The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - The Playcallers Ep. 2: When football breaks

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

Once candidates for the same head coaching jobs, Kyle Shanahan and Sean McVay's dynamic gets complicated as they turn into NFC rivals in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Host Jourdan Rodrigue goes inside how both coaches' modern offenses take shape and the untold stories of McVay's hiring process by the Rams. Eventually, McVay's Rams take the NFL by storm in 2017-18. But all the while, one of the greatest coaches in NFL history is lying in wait to teach McVay a humiliating lesson in Super Bowl LIII...just a couple of years after Shanahan's own Super Bowl heartbreak at the hands of that same veteran coach.Voices in the episode include McVay, Shanahan, Matt LaFleur, Mike McDaniel, Les Snead, Kevin Demoff, Andrew Whitworth, Mina Kimes and Steve Wyche.Playcallers is presented by Miller Lite. To get Miller Lite delivered right to your door, visit millerlite.com/playcallers.Celebrate Responsibly. Miller Brewing Company, Milwaukee, WI. 96 calories and 3.2 carbs per 12 ounces. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Okay, can you say your first and last name and what you do? No. If you had anybody ever do that before? I'm less than I managed generally to Los Angeles Rams. Unfortunately, we could never interview Kyle. We had it scheduled. Then we got, there was a snowstorm in New England area, so Providence. When we interviewed Matt and Josh, Snowstorm hit that part of the country, and we could

get to Atlanta. And at that point, they were rolling in the playoffs. It was 2017. The Los Angeles Rams top brass, GM Les Need and CEO Kevin Demoff, were on the hunt for their next head coach after a move back to L.A. from St. Louis and a few mediocre to dismal seasons. They had also taken a quarterback at number one overall in 2016, Jared Goff, and his rookie season was awful.

Fifteen now, short drop by Goff. The pass is going to be intercepted by Dionne Jones, and Dion Jones will run it in for the touchdown. God off. That's a good man and can't hit him. Brian Quick, wide open in the end zone. Every organization was trying to get a piece of the dynastic Patriots at that time. The Rams flew to New England to interview their OC, Josh McDaniels, and their D.C., Matt Patricia. Kyle Shanahan, the offensive coordinator in Atlanta, was a candidate for the Rams job.

And so was Washington OC Sean McVeigh. Then, a blizzard grounded the Rams plane in the Northeast. More than 50 million people are waking up to a winter snowstorm that is slamming the northeast. The dangerous storm is intensifying as rush hour begins, bringing whiteout conditions and high wind. We couldn't get there. We did ask Kyle, hey, would you like the FaceTime? He really didn't want to do that. So at that point in time, we passed on the interview.

That weather event and whatever occurred because of it, it definitely changed the course of the NFC West. We hired Sean McBay, San Francisco hired Kyle Shanahan, and over the last five or six years, I know this, the Rams and the Niners have been in a lot of conference championship games and a few Super Bowls. I'm Jordan Rodriguez. This is the play callers. I think Sean is one of those rare personalities that just it's infectious, his energy and just the passion he has to do something. Everybody in the building, they just want to be around him. And everybody said, oh, Sean McVeigh, he's unbelievable, he'll be a great head coach. He's just so young, you know, in a couple years, he'd be the candidate.

The thinking back then to when Sean came on, people were like, what? He's younger than his players. Who's this dude? The Rams are out of their heads. The lack of fear of failure is it wasn't even a thought. It was just like, we're just going to go enjoy playing football and trying to be really good at that and really like the people that you do it with. We went through all of 2017 and all of a sudden we're scoring points in a huge fashion. Nobody's stopping us.

You kind of kept waiting for the bottom of the dropout and it never did. That snap. The kick is and on to Super Bowl 53 they go. I was at that Super Bowl covering it for ESPN, and I was sitting pretty close to that end zone. I just remember thinking, oh, God, Gough just he was just flummoxed. After Mike Shanahan and most of his staff were fired by Washington after the 2013 season, the young coaches, Kyle Shanahan, Matt LaFleur, Mike McDaniel,

splintered into different places. Kyle was hired as the OC for the Cleveland Browns for the 2014 season, and then asked to leave. The Falcons led by the. head coach Dan Quinn, hired him as their OC in 2015, and hired Matt LaFleur to coach veteran quarterback Matt Ryan. I mean, Matt Ryan was a pretty damn good quarterback, too. You know, he's a guy that he had a lot of success.

And I'll be honest with you, there were a lot of the same lessons that I learned from the 2015 season in Atlanta and the things that we did after that season to help us better communicate to get on the same page. Quinn hired Rahim Morris to be his assistant head coach, and he coached defensive backs. That reunited Morris with several of his former Washington colleagues, including Matt LaFleur. You know, Matt went from a person who was a little more quiet, always had a high opinion, always had his opinion, sometimes indecisive, to Washington becomes decisive, really great decision-maker, firm, his presence and speech to be able to talk in a public forum really increased.

