Sean McVay officially announced he is returning for his seventh season with the Rams, after initially opening up and sharing in the aftermath of Week 18 that he would consider stepping away, extinguishing—for now—any of the numerous succession plans that may have been in the works over the coming weeks.
Had he left, we may have been talking about a new regime led by McVay’s defensive coordinator, Raheem Morris. If Morris, who is interviewing for other jobs, had also gone, we may have been talking about a new regime led by McVay’s tight ends coach, and assistant head coach, Thomas Brown (more on Brown here). If Brown, who is also interviewing for other head coaching jobs, had also gotten a job elsewhere, we’d have seen the Rams plunge late into a cycle that might have them no longer looking like the Rams we’ve grown familiar with at all.
It brings us to an interesting question that the Rams must have thought about by now, but should probably seriously consider in the coming weeks and months: What will this franchise look like when McVay ultimately decides to walk away?
A few years ago, when the annual Sean-Payton-is-leaving rumor became as inevitable as a winter snowfall, the Saints seemed to start treating themselves like someone desperately trying to convince their partner to stay. They offered Payton whatever he wanted. They played cap gymnastics. They made themselves into an amalgam of all the coach’s wishes and desires, and he still booked it out the door once it became clear that the situation was untenable.
McVay, 36, is entering a point in his life when he may just want to be a regular human being for a little while. He has already won a Super Bowl and has been to another. While it is not our business to speculate on what he’s going to do if he’s not the coach of the Rams (broadcaster? Chef? I’d pick chef) we should want for him the same things we’d want for ourselves: time, clarity and peace of mind.
While Payton and McVay are different people, the situations they’ve created for themselves and their franchises are eerily similar. The Rams, generously speaking, have one more year left in this window of time to contend for another Super Bowl. Aaron Donald has contemplated retirement openly in the past and already has more than enough money to last him a lifetime and enough accolades to make him a first-ballot Hall of Famer (his contract runs through 2024). Jalen Ramsey is nearing 30 and is approaching—after this season—a logical breakup point in the five-year deal he signed with the club in ’20. After that, barring the discovery of a deep field of Australian Rules football players who are willing to sign en masse and possess translatable NFL skills at an unfathomable level, they are going to be hosed. At least for a little while, as the roster continues to feel the squeeze of the front office trading away premium draft picks and thus failing to restock with talent on rookie contracts.
And McVay will probably be gone.
If the Saints had to offer the Rams any advice, what might it be? In both cases, the writing will have been on the wall. As much as coaches would like to tell the public that the media simply makes up reports in order to get attention, these ideas come from somewhere. At the first sign of a Payton exodus, the Saints should have been—and could have been—building the survival shelter.
With McVay in particular, he’s admirably talking about burnout and work-life balance. He is not going to find that over the course of another NFL season. There’s a good chance that, like Payton and the Saints, the Rams will find themselves back here next year. There’s a good chance next year might be the year that he heads for the door, and it’s not hard to envision Donald, Ramsey, Cooper Kupp and Matthew Stafford following suit.
A team has to be all in every year or else it won’t be a serious contender. However, as we’re watching the Saints try to navigate life without Payton, their best hope for a resuscitative event is whatever compensation they might get in return for him (remember: Jon Gruden, who has the same credentials as Payton, fetched two first-round picks, two second-round picks and $8 million when the Raiders traded him to the Buccaneers in 2002). New Orleans is now reeling from an attempt to go “all in” again without him, handing over what became the 10th pick to the Eagles.
It’s unclear at this point what exactly the Rams can do to pad the landing once McVay inevitably leaves. Donald and Kupp have no-trade clauses, for example. It’s not like the team could leverage the finality of this group’s window into a high-end estate sale to help them recoup the massive amount of draft capital they poured into acquiring these players in the first place.
But, like any good silver-linings playbook, the Rams should start looking at a bad situation and eliminating what they cannot do. They cannot assume, like the Saints did, that this day will never come and that the love of the players and the city and the game will act as a salve for all of McVay’s concerns. They cannot assume, like the Saints did, that a coach of this magnitude was just one small cog in a system and that the play-calling prowess would have been sprinkled around the facility like a kind of brilliant dust mite, making him easily replaceable. There is a reason the two of them wanted some time off, or at least a better place with which to spend their time. Their central processing units simply burn hotter and brighter than others.
Like any good playbook, the preparation must start now, even if the inevitable doesn’t feel inevitable at the moment.
