Les Snead on Jim Rome...

[jimrome.com]

From interviewing him for the head coaching position of the Los Angeles Rams to working with him through the 2017 NFL Draft and into the team’s offseason activities, General Manager Les Snead said one thing remains oblivious about Sean McVay. His age.

Snead joined The Jim Rome Show Thursday on CBS Sports Radio and said you’d never be able to tell McVay is the youngest head coach in the history of the NFL.

“You never think 31. I don’t even know if you think 40, 50, 20. What you do think? Ok, wait a minute, this guy is a special leader,” Snead said. “He’s very smart, especially when it comes to football and what he wants and how he wants to accomplish it, and there’s an ultra-passion and enthusiasm for the game, and not only for the game, but how to prepare for the game.”

Snead also shared some interesting observations of his starting quarterback, the first overall pick in the 2016 NFL Draft, Jared Goff, and his first year in the bright lights of the nation’s second biggest city.

“If you start it at first year, obviously guess what, Los Angeles Rams come back to Los Angeles trade up to the one pick, that’s kind of a Los Angeles thing to do,” Snead said. “He kind of walks into L.A. let’s call it a red carpet moment, and then he spends time behind Case Keenum and then we insert him, and then the end of the season doesn’t go so well.

“So you go from that red carpet moment to uh-oh, like we all do in life.”

But Snead said it’s how Goff has handled that adversity that is encouraging.

“What you learned about Jared through that, number one, he doesn’t blink,” Snead said. “It doesn’t bother him in a sense that what happened doesn’t affect what he’s going to do, try to fix what happened, and I think that’s what quarterbacks need. I don’t think there was a day he took off. I don’t know if he left southern California. I don’t know if he left the valley except to go down to Orange County and work with the group, Tom House and his group down there, but he spent a lot of time in our building. Hey getting to know the players who were still coming around for treatment, workouts, what have you. Getting to know our new coaches as they came in, there wasn’t a day he took off and the most important thing, there wasn’t a moment where last year’s unsuccessful start to his career affected how he’s preparing to be successful the rest of the way.”

Snead said Goff is now a completely different player today than he was at the end of the season and continues to take each step forward in his growth.

“Any time you get to take snaps in this league, you’re going to learn something, whether you like it or not, because this is a really really competitive football league,” Snead said. “But what I think what you’ve seen in those OTA’s is hey, he turned 22, we’ve went from 21 to 22. He also had to learn new offense. But in that, learning the new offense from the ground up has been really beneficial to him. I think he’s been able to absorb it and we’ve seen, let’s call it from our first mini-camp through the OTA’s and we will do our second mini-camp next week, you’ve now seen him go to where he’s processing things quicker, not thinking about them, not thinking about what Sean wants him to do, but actually coming to the line of scrimmage and knowing what he wants to do, and I think the next step will be when you actually go play an opponent, a group, if you want to call an enemy for the day who actually, there’s going to be eleven people out there trying to disrupt what you want to do, and I think that’s the next step in this process is him being able to go out and execute those moments.”