I felt like it's just astounding and unbelievable. Kyle Shanahan also hired Mike McDaniel as an offensive assistant. It fired, then we go to Cleveland, and then Kyle gets out of that, then we're in Atlanta for two years, and then, I mean, it was just a lot of shit was happening. The steady thing that I, through those years, was those kind of components of, like, recognizing,

oh, yeah, it doesn't matter if people see it yet. I can impact people. the way I've always wanted to, I can become something really special in this game. All I need to do is stay in it, stay in the NFL, and over time, people will start realizing stuff. Sean McVeigh was the offensive coordinator in Washington. They won their division in 2015 and lost in the wildcard game, but otherwise weren't exactly known as a powerhouse.

Kyle Shanahan's Falcons offense, meanwhile, started blowing the doors off of defenses. It's been seven years since then, and I still think people don't quite apprehend how good that offense was. Mina Kimes is a senior analyst for ESPN and a Seahawks fan who watched the 2016 Falcons beat Seattle 3620 in the divisional round. I think back to 2016, Kyle Shanahan's Falcons, for a number of reasons. But one of which was I think that was when it was really driven home for me, personally that this offense had the capability of taking a good quarterback. And Matt Ryan was a good quarterback. He had been to multiple Pro Bowls at that point, obviously.

Had a lot of success in Atlanta. But what that offense could do once you got the quarterback to really buy in and the whole team to kind of fit the personnel to it was to take a good quarterback and to kind of pour gasoline on it. Matt Ryan had an MVP season. Receiver Julio Jones had 1,400 yards. in just 14 regular season games and average well over 100 yards per game in the playoffs. Running back Devante Freeman rushed for his second consecutive 1,000 yard season.

So to put it in perspective, Matt Ryan that year had a passer rating of 117, which is the seventh highest in NFL history. Tom Brady has only surpassed that once. That was the 2007 crazy Patriots offense. Drew Breese has never attained that. And pass a rating is an imperfect metric. But I just say that to remind people, like, that offense, that year, destroyed the NFL. That was a pretty big moment. I think for me as a football fan in understanding the relationship between the offense and the quarterback and what it was capable of unleashing.

The 2016 Falcons offense was legendary. At that time, they scored the seventh most regular season points of any team in NFL history and nearly 200 more than that year's league average. Here's Kyle Shanahan. I start to add in a no-huddle turbo package. I get to Atlanta. I'm not going to do the zone read. I'm doing everything I've had. Now we got Matt Ryan.

I can do more no-huddle, running the exact same plays, doing different terminologies on how to see what the defense is doing. But football is a punishing sport. So we remember the legacy of that season as what happened in Super Bowl 51 at the hands of Bill Belichick and the Patriots.

Nobody more so than Kyle Shanahan. Boss are to kick it away with Dionne Lewis waiting deep. The Falcons offense played a near-perfect first half. Seriously, Matt Ryan had a perfect passer rating. Deep in the third quarter, Atlanta had a 95% win probability and a 28-3 lead. And then... Now they'll throw. Pass is caught.

That's white. Touchdown. Long drive with 206 left in the third quarter. Instead of using his run game to go ball control, keep possession and kill clock. Kyle Shanahan kept calling passes. Ryan is set. Burning clock too quickly and giving the ball back to New England and quarterback Tom Brady, who started shredding. Atlanta's fourth quarter possession chart went like this.

Punt. Fumble. Punt. Tossed a white. That historic implosion meant that for years, people have questioned. who Kyle Shanahan is as a play caller. Do you want to go with the risky thing or do you want to go with the conservative thing? Well, my personality is the risky thing.

There's no doubt about that. As I get older and mature more in life, I learn like maybe you shouldn't jump off that cliff. Maybe you shouldn't drive that fast, just like we all do as you get older, but you learn that through life experiences. But your personality usually shows in how you drive too. Man, I better watch out for my personality. that infamous day, Atlanta beat the Packers 421 in the NFC championship game. Sean McVeigh, who had officially been hired by the Rams 10 days previously, went to the game. The last NFL game he would ever attend strictly as a fan.

And I'll never forget watching that game as a fan, some of the operational things as far as the way they got in and out of the huddle, how quickly they were able to get the ball snapped on a running clock in two minutes. Okay. maybe not strictly as a fan. With any of these guys, there's gonna be some intel gathering involved. And that struck a chord with me, and like, those are things that you can't see on a TV copy

and that you can't see on an all-22 when you're watching on Xos, but you can see that in person, and that experience was really valuable. One major characteristic of the soon-to-be Unstoppable Rams offense that McVeigh was about to install in Los Angeles, with Matt LaFleur,

as his offensive coordinator was a turbo package, a set of no huddle tempo plays that kept defenses majorly on their heels. That's why I hate that I let him out before go to him because it was exactly our turbo package the same way,

and it got all the play actions back. Tree rings, innovation loops, an idea pollinates and evolves as coaches split. This is how football happens. But I'm getting ahead of myself a little. He didn't even really get the public buzz until he was named the Rams coach. People are like, yeah, this guy's good, he's this and that.

