MMQB: why McVay returning was an easy decision GREAT READ

Sean McVay Explains Why Returning to the Rams Was an Easy Decision
Two days after the Super Bowl, the coach told Matthew Stafford and Cooper Kupp he’d be back. Plus, Jason McCourty’s exit interview, how the Baker Mayfield trade came together and more.
ALBERT BREER1 HOUR AGO
Sean McVay probably knew the way things were going anyway, but Super Bowl weekend, and the win his Rams capped it with, can mess with a guy’s emotions. So there lingered stray thoughts on what his future held, and whether he should consider the opportunities he’d be presented that would take the whistle off his neck.

That Tuesday, two days after he’d hit the highest of coaching highs, he conducted a wrap-up meeting with the team, and, right after, two heroes of the Super Bowl came to his office. Matthew Stafford and Cooper Kupp had something to say, something that was probably a little more than a request and little less than a demand.


The particulars of the conversation will stay between them. But the message, laced with some colorful language, was crystal clear:

You can’t leave.

“It was really when those guys came in, and I could see how genuine and authentic it was: You can’t not do this,” McVay said. “That was when I looked them in the eye and said, I’m not doing that. And when you tell those guys that, you know, O.K., this decision is final. I think more than anything, all the emotions that are released when you’re able to [win it all], and you’ve got other opportunities, it’s like, Ooh, that’s an exciting option.

“But when you really sit down and think about it, the things I love most about coaching, and then the biggest thing I’d say, Bert, it’s the amount of people that would potentially be affected. … I love coaching. I love working with guys. I love being in the foxhole with the players and coaches. And you can’t mimic and emulate that in a media job.”

On Sunday, the 36-year-old McVay hit the practice field to kick off his sixth training camp as Rams coach. He did it in defense of a world title, and with a résumé unlike any coach his age has ever had in their mid-30s. He did it with a chance to keep building that résumé, and with a chance to, over the next couple decades, chase down the greatest ever to do the job.

But the reason he’s back, and will be on the field rather than in a booth above it in September, has little to do with any of that. And everything to do with guys like the two who burst into his office five months ago.

Separate photos of Sean McVay at a summer practice, Jason McCourty on the Dolphins and Baker Mayfield on the Browns.
Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports (McVay); Jasen Vinlove/USA TODAY Sports (McCourty); Tommy Gilligan/USA TODAY Sports (Mayfield)
Vacation’s over and we’re locked in for the 2022 season. And to kick things off, with my camp trip beginning Monday afternoon, we’ve got a loaded column for you. Inside this week’s MMQB column, you’ll find …

• Insight on Jason McCourty’s decision to walk away from football and into TV.

• Detail on the consummation of the Baker Mayfield trade.

• More on Kyler Murray’s deal getting done.

But we’re starting this season where we left last season, with the world champs.

First, an important point: McVay was never really close to walking away. He never took a meeting with a network and, as we detailed above, his decision was locked in less than 48 hours after he lifted the Lombardi Trophy.

That said, he wasn’t impervious to the way an NFL season can weigh on a coach, nor was he blind to the funny money being thrown around in the broadcast world.

And maybe, if the circumstances around him were different than they are right now, he’d have taken those meetings that network execs were pursuing with him, or even made the jump into what he still thinks will wind up being the next phase of his life. So that it became a relatively easy call in February only underscores how strong the pull to return was—and why Stafford and Kupp approaching him was a perfect manifestation of it.

“Why it wasn’t a consideration for me, not coaching, it’s because of the people, and people like Matthew and Cooper who make you feel like appreciated,” McVay said. “You just feel like you’d be letting people down that you care a whole lot about, whether that be players or coaches. And that was the epitome of it being represented.”

Still, there’s a reason why the idea of walking away at 36 would even be a glimmer of a thought in the coach’s head. He, and the Rams, given McVay’s natural breakneck work pace, have had their radar up for burnout for a while. He and I talked about it last summer. A year later, his handling of a very different offseason shows how conscious he is of it.

And what he’s seen his new wife Veronika, born and raised in Ukraine, go through over that time had its way of driving the point home.

Veronika’s father, stepmother and brother all still live in Ukraine, and her dad chose to stay when the Russians invaded 11 days after she watched her husband win the Super Bowl.

“What happens is you feel terrible about what’s going on with Ukraine, but unless you have family there or it touches you in a very personal way, most people, their lives move on, which is an unfortunate thing but it’s the truth,” McVay said. “Not with us. This is an everyday part of our lives. That’s her family that’s there, that’s the country she grew up in and it’s been heavy to say the least. But she’s been incredible with the way she’s handled it. …

“With everything comes perspective, and stuff that I’ve typically gotten upset about, you start to really say, Does a bad third-down play-call or a couple things that go wrong in our line of work, is that really that big a deal, relative to some of the real s--- we’ve seen that affects my family? Because her family is my family.”

