Rams fans can rejoice that McVay doesn’t appear to be going anywhere
If you haven’t read it yet, I highly encourage you to read Jordan Rodrigue’s The Athletic piece on Sean McVay detailing his meteoric rise in the NFL and his rock bottom moment also known as the 2022 regular season.
The Rams head coach is not the same person that came into the league in 2017; taking it by storm. And I am not talking about his tactical strategy. Through the help of Chris Petersen, the Rams now have a head coach that sees more to life as a coach than just win and losses.
For a refresher, Sean McVay contemplated a career change. After becoming the youngest coach in NFL history to hoist the Lombardi Trophy after a Super Bowl LVI win over the Cincinnati Bengals, the Rams then collapsed. The team finished 5-12 in their efforts to repeat. Every Rams fan remembers that post game press conference in Seattle. We all watched; holding our breath and wondering if we had seen the last of Sean McVay coaching in Los Angeles in exchange for a career in broadcasting (an escape from the entrapment of coaching). In that postgame conference, McVay confessed:
“I don’t get the sense in the least bit I’m done coaching,” he said. “It’s just a matter of what does that look like as it relates to the immediate future is more about what you’re really working through right now.”
A week later, Sean McVay announced he would return to the organization. Rams fans were ecstatic, myself included. But we never knew the exact root or the rationale. All we knew was that McVay had renewed perspective and did not want to run away from challenges.
As it turns out, Chris Petersen, the former Boise State and University of Washington football coach was the voice that offered reason into McVay’s clouded mind. Chris Petersen was the architect behind Boise State’s dominance in the late 2000s/early 2010s. But he too wrestled with finding peace after all the success. It wasn’t until COVID that Petersen had time to sort out his own self-problems.
It was widely speculated that McVay would be done coaching when the core group of Aaron Donald, Cooper Kupp, Jalen Ramsey, and Matthew Stafford would no longer be around. But how, a third of them are retired or playing elsewhere. And that’s not even mentioning Stafford being close to retirement himself. Yet, here McVay is rejuvenated and ready to get after another football season. And there doesn’t appear to be a second thought to considering anything else…