But look at how young he is. What was he, 31, 3031? Senior NFL network analyst Steve Weish remembers what the buzz, or lack thereof, around Sean McVeigh was, when he was in his late 20s and coordinating Washington's offense. This was still in the era when guys like Mike Zimmer and Bruce Ariens and dudes who'd really paid their dudes. were getting their opportunities to coach. You know, the younger guys were still in their 40s. They had been OCs for four or five years.

You know, the game, I think, was changing so much. And the one thing that you could see is it was less about finding kind of authoritarian leaders of men, kind of as it might have been said. And more of these players want a coach who can help them get better. Ram's C-O-O-C-O-C-Mov also remembers. McVeigh being a little under the radar, depending on who you talk to. The talent was there, but nobody had ever even considered hiring someone so young to be a head coach. We're fortunate we had about a month to really do research before we could actually start

talking to anybody. You would ask people, who are the people you like, some names that you would recommend for us to talk to in the coaching search. And usually we'd end the question with, who's the person who's nobody's talking about? Or who's your slu's your slu. Leaper candidate and everybody said, oh, Sean McVeigh, he's unbelievable, he'll be a great head coach, he's just so young, you know, in a couple years he'd be the candidate. Rams GM, Les Sneed says McVeigh's age sparked an internal debate within the Rams organization. Was the young coach's age really a negative? I think that was the only negative we could come up with.

Now, then you had to really unpack, is it actually a negative? And if it's not, why is it not? if it is why is it? It's interesting from a society standpoint, a lot of, there's probably a lot of people changing the world for good or for bad in technology that were in their 20s and 30s.

There was definitely some case studies that, hey, age might not necessarily be a negative. It could actually be a positive or at least a neutral. The key is probably what's going on in that person's brain and how that person's a positive. buying that to whatever they're doing, that's really what matters. The thinking back then to when Sean came on, people were like, what?

He's younger than his players. Who's this dude? The Rams are out of their heads. Sneed, Demoff, and other Rams Brass started interviewing players Sean McVeigh had coached in Washington. They articulated the one that you were always like, can this young man at this age capture a building? Will an NFL team, listen to, but interesting, all of those players were like, oh yeah, easy. best teacher we've ever had. Smartest football mind ever been a part of.

Oh, yeah, the room's going to be the easiest thing. We're all going to be paying attention. The Rams were only about halfway through their interview process when several of the team's leaders were pretty set on Sean McVeigh. There was an element of all of us that was like, we should just offer him the job. But there was also an element, like, let's go through the process. And at the time, no one else was talking to Sean.

So you didn't feel rushed in that, regard. Eventually, the 49ers got around to interviewing him. And I remember getting on the phone to Sean on Sunday night from the hotel room in Florida. When I called him and I said, hey, I'm going to have you come out to L.A. Tuesday or Wednesday, like, I want you to meet Stan. And I said, I know you're interviewing with the 49ers tomorrow. Do well, but don't do too well. We finished up the interviews. We were flying back from Florida. He was supposed to be in the interview three hours and start texting him. He's not out. Now it's five, six hours. And I'm getting furious. There's no way. Like, This is going to go too well.

Family history with 49ers. Sean McPhey's late grandfather, John McVeigh, was the co-architect alongside Bill Walsh of five 49ers Super Bowl winning seasons in the 1980s and 90s. And it was that reaction to me that was, okay, I know. This is our guy. Later that week, at a dinner at famed Los Angeles restaurant Spago, the Rams officials had legendary Rams running back

Marshall Falk, vet Sean McVeigh, right in front of team owner Stan Cronkey. They were sold, but they needed to convince Cronkey, who deeply trusted Falk's opinion. Marshall was the perfect person because he was explaining me why we needed a veteran offensive mind to be the head coach. And he was happy to go to dinner with this 30-year-old,

but he thought that was stupid and that we were stupid. And so Marshall walks in and he tells Stan, you know, I'm so excited to be here. Like, I think you're making a mistake, but I'm just glad to be part of the problem. process. And at dinner, you know, and Stan and Marshall have always had a great relationship, a cerebral player, you know, someone who I think everybody respected for football intellect and understanding the challenges around the team. And so it was an opinion I knew he would respect

either way, and one that I would have to respect either way. But also the one advantage it had as it brought, it was an easy thing for Sean to be able to talk football at dinner. And the two of them started going and, you know, they hit it off immediately. They're talking the whole time. And I remember walking out and Marshall told Stanley, he goes, you let that guy leave tomorrow without a deal. You've made a huge mistake. That's your guy. In later years, one quality the Rams didn't even know to look for at the time would emerge. Sean McVeigh simply had not lived a lot of life just yet. What kind of perspective was he missing? He was still evolving as a human of being, heck, not even married yet, no kids.

