What Sean McVay had to say about Cooper Kupp’s status for Eagles game

Sean McVay spoke to the media again on Wednesday, addressing Cooper Kupp, Matthew Stafford, and Week 5’s game against the Philadelphia Eagles.

The Los Angeles Rams are riding high after defeating the Indianapolis Colts last Sunday. They are 2-2, but goodness they really could be 3-1 had they beaten the Cincinnati Bengals. Joe Burrow has not looked right all year, and his team has not looked right, but they certainly beat the Rams on Monday Night Football.

So which Rams team do we see this Sunday? The dominant team that showed up to play the Seattle Seahawks? The close, but not quite there team that played the San Francisco 49ers? The awful offense that showed up when they played Zac Taylor and Bengals? Will it be what we saw last week? A team that looks great for a while and then forgets how to play good football for a bit?

Who is this team? What is this team?

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I don’t know, but they sure are exciting. There’s an argument that Sean McVay alone is worth the price of admission, but when you add in players like Puka Nacua (yup, top billing these days), Aaron Donald, Matthew Stafford, Byron Young, Kyren Williams and there’s so many more. One of the most exciting things so far is that the Rams offense has had success without Cooper Kupp. Let’s see what the head coach had to say about Cooper and some other topics in his recent presser.

“He’s gonna go through practice today. We’re gonna see exactly what that looks like, but like, it says limited he’s not gonna be limited. I mean you know so I just read, I was like Ron Burgundy just reading off the damn injury report. So he’s going through a normal practice. You know, we’ll see how he’s feeling and you know we’ll progress him as the week goes.”

It’s good to know that Coach McVay has watched Anchorman before. Now we know the answer to that all important question. The coach is also asked what would be some checkpoints the team may want to see to ensure that Kupp is ready to go.

“I think playing football is the best checkpoint.”

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He’s does elaborate on that statement, but at the end of the day, that’s what needs to be seen. Cooper Kupp playing real football. I don’t think it was expected that he was going on IR to start the season until it happened. It was worrisome. Fortunately the stellar receiver may be alright in the short and long term. The team can only hope he comes back and stays back.

“We want to be able to see him return to performance, look like the Cooper Kupp that we know and you know it’ll be good to have him out there.”

Kyren Williams also popped up on the injury report and the team has leaned on him to kickoff the first quarter of the season. The coach is asked how serious the injury is and McVay says that Williams took a shot to the hip on on his first touchdown run of the game last week, and he seems to expect the young running back to be fine.

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“It’s more precautionary than anything.”

It’s great for fans to hear that Kyren should be alright for this upcoming matchup against the Philadelphia Eagles. He’s been a valuable piece to the team and offense. It also hopefully speaks to the player’s toughness that he took that hit early in the game, and it really didn’t seem to affect him. He played through it, and Matthew Stafford played through a hip injury of his own. Should the team be concerned about Stafford’s health?

“Full go. He’s as tough as it gets, you know that Gary, and so you know we’re not gonna be running a lot of zone or zone read or anything like that today. So he’ll be in good shape, but he’s you know there was some good swelling. Fortunately they were able to kinda get some treatment and some things. You know to try to decrease the swelling and minimize that, you know, right after the game, and you know he does such a great job of taking care of himself, and doing at lot of things at home as well. So he is, I think “feeling good” would be a good strong way to describe it, but he’s able to go through and be a full participant which is a good thing for us.”

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As the season goes the Ram’s blocking is going to have to protect Stafford. Whereas he pulled out the win last week, it’s not like his injury sounds enjoyable. The team will have to hope he can get healthy, and helping him not get crushed by the defense of an undefeated Eagles team should help his healing process.

McVay gets asked about what is being referred these days to as the “tush push” and it’s an impressive play that the Eagles have been using with great success.

LA’s head coach gives an explanation that really praises how the team runs and executes that play. I think his statement can apply to the respect that he has for the Eagles as an organization and opponent as well. They are well coached, they’ve got great players, they are 4-0 for a reason.

“Their personal, and then their execution of the techniques, and win that leverage and be able to get that push. It’s incredible, you know and then when you see a lot of teams try to replicate it around the league it doesn’t look anything like that, and so I think it’s a huge credit to those guys their commitment to it. They pick and choose their spots and they have some complimentary mixers off of that but it’s one of those deals that you give a tremendous amount of credit to #1 their players being able to execute it, but also the buy-in to continuously activating that and the finer details with the techniques, the fundamentals, where it comes to life on the tape seems like week in and week out.”

The play has worked for the Eagles. Not so much for every team though.

“Did you see the Seattle play? We tried it, it didn’t look very good. You know, that’s why we had to go for it on 4th and 1, we tried it on second down and it looked nothing like Philly’s. So, we got some other things maybe we’ll try.”

LA may not be able to execute the “tush push” as well as the Eagles, and Philly does boast a plethora of talented players. Regardless it will be exciting if Kupp comes back to go along with Puka Nacua, Tutu Atwell and Van Jefferson. It will be interesting to see how the Rams manage their skill position players, and if the offense takes another step forward.

“It’s good to get a lot of different people involved.”

The Rams have a chance to shock the Eagles and the league. They have a chance to get to 3-2 and have a winning record for the second time this season. We will find out Sunday how this Rams team starts off the second quarter of the season. Slowly but surely we’ll get to see who and what this team is.