Rams look ahead to busy offseason knowing they have 'a place where players want to be'

Los Angeles Rams look ahead to busy offseason knowing they have 'a place where players want to be'

Brady Henderson
ESPN

LOS ANGELES -- At around 9 a.m. PT Monday, some 14 hours after the Los Angeles Rams won Super Bowl LVI, Sean McVay posed for pictures with the Vince Lombardi Trophy and called it an "incredible honor" to be standing at the podium reserved for the game's winning coach and MVP.

"It's also torturous to have a team win a championship and then make you come in the next morning, do a press conference this early," McVay joked.

As Super Bowl champions do, the Rams had partied the previous night away in celebration of their second title in franchise history and their first since they moved back to Los Angeles from St. Louis in 2016. That celebration will continue with a championship parade on Wednesday that will culminate at the L.A. Coliseum, where the team played before moving into owner Stan Kroenke's $5 billion SoFi Stadium in 2020.

Then the Rams -- represented by McVay, Super Bowl MVP Cooper Kupp and management Monday at the Los Angeles Convention Center -- will shift their focus to all the major obstacles they'll have to overcome in order to repeat in 2022, a feat that only one NFL team -- the New England Patriots in 2004 and '05 -- has pulled off in the last two decades. That may prove especially challenging for the Rams given all the resources they sacrificed while going all in to win in 2021, and now with the recent emergence of questions about two of their most important pieces.

McVay openly pondered his coaching future last week, his comments coming on the heels of sources reiterating to ESPN's Lindsey Thiry that the coach has considered a move to the broadcast booth. The Super Bowl pregame show brought a report from NBC that Aaron Donald might retire if the Rams won, a possibility the star defensive tackle neither confirmed nor denied afterward.

Asked about those situations Monday, Rams COO Kevin Demoff chalked them up to the grind of a long season, projecting an absence of concern.

"You're talking about 26-27 straight weeks in which these guys had maybe a bye weekend off," Demoff said. "And you talk about an Aaron who works relentlessly at his craft in the offseason and for Sean, who's burning the midnight oil, I think all these guys are wiped. And I think when they get to this point, the gas tank is empty. ...

"... Someone once told me: The hardest thing about winning the Super Bowl is you wake up the next morning and it's the next season. It's over. And to be fair, I think that's daunting to some degree, when you wake up this morning and you realize, 'I've got to go do it all over again,' and you don't have the energy. So I think the talk is actually natural. When you look at someone like Aaron Donald and what he's accomplished, this was obviously a legacy piece."

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