So he was going to dive into coaching an NFL football team with that responsibility, but also knowing that, boy, he still has right of life to, I would say, live in a way. Because he probably still had some, let's call it, big rocks on life's timeline to get through it. As we were trying to find our identity in L.A., one that was taking a different path, building a different franchise, reimagining what the NFL could be, was one that was exciting and Sean fit that bill. But I think as you were growing up with him, you knew there were going to be growing pains, but there are growing pains with every first time head coach. It's a job that everybody's learning on the job, whether you're 30, whether you're 40, 50, 60.

There was no real blueprint to follow. But in 2017, all they could see was potential. So they all jumped. Together. Sean McVeigh became the youngest head coach in NFL history at just 30 years old, and the wheels started spinning immediately, faster than anyone could have imagined. When you have the freedom and the lack of fear to just be yourself and to just own your thoughts, I think that you have a chance to create something beautiful. And you become an artist at that point. We'll get back to this episode of The Play Callers after a word from our sponsors. Before you dive back into The Play Callers, we wanted to let you know you can unlock this entire series ad free with a subscription to the Athletic Audio Plus.

Unlock that now for just 99 cents a month by clicking subscribe at the top of the Athletic Football Show's show page on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening and enjoy the rest of the episode. Andrew Whitworth, who'd eventually become the Rams' longtime left tackle and team captain and its conscience in many ways, was the first major free agent signing of the start of the Sean McVay era. Sean and the coach and stuff, and really, I mean, mostly Sean, for the most part, became this beautiful artist of what he wanted his offense to look like. And it was nothing like what he started off for it to look like.

Whitworth joined a team that also included rookie receiver Cooper Cup, experienced receivers Robert Woods and Sammy Watkins, future Hall of Fame defensive tackle Aaron Donald and Star Running Back, Todd Gurley. Todd Gurley back in the game, and here's what the Rams wanted from him. Touchdown. Todd Gurley, 71 yards for the touchdown. McVeigh, a former tight-ends coach,

actually entered the job believing he'd use a lot of 12th personnel. Two tight-ends, maybe with one of them being an interchangeable full-back, one running back, and two receivers. The Rams even drafted tight-end Gerald Everett

with their first pick in 2017 and used a sixth-rounder on full-back Sam Rock But when minicamp began that spring, McVeigh decided to change the entire plan. I wish I could say that it was like some deep thing other than like the best 11 players was our three receivers and one tight end in a lot of instances. You know, when Robert Woods and Sammy Watkins were your two starting receivers when you'd be in 12, and I'm looking at Cooper Cup on the sideline, that doesn't make a lot of sense.

We had an incredibly conscientious, tough player that could do so many different. different things in Robert Woods. We ended up trading for Sammy Watkins to really give you that powerful X that could take the top off, that could win, isolations that could come to life in the red area that was willing as a blocker. And then you get an incredibly mature rookie in Cooper Cup who is, you know, like a quarterback the way he processes things. But all three of those guys were willing to compete. So they enabled us to compete without the ball. There was a joke that started back then, that Sean McVeigh's base offense was 11 and a half personnel, because his three starting receivers, out of 11 personnel pre-snap formations, were actually running 12 and 21

personnel plays, like tight ends and fullbacks, including blocking for Gurley. 11 personnel felt like our best group of players to utilize their skill sets. It didn't seem like we wanted to come off and then as a result, we didn't want to take them off the field. And then as a result of that, then you start to see, oh, we can do some tempo, and now we're not subbing, and these guys are conditioned to play more snaps than most receivers were. Like, where I've gotten so spoiled is, like, these guys were aliens in terms of being able to run the way they are and then be back on the line of scrimmage and run another route or do a great block.

Here's Chris B. Brown, creator of smart football, to break it down for you in smart football terms. When McVeigh got to the Rams, you know, there were basically like three years or so in my math, right, where when the Todd Gurley years, I mean, they just ran outside zone up and down the field and everybody. Now, we also get into what I think is McVeigh's actual greatest strength is building these little packages of plays together, but they would basically run 11 personnel every play. They'd run these condensed formations. They would push the count. So, you Normally, you know, the whole, like, Tom Briegel, you know, he's the mic, he's the mic. They would condense information, but then they would declare the mic as the Sam linebacker.

So everybody's working further out in the count. And it just screwed everybody up because then the safety became the Sam linebacker, the way they pushed it so much. And then, you know, the Mike linebacker became the weak side linebacker. And then they would usually leave that weak side linebacker on block. And they'd push the count on everyone. And it just completely mess up defenses on the way they would react, Sometimes they would underreact and they'd get outside, sometimes they'd overreact.

