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Sean McVay and Rams Handling Offseason of Transition
In an unusual offseason for all 32 teams, the Rams are saying goodbye to some veterans and hello to some new coordinators. Here's how Sean McVay's staff is managing.
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How Sean McVay and the Rams are Handling an Offseason of Transition
In an unusual offseason for all 32 teams, the Rams are saying goodbye to some veterans and hello to some new coordinators. Here's how Sean McVay's staff is managing. Plus, ranking the deepest positions in the draft, the questions about Tua, the Browns' uniform tweak and more.
ALBERT BREER 23 HOURS AGO
With respect to everything going on in our world—and for how small pro football’s place is in it, given the global crisis at hand—there’s part of this that really does suck for Sean McVay.
And that part has smacked him right in the face over the last month. Repeatedly.
Yeah, he’s trying to make the most of circumstances he, the Rams, and the other 31 coaches and teams are facing. But that didn’t make it easier, not getting to invite Todd Gurley—an absolute centerpiece of the facelift he’s performed— into his office to put a bow on the last three years, like he wanted to. Nor did it simplify calls to Brandin Cooks, who he calls “one of my favorite players,” or Clay Matthews, who he grew close to in their year together.
There are certain things you can replicate on the screen of a laptop. There are others you can’t, and it didn’t take long for McVay to realize it, with the Gurley gut punch as a catalyst.
“The one thing, especially this time when you have a lot more time than you’re normally accustomed to, to be reflective, to look back on the three years that we’ve spent together, it gives you nothing but an appreciation,” McVay said, late Wednesday from his house outside L.A. “And that’s the tough part about it. There’s still a human element. People say, ‘It’s not personal, it’s business.’ Well, there’s still a personal relationship, a personal appreciation, and a humanity that exists. …
“Certainly, it’s for the right reasons, as we fight the coronavirus. But it’s been a really difficult collaboration as we’ve made some tough decisions, and it only makes it worse when you can’t look guys in the eye and you have to communicate the information through the phone or on some of these social platforms that isn’t as personal as a face-to-face is.”
It’s also a reminder how much has changed with the Rams. McVay’s got three new coordinators. The way the team is building has, subtly but significantly, shifted. New leaders in the locker room will have to emerge. The new stadium is about to open, even if the pandemic has created uncertainty on when the ribbon will actually be cut.
This is a different offseason for everyone. It remains a very big one in LA.
And maybe you don’t realize how much has changed in L.A. until you start to add it up, because it’s not like there’s a new GM, head coach or quarterback coming in. Consider…
• McVay hired Kevin O’Connell to be offensive coordinator (a title that sat vacant since Matt LaFleur left two years ago), Brandon Staley as defensive coordinator and John Bonamego as special teams coordinator, while saying goodbye to one of the great defensive minds in recent NFL history, in Wade Phillips, and a long-time Rams staple, in John Fassel.
• Cornerstones like Gurley, Cooks, Cory Littleton and Dante Fowler are gone.
• The team was far more restrained in its spending. One series of moves that signaled the change? The Rams took on economical reclamation projects A’Shawn Robinson and Leonard Floyd for the price it would’ve cost to keep Fowler, without yielding the long-term flexibility they would’ve had to in order to re-sign the star edge rusher.
• The Rams are swallowing over $40 million in dead money on the Cooks and Gurley deals, which is a tacit admission of mistakes made, and a price paid for pushing money from today to tomorrow to build the Super Bowl roster of 2018.
It’s not a total rebuild, of course. But there was enough here for McVay to make what, with the benefit of retrospect, wound up being a pivotal decision in the mosaic of the mess of 2020. He kept his coordinators home for the duration of the combine, and only went himself for a day, to try and make sure the identity of his team would be better cemented.
During that week, McVay would spend half the day with O’Connell, going over the team’s scheme, how to best build it for the players on hand, and the trouble areas that they wanted to fix, and the other half of the day doing the same with Staley. The coordinators, then, spent the other halves of their days working through specific position groups in the draft class, and looking at their fit for the team, to make up for the work lost in Indy.
“It was getting a jump on the teaching progression, and working in collaboration with them, being in a really good spot specific to where you typically are in an offseason, especially when it’s a newer system,” McVay said.
McVay says now that, at the time, the idea was “being intentional” about relationship building, and the unintentional benefit since has been obvious. The rapport within a staff working remotely is there now, at least in part, because of the time spent together then. And so just as unfortunate as the way the head coach had to say goodbye to guys was, McVay’s excited about trying to create advantages, in going forward with some purpose.
The age edge. McVay is hesitant to call his age, he’s 34 now, an advantage. And the truth is, in working through Zoom and Microsoft Teams, it hasn’t been all the time.
