MMQB Spends 24 Hours With LA Rams HC Sean McVay, A Man Obsessed With Football

Andy Benoit from MMQB has a great piece up today that details a day in the life of Los Angeles Rams Head Coach Sean McVay. It’s a rare detailed look into the real life of an NFL head coach.

There’s not really a ton to takeaway. Those details are revealing in a sense that you get to peek behind the curtain, but not necessarily insofar as they tell us anything that we didn’t know or should have at least assumed otherwise.

The number one takeaway (which is heavily framed by the tone and editing of the piece) is that Sean McVay likes football. A lot. A whole lot.

From getting to his office at 4:37am to watch tape to going over various minutiae with relevant members of his coaching staff to calling WR Robert Woods on his way home to both reiterate some finer coaching points from that day but also to massage the effect of Woods’ personality on his performance and their relationship as coach and player even to a dinner with his girlfriend, Assistant Linebackers Coach Chris Shula (yes of that Shula family whom McVay has been friends with since college) and his girlfriend, McVay is constantly absorbed with, obsessed with and possessed by the sport of football.

I don’t know that this isn’t the case for every coach, especially at this level. The level of competition, the fine line between success and failure, the scope of collaboration between the head coach and his staff and the roster and the front office all require so much constant attention and effort, it’s pretty impossible to ever really extricate oneself from the constancy of “football.”

It’s so permanent and so pervasive that you end up with silliness like this line from Benoit:

The group gets a table near the front of the restaurant. It’s a trendy place devoid of sports atmosphere.

Partially repeated for emphasis:

It’s a trendy place devoid of sports atmosphere.

It’s as if the fact that Sean McVay eats dinner in a restaurant that has nothing to do with football (which is, yanno...a restaurant) is relevant.

Which is strange, because with McVay, you get the feeling that maybe it is.