They also would generally not even block the corner. So then the way they could, and they would use those receivers in the blocking scheme. And it just mess with people for three years. That's when you really started to hear the phrase illusion of complexity. Think about it like this. Sean McVeigh was able to run a wide variety of 11, 12, and 21 personnel plays that all looked just like 11 personnel to the defense, before the ball was snapped.

Many, many plays out of very few formations. And they went fast. Remember that turbo package that Sean McVeigh watched Kyle Shanahan and Matt LaFleur run in Atlanta? Sean did a great job with the Rams in his first two years. That's why I hate that I let Matt LaFleafr go to him because it was exactly our turbo package. Well, now LeFleur is McVeigh's OC in Los Angeles.

Coming out of the break, and he had a due idea in terms of how, to implement more of the dropback because we weren't quite sure what we had with Jared. You know, we're trying to be able to catch people a little off guard so that the D-line can't dig their heels in the ground. And hopefully for our quarterback, it would provide him to go against maybe some more simplistic defenses where we thought we could take advantage of them. That's something that we had ran all the way back to Washington. and we started implementing within that no huddle a lot of those turbo plays that we had had some

success with specifically the most success with in Atlanta. Okay, so basically, if a defense knows an offense will use tempo against them, they will often stay in a simpler or more base, more regulated look so they can react faster. Against Sean McVeigh's teams, this was usually nickel to put an extra defensive back on the field to account for the extra receiver. But why stop at just using tempo? And Sean is, he's genius in terms of being able to come with ways for our guys to remember on, you know, how to call things. And what was so interesting with it was we were able to do like motions with it.

And that had, we had never done that before, you know, previous in Atlanta. And just kind of, it just built up over the course of the season. motions create more conflict for defensive players. Do you account for the motion player? If you do, what alternate space does that open up for the offense? I guess in even more a layman's term, it's to put linebackers in absolute fucking hell. Overthinking means hesitation. And in football, hesitation means death.

The Mike linebacker is the quarterback of the defense. You know, he sees what happens. It's telling me he's communicating. whatever, but what happens if what you're seeing is not what you thought. You saw, this all starts with the wide zone run game, which is designed to get you moving in a particular direction, but then a million things happen after that in this offense, not just, you know, a potential play action pass, but with these multiple players going in motion, so you just constantly in a blender and one false step can completely, I mean, that's all it takes in the NFL, it's

literally one step, especially when, you know, some of these coaches have found really unique skill players, and you're cooked. So, or you're matched up with someone you don't want to be matched up with. Todd Gurley, the running back, was extraordinary. He lifted the Rams run game to new heights and got their play action game off the ground for Jared Gough. You said, like, why did some of those play actions come so open? They're the best running back in the league that was bowling. Play action passing is a cheat code for quarterbacks to create explosive pass plays.

It's another math advantage. The idea is that a defender has to come toward the line of scrimmage to account for the possibility that the running back actually does get the ball in order to fill the gap that that run would assign him. The extra second or so of the run fake itself buys a little more time for receivers to then fill the voids left by the defensive players. There's some debate over this within the analytics community, but most coaches' school of thought is that an above-average,

to dominant run game is needed to truly sell the play action. Yep, the Rams had that. Todd Gurley, who's offensive player of the year in 17, I think there's a lot of people that could have said he was MVP that year, but he was great nonetheless. And then he did the same thing in 18, at an even more efficient rate. Sean McFay's offenses from 2017 to 2020 became synonymous with play action passing,

especially with Jared Goff starting from under center. That meant his back to. turn to the defense during the run fake. Remember this. It becomes very, very important later. But I think in its essence, it's the marriage of the run in the past, trying to create that little bit of conflict for the defense, particularly on those rundowns where, hey, is it a run, is it a play action, is it a play action screen, is it a bootleg?

How do you continue to, you know, make sure that you're making the defense defend every blade of grass and trying to create that conflict? Tempo, motions, 11 personnel, condensed formations, play action passing, outside zone. Let's be clear. Sean McVeigh wasn't the first coach to use really any of these concepts in a vacuum. It was the way he used them from how he'd blend pre-and-at-snap motion with tempo, or how high of a rate of 11 personnel he deployed, or how he would sequence plays together to set each other up

that made him start to stand apart as a play caller. I mean, there were Hannibal teams running some of those things, but nobody was running the exact combination of what they were doing at the time. And it's a little bit like writing, right? When you're a young writer, you're, like, I was the old sort of Hunter S. Thompson. He literally like re-typed F. Scott Fitzgerald or Greg Efts. Like, just typing it out to like learn the rhythms. But you're writing like S. Scott Fitzgerald, right? Like, eventually you learn to make it your own.

