He’s got to be embarrassed by this. He states he is. He seems ultra competitive.
But THE BIGGEST discomfort he should face head on and take by the horns is to become a full football coach.
Look at the Crimson Tide. They’re the most complete football team on any level: they can play fast (McVay ball), they can play smash mouth (Harbaugh ball, Ground Chuck), they can play deep passing, they can ball control, dink and dunk. They’re defense can defend against any of the above offensive concepts.
Now Saban can have a roster of 100+. That’s an advantage. But McVay doesn’t know how and seems like he has no desire to learn the Ground Chuck part of the game. He’s too impatient. Too impulsive. And as long as he’s not interested in that part of the game or willing to give it lip service, his 53 man roster will be sculpted to have 11 personnel and zero Ground Chuck players. He won’t be able to draft the right players for Ground Chuck because he doesn’t know how that works.
We all remember Madden telling the story of meeting Lombardi at a coaching clinic and nobody was approaching Vince afterwards. So, Madden goes up and asks about Student Body right 8 HOURS LATER, Madden got out of there.
But Madden was a complete coach. He has all the things then that Saban has now: run game, vertical game, dink and dunk (Belitnikoff). And he has the winning percentage to prove that.
So, McVay can be feeling very uncomfortable now. And he will in the future unless he calls it quits for the announcer’s booth, unless he sit with someone like John Robinson (yes, the 90 year old former Rams’ coach, or Greg Roman, or Harbaugh.
He’s 2/3rds of a complete coach. And the 1/3 of poor coach is being leveraged against then and makes him look bad.
He’s got to do the hard work.
We Not Me