The 9/11 Sean McVay Show … & articles on McVay

Sean McVay’s influence on Redskins is so loud you can still hear it

Sam Farmer

http://www.latimes.com/sports/nfl/la-sp-rams-mcvay-redskins-20170912-story.html

Can you hear me now?

If you’re Sean McVay, the answer is undoubtedly yes.

Even though he’s seemingly out of earshot, as head coach of the Rams and roughly 2,600 miles away, his former Washington Redskins players wonder if he can still hear them.

“We’d always joke about how well he can hear, and not just in meetings,” tackle Trent Williams said. “Outside of practice, too. You’d hear two guys talking among each other five yards behind him. If it’s a question he could answer, he’d turn around and answer you. It was like, ‘How’d you even hear it?’”

The Redskins called it “ear hustle.” McVay, their offensive whiz kid, had relentless ear hustle.

“Coach Sean, he’s a big eavesdropper,” tight end Jordan Reed said with a smile. “If you’re talking, he’s listening. He might be looking that way, but he’s listening.”

In his head coaching debut last Sunday, McVay made some noise himself. The Rams, who couldn’t find the end zone last season with GPS and a kennel of bloodhounds, scored five touchdowns in a 46-9 rout of Indianapolis. That’s as many points as Los Angeles scored in the first three weeks combined last fall.

The Rams play host to the Redskins on Sunday in a game that reunites McVay and the team that afforded him his NFL foothold. He spent seven seasons in Washington, working his way from assistant tight ends coach (2010), to tight ends coach (2011-13), to offensive coordinator (2014-16).

He is beloved in that Redskins locker room, and, as it relates to Sunday’s game, somewhat feared.

“To go against Sean the first time is kind of nerve-racking,” said Williams, the All-Pro left tackle. “Because I know for a fact he knows everything about everybody on this team that was here when he was here.”

Cornerback Josh Norman, another Washington All-Pro, believes McVay took a Sharpie to the schedule the day it came out and circled this game in red.

“He’s a fiery guy,” Norman said. “He’s so smart. He’s a magician. As far as offensive minds, he’s young but could probably create something that we’ll see and be like, ‘That’s Sean McVay.’ Just like the West Coast offense. Who created that? Bill Walsh. Sean McVay could add another layer on top of that. That’s scary, but he has the opportunity to do that.”

McVay’s pedigree is well known. His grandfather, John McVay, was a longtime executive for the San Francisco 49ers who collaborated with Walsh, the Hall of Fame coach, to build a dynasty with that franchise. The younger McVay would go on to become a high school standout in Georgia as a quarterback and defensive back, play receiver at Miami University in Ohio, then rise through the coaching ranks under Jay Gruden and Kyle Shanahan. McVay was 30 when the Rams hired him in January, making him the youngest head coach in modern NFL history.

“Once you talked to him about football, the age thing goes right out the door,” Redskins tight end Niles Paul said. “He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever known when it comes to football.”

From the day he was promoted to tight ends coach, the bright-eyed McVay, with his spiked hair and boundless energy, let it be known that his players would have to adjust to his clock-management issues.

“The first week was incredible, because he was so pumped,” recalled Chris Cooley, formerly the team’s star tight end and now a Redskins color commentator. “We’re in Week 13 of the season and Sean had us meeting an extra hour at the end of the day to go through this plethora of tape cut-ups and break down what we’re doing that week, individualize routes and how we want to run them.

“I’m like, ‘Sean, whoa! You see the parking lot out there? The rest of the guys are gone.’ He was like, `I know, I know, just a little bit longer.’ He was so excited. I thought, this is going to be fun for him, this is going to wear off in a week. It didn’t.”

Cooley, who takes pride in knowing the game, quickly realized that even he was out of his depth when debating concepts and philosophies with his new position coach.

“I have always thought of myself as a smart football player,” Cooley said. “And Sean’s in the room, and within a week he knows 10 times more than I know about the game of football. So it became a massive challenge to me to challenge Sean. To understand it the way he understood it. Because of him I learned every front, every coverage, every look that you could get defensively.”

