YOUNG EINSTEIN
Peers heap praise on Rams’ 31-year-old coach McVay
THOSE WHO know quarterback whisperers when they see and hear one expect Jared Goff one day to be saying exactly what Kirk Cousins is saying today about Sean McVay.
“I was certainly a younger player when he f irst started l eading me at the quarterback position,” Cousi ns told Serby Says. “I think we grew t ogether quite a bit in the 2014 season, a season that didn’t go our way. That offseason I felt like he did a good job encouraging me, believing in me, never letting me doubt myself or my ability or my potential in this league. And then he created plays and designed game plans and organized an install each day of OTAs and training camp, and enabled me to have a quiet mind and play the position success- fully. I do feel like I owe him a great deal in my career.”
On Sunday Cousins faces McVay, his former offensive coordinator and Goff ’s new head coach with the Rams — the youngest head coach in the NFL at 31.
Why is McVay able to command a room and command a team of men not much younger than hhim?
“It doesn’t really matter what age you are. There’s a lot of people who are 60 years old who can’t command a room,” Cousins said. “You have to have presence, you have to have charisma, and it’s hard to teach presence. It’s hard to coach it. You either kind of have it or you don’t. I think Sean had that long before he was 31 years old. Those guys don’t grow on trees.”
Asked to provide a scouting report on McVay, Cousins said he is “very sharp.”
Quick thinker. Understands the game. Hard worker,” Cousins said. “Has been around really good offensive minds in Jon and Jay Gruden along with Mike and Kyle Shanahan. Will be able to adapt his system to the talent of the players that he has on his team. Good motivator. Very organized. Really everything you’re looking for in a coach.”
McVay is The Natural. A veritable Jon Gruden Grinder. Gruden’s father Jim was an aide for John McVay, Sean’s grandfather, at the University of Dayton.
“The Gruden-McVay relationship goes all the way back to 1970,” Jon Gruden told The Post by phone. “John McVay and my dad are best of friends. My dad continued to work with McVay as a 49er when John McVay became the general manager, he hired my dad to be one of his scouts. My best friend, one of ’em, is Jim McVay, who runs the Outback Bowl here in Tampa [Fla.]. He played quarterback in Dayton where I played quarterback, so we’re like tied together.
“And when Sean was playing wide receiver at Miami [Ohio], he said that he wanted to get back in coaching. ... I said, ‘ Well I’d love to have you on my staff.’
“I took a lot of pride, honestly, in hiring these young guys, that not only to become future head coaches, but I wanted young guys that could help me — guys that can coach, guys that could study, guys that loved it, that would do it for nothing. That’s how I got into coaching with the 49ers when John McVay hired me. John McVay hired me to be a quality control coach.”
Gruden was asked what stood out about Sean McVay.
“Similar qualities that I saw in my own brother. I mean, he’s a
helluva guy. He works his ass off,” Gruden said. “All he loves is football. He loves it. He’s a sharp guy. I knew he’d be loyal, he’d work hard. That’s what the McVays’ and the Grudens’ goal is in life: hard work, loyalty. If you can do those two things, you got a chance. I knew he could do both of those things at an extremely high level. And it sounds easy to do, but it’s hard to work hard, hard every day, and it’s hard to be loyal all the time.”
Even if you have to start out as a secretary.
“I learned from Al Davis. We didn’t have any secretaries,” Gruden said. “Secretaries really in Oakland were young football people. So what I did basically is got Sean in the [Buccaneers] building [2008] by making him a secretary. Next thing I know he’s out there helping Joey Galloway with his comeback route, or he’s helping Michael Clayton how to read man or zone on a shallow cross, he’s running the scout team, he’s drawing cards. ... He’s helping me survive.”
Gruden was 38 when he became the youngest head coach to win a Super Bowl — XXXVII with the Bucs.
“You either have the charisma, the knowledge, the passion, the intelligence or you don’t,” Gruden said. “I don’t care if he’s 31 or 71, you want him on your team.”
At Marist School in Atlanta, they wanted McVay to quarterback their team and run the triple option. Chris Ashkouti was McVay’s favorite receiver.
“It was like having another coach on the field,” Ashkouti said by phone. “He would spend a crazy amount of time studying film before the games. ... He played with a chip on his shoulder, and he just brought out the best in everybody else. Everybody just rallied around him. He’s always positive.
“You just have to love him, he’s got a super-contagious personality.
“He’s a winner, man. He’s the best.”
Whenever Ashkouti is asked for a McVay anecdote, he always comes back to a legendary play in the third round of the state playoffs against Shaw High, a naked bootleg in a crucial moment.
Chris “Chili” Davis was the tailback and free safety.
“He faked it to me, I dove over the top, and he literally walked the ball in,” Davis said by phone.
McVay and Davis had adjoining lockers.
“He would always sit there and he would just spit straight down like it’s a spit puddle,” Davis said. “Thinking in his head all the different checks he had to make and all that.
“Something else people may not know about him as far as the way he’s always thinking about the game, and us as a team, you’d go to his house and above his bedroom, you would just see little brown dots on the wall, like I’m talking about hundreds, thousands of these little dots. He just used to lay on his bed and throw a spiral up so the end of the football would hit the ceiling and come right back to him and he’d just do that over and over and over again.
“It was just his way of calming his nervousness, or walking himself through the games. It was one of those things that we just didn’t question.”
They are so proud of their young, old friend.
“He can walk into a room and win everybody over at the drop of a hat,” Ashkouti said. “I think people are starting to recognize the greatness that’s coming with Sean.
“He was born for it. It’s in his blood.”