“I do know sometimes I’ll be looking, and I’ll have the camera still faced on me, and I’m talking about a play I’m narrating,” he said. “And they’ll say, ‘Hey Sean, shut the hell up and flip the camera back around.’ … That’s happened on more than one occasion where you say, ‘OK, so you see this guy right here, see what’s happening on this specific technique?’ The coaches are like, ‘Bro, we’re still seeing your face, we’re not seeing the film.’”.
But the fact that he, Staley (37) and O’Connell (34) grew up with the internet can’t hurt, and it may be why the staff as a whole has plowed forward without trepidation, even with the attendant mishaps factored in (which support staff guys like Billy Nayes, Jeff Graves and Dan Dmystirin have helped them work through).
“How we’re able to be diligent and efficient in our work, that’s been a real positive,” McVay said. “I don’t know if it’s necessarily exclusive to the age, but just how efficient our coaches, our scouts have been with that adaptability on some of these technological platforms that allow you to operate in a very similar manner to what you would if you were present in the building.”
Building an identity. Part of the reason for Staley’s arrival in L.A. was McVay’s respect for, and the trouble he’s had with, the Vic Fangio system—Staley was with Fangio in Denver and Chicago. Part of O’Connell coming aboard was how highly regarded he was with old friends of McVay’s in Washington. But the overarching idea here for McVay was being able to tie together the team’s offensive and defensive identities.
As we talked about that, I brought up how Bill Belichick toggles between sides of the ball to ensure his team has that. Likewise, McVay has spent more time with the defense the last couple years than most people know, and that’s continued with new coordinators aboard.
“One of the things that was exciting about Brandon and a lot of the visions he had, there was a very similar philosophy, in terms of how it’ll best suit our players but also marry with that team approach,” McVay said. “When you look at some of these teams, it’s about winning football as a team, not playing separately as far as offense, defense and special teams. …
“There are different ways to do it. [But] you referenced New England, they’ve done as good a job as anybody being able to adjust and adapt their system specific to their opponents but still have an identity with how they want to operate week in and week out. And I think that’s why they’ve been the most consistent program over the last handful of years.”
Being ready for the players. On April 27, two days after the draft wraps, the Rams offseason program will start under the same sort of circumstances that McVay’s coaching meetings have taken place. And McVay hopes that going through the former, and having to put together a revised scheme on one side of the ball, and a new one on the other, will prove a good dry run for the latter.
But there are pieces of it he acknowledges will be touch and go, under the NFL’s new rules. One will be the normal give and take—McVay likes his players to take ownership of what they’re being taught—that happens in meetings. It’s possible, to be sure, players will be more hesitant to speak up into their laptops than they would be in a meeting room. And with new coaches in the mix, it may be complicated even further. Which means that there’ll probably be adjustments and tweaks along what’s clearly an uncharted path.
“What’s going to be interesting to see is when you get into those larger quantity meetings where you’ve got 35 or 40 guys in a unit meeting, and the team meetings, those will certainly be a challenge,” McVay said. “We’ve practiced on one another, and we’ve tried to be intentional to make sure our time is spent where it’s efficient, it’s engaging, it’s entertaining for the guys, it’s educational. You don’t want it to get monotonous.
“You’ve got this time allotted. We want to make sure it’s maximized and it’s something that keeps these guys knowing you always have an intent in what you’re trying to get done.”
All this time has given McVay plenty of space to think too, and that’s where we got back to Gurley. Before the Rams cut him, McVay remembered Gurley’s incredible stretch run in 2017—he went over 100 scrimmage yards in nine of his final 10 games that regular season, as the Rams improbably won the division—and his important role in the Super Bowl season of 2018, and it came back to him again, how much Gurley meant to him personally.
“How fortunate and blessed I feel to have gotten a contract extension after my first deal, he’s been as instrumental and influential on the success that we’ve had as anybody,” McVay said. “He’s helped set me up, and my family up, for a lot of really nice things. You don’t get those opportunities and you don’t achieve a level of success without getting to work with players like him. I mean, it’s really special. … His resume for the five years he played as a Ram, and I was with him for three of those, it’s up there with the all-time greats.”
And just the same as McVay missed the chance to give Gurley the send-off he deserved, he is missing being at the facility, around his staff, and it’ll hit him again, he’s sure, in a week and a half, when he’s staring at his players in Brady Bunch-style boxes on a laptop, instead of addressing them in an auditorium.
But that’s where he, the Rams and we all are right now.
“I heard [L.A. Clippers coach] Doc Rivers, I’ve gotten to be friends with him, and he’s talking to his team about winning the wait right now,” McVay said. “It’s a little bit different, they’re waiting, they’re in a holding pattern. But it’s the same in that it’s winning the moment.”
And if that means just remembering to flip the camera on the laptop, then McVay will try to do that too.
