I know a lot of us have been super critical of McVay at times, last night was no exception. We saw what happened to this team in the Superbowl and a lot of that fell on the shoulders of McVay. Up until now he's shouldered the blame for a lot of our deficiencies and he's never bad mouthed any individual on this team. By no means am I football or coach guru but there were a few things I had to consider:
McVay is the youngest head coach in the NFL: To a lot of people this doesn't really mean anything but we have to talk about this. There are times that McVay seems to make inexplicable in game decisions - I don't need to write a list of these, we all know them. This is only his fourth season as an NFL head coach and he still has some growing to do in that capacity. We can't expect a 34 year old to come in and have Belichick level success with a team he's having to rebuild from the ground up. That's a huge undertaking and impressive where the team is currently at considering we had been bottom feeders for so long. You wouldn't have to look very hard to find so many promising coaches, of all ages, flame out of the NFL because they were in over their heads. Hell, the way he's handled some of the shit that's come his way is downright impressive: handling of Gurley, the negative press from the Saints game, the Superbowl loss. He isn't immune from criticism but he takes it on the chin and keeps moving forward. Some of that criticism stems from his coaching personnel choices; which brings me to my next point.
McVay is an offensive minded coach: Kind of piggy backing off of the first point, we have a young offensive minded coach. That's the side of the ball he knows damn well, one of the best in the game. It's not outside the realm of possibilities that he doesn't make the best decisions with respect to who runs the defensive side of the ball. Not to bring up bad memories but Fisher absolutely SUCKED at picking offensive coordinators that fit his personnel. The huge difference is that Fisher had been coaching long enough to know; McVay is young and has committed most of his studies to the offensive side of the ball. He picked Wade initially because he didn't want to have to worry about defense but we just never had the personnel to run Wade's style of defense; it happens. I don't think we can really fault a guy for wanting to reduce how thin he's spread by hiring a top tier DC to take care of that side of the ball. At this point we don't know how well McVay is at identifying coaching talent on the defensive side of the ball - that's just the reality of things. I'm sure he'll learn more about that side of the ball as he continues to grow as a head coach and if things don't work out with Staley, he'll be better equipped in choosing his next DC.
McVay is a winner and has a winner mentality: This is a great quality to have but it can bite you in the butt sometimes. McVay has proven to be a winner in this league and it could be argued that he fields a Superbowl contender every year. When things go wrong it would be silly to assume that McVay just shrugs off losses and moves onto the next game. He might not show it in public but I'm sure each and every loss stings and he feels ultimately responsible. Like I said earlier, this type of mentality isn't without its faults. When you focus so passionately on winning, sometimes things get away from you. You start thinking very binary, 1 or 0, and you start to outsmart yourself. Football isn't all X's and O's and, through growth, he'll come to understand that there are some subjective things he can improve on to benefit the objective.
There's more I wanted to write but I think this is long enough. I hope the take away is that as much as we (myself included) want to bag on McVay and his personnel at times, he's really doing a damn good job - all things considered. There are only a handful of coaches I'd say have more upside to McVay right now and we don't even know the ceiling that McVay can hit once this team irons out some of its issues. I think we've gotten spoiled by what McVay did his first two years in the league and we need to come back down to earth a little and cut the guy some slack. We're in good hands.
