Rams’ McVay stays tough on himself

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It was 5 a.m., but Sean McVay’s cellphone would not stop buzzing.

The Rams’ boy-wonder head coach had logged only a couple of hours of sleep following his team’s 38-31 victory over Minnesota a week ago Thursday night. It had seemingly taken forever for McVay to make the 24-mile commute from Los Angeles Coliseum to his home in Encino and to wind down from his squad’s electrifying performance.

Sleep finally came — until the cellphone started blowing up.

Buddies from all over the country weighed in, many of them on the East Coast who thought nothing of the time difference. They just wanted McVay to know how happy they were after watching his Rams light up the scoreboard and improve to 4-0.

All of the texts sparked McVay’s own reflections on the game, and the coach found himself getting keyed up all over again. He scrapped plans of sleeping in after giving his players and assistants the day off. To his home office he went. There, McVay has a setup virtually identical to his office at the Rams’ Thousand Oaks headquarters another 20 miles farther from L.A. In that home office, McVay has the same access to the team’s exten-

sive game film library.

He started rewatching the game. McVay saw all five of Jared Goff ’s touchdown passes and the 465 passing yards that resulted in a perfect 158.3 passer rating. He saw three receivers record 100yard outings, and all 150 of running back Todd Gurley’s all-purpose yards.

With a fourth 30-plus-point game, McVay’s offense continued to challenge Kansas City for the distinction of this year’s version of “The Greatest Show on Turf.”

At times, the Rams have looked like the NFL equivalent of the NBA’s Warriors: up and down the field at a dizzying pace, gunning from deep and scoring at will. And through a quarter of the season, Los Angeles’ offense ranks either first or second in every statistical category.

But McVay’s eyes, trained on that film for hours last Friday, told him things far less glowing than the endless praise in those texts. He needed to be better.

“I thought myself, personally, as a play-caller, a couple situations, I was really poor and that could’ve cost us the game,” McVay told USA TODAY in a phone interview after putting his defensive film review on hold. “A couple key instances, I really put us in a bad spot. … In a couple of the third-down plays and once you got into the red zone, where you get a little greedy or pass-happy where you need to be more efficient and finish with touchdowns. I’ve got to be better there.”

An improved version of this high-flying Rams’ attack, already averaging 35 points and 468 yards a game, doing even better is downright terrifying for NFL defensive coordinators. But McVay sees that as a realistic and necessary goal.

Had it not been for a couple of “horrendous” play calls that led to two stalled fourth-quarter drives (one fizzled at the Vikings’ 9 and ended with a missed field goal attempt, and another resulted in a punt and a chance for Minnesota to mount a game-tying drive), McVay believed that his team could have won by 14 points or more.

The Rams still prevailed thanks largely to clutch defensive play, so there was no harm done. But McVay doesn’t want repeats of those potentially crippling scenarios. So he continues to search for answers after admitting that he doesn’t have them all himself.

In the last two years, few play-callers have proved as prolific as McVay. His offense led the league in scoring last season, averaging 29.9 points per game. Only Andy Reid’s Chiefs (36.3) average more points per game this year than the Rams’ 35.

But McVay still sees room for growth, and that can’t be measured by points alone.

Sometimes an offense can have an average performance but still “get lucky,” as McVay describes it, because a defensive player blows an assignment. Other times, a coach can make a great call, but a defender will simply make an even better play. McVay’s aim centers on an approach that’s designed to be consistently intentional and effective in key situations (finishing drives in the red zone, converting on third downs, running the ball effectively).

McVay routinely devotes time to studying the coaches he views as the best play-callers in the league, with Sean Payton in New Orleans, Reid in Kansas City, Josh McDaniels in New England and Kyle Shanahan in San Francisco leading the way.

“I’ve got a lot of respect for a handful of coaches and there’s a lot of great stuff put out there on film,” McVay said. “So I always want to stay up to speed on those current trends and figure out if you can steal something that fits your players and your system. I’m certainly not afraid to steal from some of these great coaches. I know I do every week.”

McVay might, at times, mimic or build off of concepts gleaned from opposing coaches. But few in the league take as aggressive an approach to play-calling as he does.

A deep and highly talented collection of receivers and running backs helps, but so too does McVay’s willingness to buck conservative trends and instead pursue the most creative and aggressive approaches possible.

Goff is chasing that elite bench mark as a passer, and Gurley is performing like the top-paid running back the team made him in the offseason. McVay, however, makes it all go. He’s the mastermind determined to ratchet up the intensity, authoritatively dictate the tempo of each game and dominate opponents in whatever fashion he desires.

McVay & Co. have proved capable of doing this. But doing so at a consistently unstoppable clip is his next quest.