McVeigh wasn't really afraid to fail because he didn't really know what the definition of that was as a head coach just yet. The lack of fear of failure. is, it wasn't even a thought. It was just like, we're just going to go enjoy playing football and trying to be really good at that and really like the people that you do it with. So they just tried shit. And so in some ways, it was actually a good position to be so young because he hadn't had time for the game to jade him and to make him like, man, you know what?

Like, it's just always an uphill battles. What's the safest route? You know, what's the safest thing we can do as a football team to just go out and compete every week? It was like, hey, I'm young. I don't know why I shouldn't do this. So this is what I want to do. As Andrew Whitworth remembers it, there was a freedom in that lack of fear, which carried over to the players themselves. They had ideas, and they shared them without worrying they'd be told no or stuffed back inside their box.

Everything was evolving. You know, it was going to be this, and then it's like, nope, it's going to be that. And then it's like, oh, Jared's really good and sped up situations. Like, let's keep the ball on the field and down. And, like, if we get a first down, let's never let people huddle. Let's keep him moving. Like, he seemed to grasp things and be calmer and more relaxed the faster we went. And so it's like, all right, we're going to go from huddle calls and 12 and 13 and

changing, you know, all these personnel to, nope, we're going to keep the same group out there. We're going to get on the ball really fast. And we're going to have two plays that could be kind of sped up plays that we could run. and then we're going to have four, and then we're going to have six, and then it's going to be eight, and then it's going to be 20, and then now we're going to have all these numbers, and we're going to do all these different things. And so it just kept evolving.

Some of the best things that happened in McVeigh's offense in his first season happened because he ceded control to the players. The Dallas game is that that's really where the run game hit its finally, like, all right, this is who we are. Because in the first couple games, we still were kind of like an unsure of that, and what Todd's best was. Obviously, he's an unbelievable football player one of the best I've ever had a chance to play with,

but what was going to be the best system for him? And we played in Dallas, and I can remember, like, we're trying to hit the ball outside. As the week four game unfolded, Whitworth, center John Sullivan, and guard Roger Saffold thought the wide zone should come inside a little more. Oh, and the linemen were going to install it in-game, on the fly.

And we came off on a timeout, and I remember we go back on the field, field and I'm like me, John and Saffold had a talk. We were running left the whole time. And it's like, hey, Todd on this next run. Like, don't read it outside in or anything. Just hit it. Like, hit the B gap as fast as you can go and never pull up. Saffold and John kind of work out how they're going to double team up to the backer. And I'm going to just take the end. I'm not even going to try to move him. I'm just going to torque him outside. And we hit it. And then we hit another one. And then, you know, it's like, you all of a sudden, it's like, okay, wait a minute.

And so we kind of found like, all right, this is our style. inside the gun. Sean McVeigh is on the sideline. Can't talk to anybody but the quarterback through the headset. And he's watching this. And he's like, okay,

we'll do it this way now. I'd never been in an offense where we really had the freedom to even do that. So there was almost like, Sean's going to paint and be this artist, but I also am going to give you guys the tools to help me along the way of like, where are we going?

Like we had full discussions. And we had the freedom to do that. And then Sean would be, out there for a walkthrough, he'd hear the discussions. And then we turned into like a screaming match with each other. Like, why would you do it this way? And we're all like, oh, all right, cool. Like, all right, do it that way.

You know, and sometimes you lost those battles and sometimes you want them. But it was like we all had a chance to kind of, hey, Sean had the brush. But every now and then, he might let you change the color. Like, and that was really where it became this beautiful thing of like figuring out a way of how we would be our best selves. Like, what was it going to be our offense? There are also some areas where McFay clearly felt he couldn't see that. control. He was the first coach who had previously worked under Kyle Shanahan, who was now

independently running an offense that was considered to be capable of raising the floor of certain quarterbacks. Jared Goff went from a 5-7 touchdown to interception ratio and 63.6 QBR in his seven-game rookie season to a 28 to 7 touchdown to interception ratio and 100.5 QBR in his second season, his first under McVeigh. He was even named the Pro Football Riders Association's most improved player in 2017. But this also started a national debate that is attached to many quarterbacks in this offense ever since.

Is it the player? Or is it the system? You know, I'll go back to the Matt Ryan example because Matt Ryan actually struggled his first year in the system with Kashanan, and he spoke about it. And I remember reading an interview with him in 2016. I'm paraphrasing here, but when he talked about why he was succeeding in it, then he alluded to the idea of not really reading defenses or worrying too much about what was happening post-snap,

but kind of trusting the system, trusting that the windows would be there, looking for colors. You know, I remember at the time thinking that it just, what it sounded like was faith. And I think that's actually probably a central tenet for the role of the quarterback in the system, which is to trust that if you execute it, not only will players be open, but there will be opportunities for them to get pretty significant yards after the catch, the way things are schemed up spatially. Of course, any functional offense should support its quarterback. The quarterback should feel free and confident within that offense.