That perspective, McVay thinks, has led to a little more balance in his everyday life—and more effort to just be as present as he can be wherever he is, be it at work or otherwise.

The best example probably came over the three weeks right after the Rams broke for summer. McVay and Veronika were married in June and took that time to honeymoon in the south of France, working their way through Saint-Tropez, Ramatuelle, Cannes and Antibes. The coach says now it’s as unplugged as he’s allowed himself to be in, well, forever.

Even in those spots, though, he won’t completely shut his brain off from work. That, in fact, is usually when he does his reading, and that reading—“I enjoy it as a relaxing exercise”—can go back to his life’s work, and it did as and he and his wife traveled through Europe in June and July. He wound up rereading Phil Jackson’s Eleven Rings, and interestingly enough it drove home, again, that idea of being present in whatever he’s doing.

“There was such a personal touch he had, and he was so himself,” McVay continued. “I think it was more about how you focus on being right here, right now. And it really just reiterated a thing we’ve talked about over the last year, just be present, be in the moment, not worrying about what’s behind or what’s ahead, just focus on the task at hand, and be able to have the mental control and capacity to enjoy every day and stack those blocks.

“But the presence, the connection, the personal touch he had with the guys, it just gave me an appreciation for why he’s been so successful.”

And, in a roundabout way, an appreciation for what he has around him now as he sets off to do what Jackson did over and over—try to successfully defend a championship.

In the bowels of SoFi Stadium on the night of February 13, McVay told me what made the Super Bowl so special, for him, was that on that Rams team, “everybody wanted it more for somebody else other than themselves.” And five months later, he sees that as a reflection of his own growth—in that he’s taught himself to look places other than the scoreboard to find fulfillment in what he does.

“The coolest part of all of it was seeing how happy it made other people that you wanted it for,” he said. “For Andrew Whitworth, for Aaron Donald, to watch Matthew Stafford be able to win, to see some of our other coaches, like, I think what you realize is it’s an amazing thing when you do it with people you really care about, and this was the closest team we ever had. It was the best leaders that we’ve ever had. It was really fulfilling.

“I’d say for me personally, a lot of narratives maybe changed, but you realize, you gotta be careful to not get too caught up in that, because there are just so many things that can occur that are out of your control. More than anything, when it becomes less about you and more about the people that you care about, that to me is what’s really fulfilling. … Like I’d told you, Albert, I had lost my way a little bit in the ’19 and the ’20 seasons. You forget about why you love coaching so much. It’s because you’re doing it to pour into these guys.”

In turn, McVay has found, they wind up pouring into the program and that has put the coach in a healthier place, too, more able and willing to delegate more and micromanage less, because he’s got a crew of players and coaches around him who can carry their weight.

And Stafford and Kupp were in the middle of another great example of that back in March.

Odell Beckham Jr. was a free agent and had torn his ACL. The Rams had agreed to trade Robert Woods, coming off his own ACL injury. Van Jefferson had knee surgery, albeit a less-serious one, too. So the quarterback and his star receiver went to McVay not just looking for reinforcements, but with a specific target in mind—Allen Robinson. The Bears’ free agent was in-division with Stafford for years, and was a bigger target, similar to some of the best receivers Stafford played with in Detroit.

McVay’s immediate reaction to Stafford and Kupp was simple, “We won’t be able to afford him, no f---ing way.” But Von Miller’s unexpected departure cleared cap space, the market for Robinson dropped out, and Stafford and Kupp stayed after McVay on the idea. And soon enough, McVay was putting together a teach tape for Robinson, and he and Stafford jumped on a Zoom to try to get Robinson to back out of a verbal commitment to another team.

“I was selling my f---ing balls off to this guy,” McVay said.

The Rams, of course, got Robinson. But, to everyone involved, from a global perspective, the whole thing brought to life the trust the coach is putting in his players, and the ownership they’ve gotten in the program as a result of that.

“And that’s where the more you get comfortable with people, the more comfortable they are with really being able to help,” he continued. “Then you can have it where they know, I’m really gonna listen to you. That’s really where things come to fruition. It’s when you’ve got two guys, hey, they had such respect for Allen Robinson, and then you start seeing it through their lens, and you realize, Man, these guys are as important as anybody.”

McVay let that spill over into his coaching staff, too.

