LOS ANGELES — At the end of a miserable 2022 season, his first with a losing record in six years leading the Los Angeles Rams, Sean McVay considered whether to pause — or even end — his career as an NFL head coach.
If he came back, many of the stars he had led to glory in Super Bowl LVI would have to be traded or released. In their place would be rookies and unproven youngsters, lots of them.
McVay would have to be ready for things to get messy this fall.
And that was before McVay and his wife, Veronika, found out their first child was due in late October, something that will bring with it a completely different set of challenges.
“I get dirty. I’m not going to go hands-off,” McVay said of becoming a new dad. “I’ll get right in there.”
Assured of one life-changing moment this year and having grappled with another, McVay is still with the Rams after deciding he was still fully committed. That devotion is at the heart of how he is approaching everything coming his way.
“I think you are either that way in all parts of your life or no parts of your life,” he said. “And so being a great husband, and hopefully a great father when little man comes here, being a great coach, leader, all the same things that you want to do are usually very close in alignment, and I don’t think you can be inconsistent in either/or. I think you are just continuing to try to be the best version of yourself.”
McVay will begin his seventh season as head coach for Los Angeles on Sunday against the Seattle Seahawks (4:25 p.m. ET), with perhaps the lowest external expectations since his first year, when he and the team exceeded projections and finished 11-5 and in first place in the NFC West.
And while the impression of the team internally is much different from those external expectations — Caesars Sportsbook has L.A.’s over/under set at 6.5 — McVay has still tried to hit the reset button on the team in a lot of ways in an effort to get back to how he coached earlier in his NFL career.
THE 2022 SEASON was by far the worst for Los Angeles since McVay took over in 2017. Not only did the Rams struggle to a 5-12 record, but they did it while going through injuries targeted on specific position groups — especially the offensive line.
Chief operating officer Kevin Demoff said it was over the final month of the season into the “decision-making process” in January that McVay and members of the Rams’ front office “had honest dialogue” with the head coach about what his future might look like.
“Being supportive of whatever decisions he wanted to make, walking him through kind of what the options looked like in each case, but also giving him the space to make the decision that he was truly at peace with,” Demoff said.
Demoff points to McVay’s age (37) not as an excuse but as a reason he thinks the coach will continue to grow. Only five current NFL coaches — Bill Belichick, Mike Tomlin, John Harbaugh, Pete Carroll and Andy Reid — have been head coaches longer than McVay.
“Yet he’s still the youngest head coach,” Demoff said. “And I think when you look at that, there’s still growth areas for everybody in this organization, but there’s also the knowledge that comes with experience, and I think that blend you’re starting to see come to life a little bit.”
There were times last season when McVay recognized that change was needed. Whether it was handing over playcalling to then-Rams offensive coordinator Liam Coen for a game in Kansas City or other ways he experimented with change, Demoff said, it put McVay on the path to figuring out whether he could sustain his current approach.
“That was the useful part of last year was for him to try to understand, like, that’s not a solution, that’s not what is going to help,” Demoff said. “At every turn, Sean is one of the best leaders and absorbers of information I’ve ever been around. Usually the thing that helps him the most is surrounding him with people who he really can lean on, believe in and draw from.
“He gives off a ton of energy in the building, and he’s the heartbeat of the way the organization goes, but he also benefits greatly from the energy that people put into him. I think that’s probably the one place where you see a little bit of a difference this offseason.”
And ultimately, it’s going through that 5-12 season and what McVay learned about himself that GM Lee Snead says he thinks will be the difference in how McVay grows as a head coach.
“We had to go through this,” Snead said. “We probably couldn’t take a class and there was a chapter in a book with these concepts that said, ‘Oh, if you’re going through this, this is how you handle it.’
“You can’t microwave wisdom. And I think that’s what we went through [with the 2022 season]. … [Sean is] a very young person with a lot of responsibility on his shoulders and then that internal drive to be great.”
MCVAY HAS BEEN asked many times what it was that made him want to stay rather than take at least a season off from coaching. Although he hasn’t mentioned any one moment, he does say he was “reminded of what a blessing this is to be in this role.”
“If you’re not careful, you can lose perspective and purpose,” McVay said. “… There’s never been perfect moments, but I think in a lot of instances the purity of when you first get here, the joy that you have, the way that you’re bouncing from drill to drill and from meeting to meeting, and being able to establish and build relationships with the players, the coaches, establishing a culture, figuring out different ways that we can push the envelope schematically and have a positive peer pressure amongst our staff to continue to learn from one another.
“Those are the things that give you real purpose when you’re doing it with other people.”
That’s easy to say, McVay said, but he realized that at times, he wasn’t “the person or the coach” that he wanted to be for his players and coaching staff, “just with the vibe and the energy that you bring on a daily basis.”
Several times since the end of the 2022 season, Demoff has seen changes in McVay — things he has noticed as progress, even if they seem small.
“There have been a couple nights where he goes, ‘You know, I want to sleep on that,'” Demoff said at the NFL owners meetings in March. “And we’re like, ‘Who are you?'”
Snead said that although “offseasons have always been really good to Sean” compared with “the stress and drudgery that he goes through attempting to be the best for the Rams” during the season, he has noticed McVay trying to improve that cycle.
“What I noticed far more is the intention around trying to … fix some of the things that I think have bothered him,” Demoff said.
“I think you just don’t take anything for granted,” McVay said. “And really, in a lot of instances, that is what we’re trying to do is say, ‘OK, if it was a brand-new year, a brand-new staff, how exactly would you do it?’ And I think that gives people a sense of urgency and appreciation for getting to know each other.
“There is a long way to go, but the process has been smooth. And I think the guys that have been here, which there’s not many anymore, but they would tell you that it does feel similar to those previous years where nothing’s being taken for granted and there’s a renewed sense of urgency and appreciation for what we’re doing.”
