MMQB: McVay on Turnover, Expectations, and Burnout…

MMQB: Sean McVay on Turnover, Expectations and Fighting Burnout​

The Rams' coach is still the youngest in the NFL, as he enters what's unofficially the second phase of his career. Plus, how the NFL and NFLPA arrived at new COVID-19 protocols, a look at the 2022 draft, quarterbacks up for more deals and more.

[www.si.com]

ALBERT BREER

Sean McVay hasn’t given the Rams much to worry about over the four-plus years since his January 2017 hire, but there has been one thing on their—and his—radar for a while now.

And hanging over his head in his Thousand Oaks, Calif. office is a constant reminder of it.
In yellow and white letters above a couple sets of shelves are the words Urgent Enjoyment.

If it sounds like a hokey T-shirt slogan drummed up by a football coach to you, well, McVay’s probably not going to argue on that point. But to him, it’s as much about where he got to at a young age, where he’s been since and where he wants to take the Rams from here. Even more so, it’s about how he thinks he needs to get them there.

“That, to me, is the balance. Hey, we want to be urgent about everything we do. I want to be urgent; that’s who I am. But you want to do it with an enjoyment,” McVay said, from his place near L.A. on Saturday morning. “You want to have an urgent enjoyment. It kind of came to me one day where, Hey, there’s an urgency, but there’s a joy in the way you attack every day.

“I remember Zac Taylor was going through all his head coaching interviews, he had the pick of the litter, and he was telling me, and it was in a complimentary way, basically without saying I was a d--- or hard on people, ‘You got a good urgency.’ And I said, I like that. You’re urgent, and I think that is natural to the core that we have and a lot of the people that are in our building possess it. But the enjoyment is the biggest thing.”

McVay needs that reminder now, because of that one thing that others in the organization, and then he, started to watch as he and the team worked through in the weeks, months and now years following the Rams’ loss to the Patriots in Super LIII—burnout.

While the speed with which McVay turned the Rams around might be rare, his story arc over the last four years really hasn’t been. Young coach comes in, energizes an organization through the honeymoon phase of Year 1 and breaks through with a program established in Year 2. Then, staff and player attrition hit, expectations rise, pressure builds and that hard-driving young coach combats the changing landscape by driving harder and harder.

Eventually, through the blur of Years 1 and 2, then the pressure to follow, the coach finds a point of diminishing returns. Which is what McVay’s been trying to confront.

“Especially the last two years, you can let those expectations get in the way when you’re not as inside-out, and you’re letting an outside-in approach affect your daily enjoyment,” McVay explained. “When I reflect on it, I think there’s a lot of times where you are what you want to be, as far as being a leader and the guy that the players want to be around, that’s who I’d like to think I am. I’m enjoyable, positive, intentional about building and developing relationships in an authentic way.

“And then, I think sometimes you can get a little bit caught up in an outside-in approach, and say, Man, here’s these expectations, if I don’t do it, maybe you’re not living up to what we did as a team the first couple years. You gotta constantly remind yourself of it.”

So going into a big year for his organization—with fans’ coming into the team’s $6 billion palace for the first time, to see a roster aggressively built to give them a show—McVay’s trying to make sure he won’t ever forget it again. And he doesn’t have to look far for a reminder.[www.si.com]