After offensive coordinator Kevin O’Connell left to take the Vikings’ job, and the Rams brought Liam Coen back from Kentucky to replace him, McVay moved to give running backs coach/assistant head coach Thomas Brown more responsibility—so he made him the team’s tight ends coach to replace Wes Phillips, who’d gone to be O’Connell’s OC in Minnesota. That, of course, left a running backs coach job for McVay to fill.

“It’s like, Who’s a better running backs coach than this guy?” he said. “So who should I appoint to find the next running backs coach? It’s him.”

So McVay put Brown in charge of lining up candidates and running interviews, which led Brown to recommend TCU assistant Ra’Shaad Samples. McVay and Brown then did a second interview with Samples and hired him. Similarly, McVay let defensive line coach Eric Henderson find an assistant D-line coach in 2021. That coach, Marcus Dixon, went with Ejiro Evero (hired as DC by new Broncos coach Nathaniel Hackett) to Denver in February. And so who would McVay charge with replacing Dixon? Henderson, of course.

“When you have the right types of people, you can empower them to onboard other great people like themselves,” McVay said. “And then when they feel that ownership they genuinely have as a result of, Hey, I’ve made this hire, well, now they’re even more bought into seeing that person succeed.”

Which, ultimately, leads to everyone succeeding, and more feelings like the one McVay had looking around the field after the Super Bowl.

Truth be told, the dynamic of being able to efficiently backfill jobs as they come open hasn’t just been a plus for McVay and the Rams. At this point, it’s become a necessity.

Last year, he was replacing defensive coordinator Brandon Staley a year after hiring him. This year, he’s replacing O’Connell after two. And as long as the Rams keep winning, and McVay’s assistants keep thriving elsewhere, L.A. going to keep having what can be best termed a champagne problem—defensive coordinator Raheem Morris is on the doorstep of a second shot as a head coach, and Coen and Brown probably aren’t far off, either.

And sure, it’s challenging to have to keep the well deep. But in an interesting way, it’s also given McVay more proof that the fire he needs to coach is still there. Because it’s where his passion, curiosity and interest in football itself is so evident.

“Do I love guys leaving all the time? Yeah, it’s a strain,” McVay said. “But also, in a subtle way, it’s a way of me reinvigorating myself every year where you’re learning to work with new people. These guys have different ideas, and you’ve always gotta adjust. If there’s one thing I learned getting my face peeled off in that Super Bowl a few years ago [LIII against the Patriots], it’s you better have some different ways of doing [stuff] and some solutions that maybe you hadn’t thought of. And the best way to do that is get exposed to other great coaches.

“Selfishly, when I saw USC hired Lincoln Riley, I’m like, Hell yeah, I’m gonna pick this guy’s brain. I’m excited to learn from this guy. And as long as I’m in that place, that’s when I know there’s no doubt in my mind I wanna coach. As soon as you start losing that intrigue and the excitement of working with people, and trying to help them, then it’s like, Alright, maybe it’s time.”

And just as McVay’s getting all that from those around him—Staley and Morris have morphed the defense into the Rams’ own version of Vic Fangio’s scheme the last two years, and O’Connell helped McVay diversify the offense to get the most from his quarterbacks—there’s a pretty obvious way he’s giving back to them.

“Raheem wanted to be here. Liam Coen knew, Hey, I could be a college head coach in a year but I like it in L.A.,” he continued. “And if you want to keep growing in this profession, this has been a good place to be.”

The challenge for all of them, then, as they challenge each other to make the program better, comes back to the opportunity that kept McVay on the sideline.

He and his staff understand what’s in front of them. Stafford’s 34, Donald’s 31, Kupp’s 29 and Jalen Ramsey is 27. All four are among the best in football at their positions, and still riding the prime of their careers—all but Stafford made first-team All-Pro last year, and you could say Stafford made up the difference in the playoffs. All four are paid as such.


And more than just the talent, and each of those guys has plenty, all showed their mettle last year when it looked, on the outside, like the Rams might be the latest so-called superteam to circle the drain. “The three-game losing streak [in November] was miserable,” McVay said, “but watching the way our guys stayed together, that was fulfilling for me, and that’s where you just know you love it.”

So now it’s on those coaches to continue to get the most of that group, and everyone else around them, while the championship window remains open.

“I’m very aware of what a special opportunity it is to work with people like Matthew Stafford and Aaron Donald, and some of the other guys that we have,” he said. “And so as a result of that, does that make you appreciate what you have that much more? Yes. How does that affect me? It’s hard to say.”

Taking all of this into account, if I had to guess, I’d say it affects McVay in two ways.

