Los Angeles Rams: Media seems to resent that everyone wants a Sean McVay

The media seems up in arms at the idea that the success of Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay is something that other teams would want to duplicate.

You can look, keep looking, but likely never find what the Los Angeles Rams found when they stumbled across head coach Sean McVay. After resurrecting a bad team still fresh to Southern California, and turning around a would-be, hope-he’ll-be, franchise quarterback in Jared Goff, NFL teams desperate for a quick fix are looking for what may not exist.

Listening to a wide sampling of media after the Arizona Cardinals hired Kliff Kingsbury to be their next coach, talking heads demonstrated an air of exasperation at the idea that, A: Kliff Kingsbury would be hired to be a head coach in the NFL, B: Knowing, once knowing, or knowing of Sean McVay makes you the next Sean McVay, and C: Teams would want to copy the template that the Rams have created in Los Angeles.

But that’s not McVay’s fault. He simply took what wasn’t working and made it work spectacularly. So in a league where copycat is the name of the game, what the head coach of the Los Angeles Rams does is what everyone else wants to do for their team.

It’s worth noting that whenever they spoke of the next Bill Belichick, there was little blowback towards the New England Patriots and Father Bill. At the very least, media critics waited for those disciples of the Belichick Tree to fail before offering a criticism or notice of failure before they actually even coached a game.

Not so for Kingsbury or new Green Bay Packers head coach Matt LaFleur.

Granted McVay is experiencing remarkable success in his first two regular seasons, but the potential of losing in their playoff game against the Dallas Cowboys has already elicited comments akin to “what have you done lately?”, or “overrated” given he is 0-1 so far in the postseason.

Fair?
In the NFL, unfortunately yes.

But the idea that teams wanting to duplicate what has and is being done in LA with the Rams is less about McVay, and more about league grifters void of any identity and looking for one by copying his success.

NFL watchers will have much they can be critical of if the Rams lose on Saturday night against Dallas, OR if the Rams work their way back to the middle of the pack in the next season or two.

But for now McVay is McVay, and looking to find the next one isn’t so unique. So long as everyone knows that the cautionary tale of wanting to copy the success in Los Angeles isn’t necessarily wrong, just highly unlikely.