But in football, a game defined by hard numbers, wins or losses, there's also an obsession with credit. We want to know who to praise when things work. We also want to know who to blame when they don't. Even if the reality is much more nuanced than that, we want to know who is in control. Sean with Jared had the big deep ball throwing quarterback, but somebody who he really talked about control, he had to help along. Steve Weish remembers the narratives around Sean McVeigh and Jared Goff back in 2017 and 18, all too well. Jared was a guy, even when he came into the NFL, hey, he's a guy who never really had to read defenses. He's looking to the sideline.

He's getting the call. He knows where the ball is supposed to go. Well, it's not easy like that. Behind closed doors in some football buildings, gossip started to swirl. That Sean McVeigh wouldn't just tell Jared Goff the player sequence, but would also direct him where to throw the ball. all the way up until the coach to quarterback helmet mic switched off with 15 seconds left on the play clock. Okay, you see that safety dropping now? Okay, we got the safety to go in the motion right here. Hit it in between the seam to the tight end or to the running back who's coming out through the play action.

On the one hand, it's easy to criticize a young quarterback for this type of handholding. On the other hand, few people actually know how much more stressful that can make the pre-snap process for a quarterback. Robert Griffin the third does. If I was with Kyle or Matt, right, a play call would come in. Okay. Now, the strong right slot is the formation, telling me the strong side of formation, the Y is to the right. We're going to take the Z, put him in the slot on the left,

then motion him back to the right. So that's part of the process of like knowing where everybody's supposed to be at. Now, X drift, that's the play action slant coming from the left. So as a quarterback, you're going through and you're saying, all right, I'm trying to get this will lineback. to bite on this spake. So I got a great ballsmanship and be ready to throw this drift route

right over top of him once he comes down on the run play. If he stays back, doesn't come down. I'm going to take one hitch to the lockdown. If that's not there, I'm going to reset backside

to the flat route on the 93 action. That's how I would process everything with Kyle. With Sean, Sean, on the other hand, as I'm calling the play, he's going to be calling the play too.

Okay? So I'm going to be like, All right, guys, we got strong right, slot Z right. He's going to be telling me in my ear as I'm calling this play. That's Sean's approach. He'll oversaturate you with information. When you're walking to the line and you're trying to see your own keys and cues, where the D-Line is, where the safeties are at,

he's telling you cues at the same time. At first, the gossip didn't matter. The McVe-era Rams' offense had burst onto the scene as a phenomenon. And even though they lost in the wild card round to Atlanta in 2017, they were running way ahead of most everybody else into 2018. You know, those guys were present, you know, they really were. There was just an ability to be present, and we were connected. We were connected staff.

You know, we were connected, you know, group of players. And it was a really cool collaboration of a lot of special people that came together. And I still think that was one of the best teams we've ever had. You know, we obviously... And I take a lot of responsibility for us falling short against Atlanta. But, you know, I think one of the best indicators of if you're a good team is your margin of victory. And, I mean, we had some games where we were, you know, in real command and in control. And it was a shitload of fun.

Sean McVeigh and his Rams staff were studying defensive tendencies, just like he used to do with Kyle Shanahan, Raheim Morris, and the rest of the coaches while in Washington. And because of the way the Rams played offense, they could do more to keep these defenses more regulated. Or in their standard concepts, so they could better predict and then exploit those tendencies. You know, really, as Sean evolved and he kind of got a good feel for things, he was so good at understanding. Every scheme, and not necessarily like, all right, these players make this defense tough or blah, blah, blah, it was, all right, what is the intention of the scheme we're playing? how do we get them to play their scheme the absolute best and use that to our advantage?

And I think that's really where you saw him in some of these four down teams that are playing a lot of this cover three or some of these zones to where he's like, all right, I can manipulate where I think the safeties are going to rotate. I think how the backers are going to slide. And we're going to literally study every week like, hey, you know, who's traveling, who's not? We go find these teams. We'd be like, man, we just hope.

Like, we would literally hope, and we're like, all right, we just hope they play their defense perfectly. Like, that's all we need. If they play their defense perfectly, we're going to win. Now, that's literally the mentality that we had against some of those teams

where you could get predictive and how they played things. But when you're out in front like that, you will be hunted. Your tape will be obsessed over by the entire league. You enter this specific type of sprint, where you must continue to stay one step ahead. or you may just lose your stride completely.

We went through all of 2017 and all of a sudden we're scoring points in huge fashion. Nobody's stopping us. You kind of kept waiting for the bottom of the drop out and it never did. First, there were a couple of blips on the radar. Through December, the Rams offense stumbled against the Detroit Lions, a game they won, and two losses to the Chicago Bears and the Philadelphia Eagles.