First, it creates a positive sort of urgency for him and his staff to do everything scheme-, play-calling, and game-planning-wise to get the absolute most out of the guys they have. Which is why when I asked McVay if he thinks Stafford, in Year 2 of their partnership, has another gear in his game they haven’t hit yet, he responded, “The answer is yes.”


Second, my feeling is there’s a likelihood that McVay’s own longevity as Rams coach is tied to that group. When they start to filter out of the league, it’d create the natural point for McVay—who’s been open about eventually wanting to take a breather from coaching, and maybe be around more when he and Veronika have kids­—to go into the media. Maybe it’ll be a year from now. Maybe it’ll be five years from now. But that’s where I think this will go.

For now, though, there’s not much time to worry about that.

Matt Stafford throws a passing during the fourth quarter of Super Bowl LVI.
Gary A. Vasquez/USA TODAY Sports
So if all of this isn’t about the scoreboard, and it is about the people around him, and getting the most of everybody, was there a moment on Super Bowl Sunday to show it for McVay?

Actually, there was, and it’s the one that’s become synonymous with that game.

Second-and-7, 3:06 left, the Rams down 20–16, and with the ball on the Bengals’ 46. The call, as McVay describes it, was designed to attack underneath coverage in a two-high defense, which the Bengals showed presnap, with a high-low concept—Brycen Hopkins would run his route underneath Kupp’s deeper in-cut and make the defender there choose. The problem was, at the snap, Vonn Bell came down to cover the hash Kupp was running to, alleviating the one-on-two conflict the call was meant to put Cincinnati in.


“That was a sh--ty play-call on the no-look pass,” McVay said, laughing. “But Matthew finds a way to move the hook player right as he drops down right into the window that we’re hunting up, and he makes the 22-yard completion on what probably was one of the worst play-calls that you could have for that coverage that [Bengals defensive coordinator Lou] Anarumo dialed up right there.”

As McVay explained, I stopped him—one of the biggest moments of his coaching career was delivered on a call … he wishes he could have back?

“Oh, dude, there are answers,” he continued. “But if you’re really doing a good job calling plays, the ball is going to the primary guy and you’re attacking certain coverages. If you said, Hey, for that play-call, with the primary concept that we had on right there, is that a good call? There were answers, but it’s like, No, that’s not a good call. You’re hunting up split-safety coverage right there, and Matthew just made it right.”

The obvious takeaway there goes back to having special players who can make a coach right even when he’s wrong. Stafford didn’t no-look Bell to show off. He did it with intent and, if you look closely at the play, you’ll see he moved Bell, who actually did well to try to play it both ways, just enough to get the ball in there.


“I talk about competitive greatness with these guys all the time,” McVay said. “And our guys shined brightest when they had to. Everybody talks about superteams, we got Ben Skowronek and Brycen Hopkins at receiver and tight end, we got Van Jefferson on a bum knee, and we got our running back coming off an Achilles on the Super Bowl–winning drive. Who ended up being the guys that shined brightest? Matthew Stafford and Cooper Kupp.

“That was the coolest thing.”

The less obvious takeaway from that moment, for McVay, had to do with the margins, and how easily the whole thing could’ve gone the other way. If Stafford hadn’t no-looked Bell, then the Rams would’ve been in third-and-long, and the rest of the game might’ve played out differently, just like if Donald hadn’t been there to pull Joe Burrow’s eyes down on the next possession, maybe Burrow would’ve hit Ja’Marr Chase for a game-winning touchdown in the final minute.

McVay would like to think he’d see last year’s team the same way—“That team, they loved each other, man, you can’t fake the s--- that these guys were feeling”—even if it had gone the other way. It is, of course, hard to say for sure whether he would.


But the one thing he is certain on is the result didn’t change much on how he saw them, the players and coaches, as people.

“There’s a lot of different ways you can look at it, but you’re either helping people get better and you’re helping situations get better or you’re not,” McVay continued. “And that’s the epitome of it to me. And I am on a constant journey of trying to be a good leader, and when you’re doing that, it becomes less about yourself, and more about those people that you really love and care about.

“That to me is fulfilling. Is it a lot more fun to win? F--- yeah. No doubt about it. But it’s also fulfilling when you know, like, Hey man, you’re doing everything you can to help Matthew Stafford or Cooper Kupp or Ramsey or Aaron Donald or Leonard Floyd, whoever it is, reach their highest potential. Or you’re positively pushing these coaches.”

That’s why, really, there’s no place McVay would rather be right now than right where he is today, on a practice field at camp in Orange County, worrying only about today.

The results, if his track record’s any indication, will come.

Which is good reason why Stafford and Kupp were never going to let him leave in the first place.

[www.si.com]

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