Rams trend upward with McVay’s return

(News4usonline) –  The Los Angeles Rams are trending upward for the 2023 season already. Thanks to the news that head coach Sean McVay will indeed be back for next season means that the Rams have an opportunity to recapture the success and glory of winning Super Bowl LVI. 

That’s a long way from now, but with McVay back running the ship, the Rams, assuming all their key players are healthy and returning, should be in the thick of things in being one of the best teams in the NFC. That didn’t happen in the 2022 season. 

The team announced through its Twitter account that McVay had informed them that he was returning, obviously a great sign to come for Rams fans, players and staff. Since the 2017 season, McVay has been leading the Rams as the head coach. 

Since the beginning of his coaching tenure with the team, McVay has instituted a cultural change. Winning football has been McVay’s calling card. Through six seasons, all McVay has managed to do is get the Rams to two Super Bowl appearances with the team taking home the Lombardi Trophy after last season. 

The Rams have become NFC champions twice under McVay. They’ve also made the playoffs in four of the six years he’s been leading the team. That’s a pretty impressive resume. Yet, the toll of this last season no doubt weighed heavily on McVay as he contemplated his future. 

“There’s a lot of layers to it,” McVay said during his end-of-the-season press conference. “I think what I would say is I really have been trying to focus on, which is easier said than done, finishing out this season the right way, being focused on these players, these coaches, continuing to try to compete to the best of our ability. 

“And then now that you’ve gotten through that, there’s a lot of different dynamics. and there’s a lot of emotion involved and so I would say once there’s clarity on whichever direction, I’ll be able to provide that insight. But I think as it relates to just processing and digesting all of it, I want to be able to do that.”

McVay and the Rams had to endure a smorgasbord of injuries to starters and key players, including maladies that took out Cooper Kupp, Aaron Donald, Matthew Stafford, and a host of others. As a result of the disastrous toll those injuries had on the ballclub, the Rams suffered their worst season under McVay, going 5-12 on the season. 

The Rams’ fluid situation at quarterback didn’t make things any easier for McVay. The team rolled out four different quarterbacks in 2022. Baker Mayfield, Bryce Perkins, and John Wolford all saw action under center when Stafford went down. That’s just a snapshot of the different challenges McVay had to juggle last season.

McVay is used to winning. He’s not used to mediocrity or sub-par standards. Minus some of their star players, the Rams played well below the level they played at during their Super Bowl run. So all of this is new to McVay, who said he learned a lot about himself.

“I don’t know about change, but you’ve learned a lot. I’d like to think that you use it as a growth experience,” McVay said prior to the Rams playing the Seattle Seahawks in the team’s last game of the regular season. “To say that I have learned a lot of things about myself, both good and bad, I think that would be fair to say.

“However you want to look at it, you realize how fortunate and blessed I’ve been to be in a situation where you’re surrounded by so many good people, and we’ve been able to stay relatively healthy and that’s led to us having fairly consistent results. This year has been, in my opinion from just what I can control, professional failure. That’s been humbling, it’s been challenging.”

With that being said, McVay admitted that he was able to learn some things about himself and his team.

“I think it’s revealed some things that maybe I wouldn’t have known about myself that you have to be able to deal with and acknowledge accordingly, but if you do it the right way, I do believe you can be stronger,” he said. “It has been something that I think every experience you always are able to learn from. Some might be good, some might be bad, but I do believe that this will be a year you’ll look back on and you’ll take a lot of things that you can’t really learn unless you do go through those hard things.”

McVay has guided the Rams for six seasons. In those six seasons, he’d never had a losing season until 2022. In four of those six seasons, the Rams recorded double-digit wins. His overall win-loss mark is 60-38. 

At the end of the 2021 season, McVay and the Rams were tasting the spoils of winning with champagne, cigars and a victory parade. Fast forward to a year later, McVay, during his end-of-the-year press conference, sounded like he hadn’t fully contemplated what he wanted to do.      

“I think really the tough part about the decision is making sure that you’re actually secure enough to acknowledge the people that you care about, that you know to be unconditional and then being able to look within yourself and say, ‘How can I be at my best?’ And not let some of the blessings that are so volatile that have come with this job not really affect your ability to make the right decisions for all parties involved moving forward and how can that be reflected in you being the best version of yourself?

“And do I love coaching? Hell yeah. Have there been a lot of things that have made it a challenge and a strain because of my own self-inflicted things? No question about it.”