Each one of those teams threw one or more defensive concepts at the Rams that rattled them. From quarters coverages and shells that made Jared Goff process more after the snap, and therefore after the play call and muddied up some of the play action concepts, fast-flowing defenders that worked to cut off outside zone run concepts, or loaded fronts that bottled up the run and put more pressure on a pass game minus the injured Cooper Cup. The Rams' offense looked downright mortal. Still, to the casual eye, it seemed like an anomaly. The Rams easily beat the Cardinals and put up 48 points on Kyle Shanahan's 49ers

and headed with confidence into the playoffs. We had a really humbling night in Chicago that wasn't fun. And then we had another challenging game against Philadelphia that wasn't fun. And then we were able to kind of reset ourselves and win a couple games to be able to get a first round by. It was an amazing night with a lot of great players doing their thing against Dallas to win that divisional round. And then we had a NFC championship that was last time I remembered a little controversial for people. But it was awesome. The Rams felt like they had their juice back.

And they were on a collision course with New England in Super Bowl 53. But Patriots coach Bill Belichick, the old Jedi master, was, of course, studying what had happened earlier in December. especially the loss to the Bears, whose defensive coordinator, Vic Fangio, had held the Rams to just six points, their lowest total in two years. In Vic Fangio's Bears' defense, they ran into essentially a brick wall, literally a brick wall of humans on the defensive line. So, in the two-week lead-up to the Super Bowl, Belichick totally changed his defense to the perfect foil of the Rams' offense. He loaded his defensive line into a 6-1 front, and even at times had a safety playing the edge to cut off the widest zone runs or to cover the flats in cases of screens and sweeps.

He played more quarters-covered structures, sitting in a shell over the top of the Rams' explosive passing game, which also made defenders less susceptible to motion. That also meant the defensive look was vanilla pre-snap and could change post-snap into layers that did things like cut off crossing routes and clog up the middle of the field. And when the headset cut off and the ball was snapped and the defense forced the offense into a pass

and then rotated into something new, Jared Goff was on an island. There was one play where Goff, you know, was under center play action, so he turns it back to the defense, and they rotated, the post-snap look was very different, and Goff was just totally befuddled by it. I think it was in the high red zone,

if I remember correctly. And it would have been a touchdown if he was the, the sort of quarterback at the time who could create, who wasn't surprised. And the things that made quarterback's successful in this, that made Jared Goff so successful in it, that faith that, you know, the guys would be there and stuff, sort of backfired. I mean, it just, you know, that it didn't help him, rather, in that situation. I was at that Super Bowl covering it for ESPN, and I was sitting pretty close to that end zone.

I just remember thinking, oh, God, Goff just, he was just flummoxed. McVeigh was frozen too. He couldn't adjust, couldn't problem solve in real time. And I think that when we got to the Super Bowl and then it's like, whoa, somebody's playing is totally different. You know, we're used to having a complete understanding of every defense and where everybody's going to be on the field all the time. And then now these guys are not doing that. We went from knowing everyone better than they knew themselves to, all right, we don't really know who we are now. and like how exactly to block this new structure.

The Rams lost 13 to 3. You've been on this rocket ship and thought you're invincible, you know, at every point. And then not only to lose, but the scores for your points. Made you question everything about how you got there and whether you would get back. So many people don't get back. I think there's probably worse moments. But maybe your body goes, you need some endorphins. You need something to get over.

But my body was going, you know what? You're going to feel all the pain. And you're going to wake up every day and regret getting to that moment and falling short. After the game, Sean McVeigh sat in his hotel room with his family and then fiancé Veronica for hours. He couldn't speak. He was stunned. I didn't coach a very good game. I don't think I saw things in real time.

I think, you know, the lead up to it, which I haven't been shy about. You know, you kind of go back and forth because you have the right intentions, but the execution is not what's best for the team. And so you lose that Super Bowl and, you know, everybody says, oh, you'll be right back or you'll get there. And then I think, you know, the lies that I told myself for, you won't be happy until you won a Super Bowl. Something shifted inside Sean McVeigh as the shock wore off. something darker than what had been there before started creeping in. I don't know exactly how to articulate it, but it wasn't the same sort of joy and bounce that I think I had.

And, you know, I was younger then and stuff like that. And those experiences and the environment shape your perspective. But when you get that far and you wanted it for people and you wanted to be able to, you know, be a part of that team to finish the job, you know, you tell yourself, okay, if you do that, then that will solve this feeling that you felt like, because I felt like I let our team down. Every single thing he did over the next three years would be to get back to the Super Bowl and to win it, no matter the cost to himself or to anyone else.

On the next episode of The Play Callers, the overwhelming pursuit of fixing the pain of failure. He wanted to see how far he could push. it and still come back and find like, all right, this is how I beat it. And how Apex Systems Collide. And I'll never get Kyle screaming on the sideline, do something! And I'm like, I'm not just going to play unsound defense. Jordan Rodriguez is the creator, reporter, and host of the play callers. Kent Garrison is the supervising producer and sound designer,

editorial assistance from Ken Bradley, Matt Havia, and Mike Smelts are the executive producers.