.

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"You get very few of those – two teams, playing awesome football, and they get to go toe-to-toe and it’s everything you wanted," Whitworth said. "It doesn’t end up with a bad game. It is literally firepower on firepower.”