Extending LA Rams Les Snead, Sean McVay is right move at wrong time

The lease is up already?

Just like players, head coaches and general managers are not employed in a conventional sense. Rather, they negotiate and sign up for an employment contract for a finite duration, typically from three to five years. Then, both sides sit back down at the negotiating table to either renew or rework the deal based on performance,  compensation, and guaranteed money.

It’s a pretty standard process, and one that often happens automatically with successful head coaches and general managers that it seldom is newsworthy. It just so happens that renewing Sean McVay’s contract was newsworthy because both he and Zac Taylor, the two head coaches who competed in Super Bowl LVI, were due new contracts this year.

And of course, winning a Super Bowl certainly gives that coach plenty of leverage. So what is the status of that?

What type of compensation are we talking about? Per Sports Illustrated’s Nicholas Cothrel, McVay is finishing up at an annual salary of $8.5 million. In the same article, Cothrel speculates that McVay could land annual compensation at anywhere from $15-18 million annually.

Of course, the fact is that the LA Rams did extend at least Sean McVay in 2019 with the intention of keeping him with the team through the 2023 season.  At the time, the extension more than doubled McVay’s $4-million annual salary to $8.5-million and extended his original deal for two more seasons. Now, it appears that he is due to more than double it again.