McVay stubbornly insisted his players not only know their positions, but fully understand and know the assignments of the players around them. Not every coach does that.

“He speaks football on a level that’s like Spanish to most people,” Cooley said. “Football is its own language, really, and every offense is a little sect of that language. But he speaks the most fluent football I’ve ever heard. You get to a point where you’re like, ‘Sean, we’re saying the same thing here. I’m just saying it in Spanglish.’ He’s like, ‘No, but I want you to say it my way.’”

That attention to detail paid off for the tight ends, and then for the entire Redskins offense, which last season averaged more than 400 yards a game for the first time in franchise history and finished as the NFL’s third-ranked unit.

“What he does is lets guys be themselves,” said Reed, who last season became the first Redskins tight end to make the Pro Bowl since Cooley in 2008. “He doesn’t try to mold you to be what he wants you to be. He takes your strengths and he tries to bring the best out of you with what you can do. That’s what he did with me. I’m not the traditional tight end, and he let me be myself.”

Now, McVay is doing that with the Rams, and his former players figure he’s got the same singular focus.

“You’d have to ask Sean what his hobbies are,” Cooley said. “Outside of football, I’m not sure. Probably watching college football.”

The rabbit-eared McVay, you see, is always working on sound fundamentals.

Redskins/NFL Perspective
Jay Gruden mentored Sean McVay. Now he has to beat him.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/jay-gruden-mentored-sean-mcvay-now-he-has-to-beat-him/2017/09/13/fd0f92f2-98af-11e7-82e4-f1076f6d6152_story.html?utm_term=.710cf9179252

For Jay Gruden, the timing is unfortunate, if not cruel. As the Washington Redskins’ coach toils to fix a struggling offense, look at what he faces this week: former coordinator Sean McVay and the ghost of a good unit past.

It’s a quagmire of perception, really. After one game, it’s laughably early to make any strong statements about Gruden’s return to play-calling or the impact of losing McVay, who is now the Los Angeles Rams’ coach. But the NFL is a weekly, unapologetic festival of overreaction. Right now McVay is hot, Gruden is not, and that has to be a major reason Washington’s formerly proficient offense looks so feeble, right?

Sometimes football is that simple. Most times, however, it isn’t. It would be wise to resist the temptation to elevate McVay’s influence to mythical heights after watching him lead the Rams to a 46-9 victory over Indianapolis in his coaching debut last week. McVay, the 31-year-old wunderkind whose coaching DNA includes Mike Shanahan and both Gruden brothers, is missed. But is he irreplaceable? The answer, again, isn’t simple.

This is another test of what Gruden has built. He promoted McVay to a high-profile job and spurred the development of a quality young coach. Before you can talk about the impact McVay had on Washington, you must remember the impact Washington had on him. From Shanahan to Gruden, he received a PhD in offensive football here. Then he added his creativity to it. Now he runs his own team.

Yes, Gruden must make up for the loss. But McVay is a spoke in a system that has flourished, not the entire wheel. The offense is still creative and flexible, but the team clearly misses McVay’s meticulous, organized approach and his ability to teach and inspire the players.

Gruden, the play-caller, is fine. If you review Sunday’s 30-17 loss to Philadelphia , his plays produced ample opportunity to move the football and score points. But the team was sloppy in just about every area. That’s an indictment of preparation and motivation, which Gruden, offensive coordinator Matt Cavanaugh and the rest of the offensive coaches must correct. The players must show more pride, too. And that’s where McVay really stood out.

“Sean has presence, and it’s hard to teach presence,” quarterback Kirk Cousins said. “He has charisma. It’s hard to teach. And it’s hard to teach being a good communicator. You kind of either have it or you don’t. You can talk about his age, but he had presence when he was 20 years old. There are a lot of guys who are 65 and don’t have any presence. . . . He has something that doesn’t grow on trees.”

After the Rams hired McVay, Cousins gave him a signed jersey that included the heartfelt words, “I owe you my career.” In the two seasons that McVay called plays, Cousins threw for 9,083 yards, established himself as a solid NFL starter and earned about $44 million off that productivity. Although burdened by red-zone inefficiency, the offense averaged 403.4 yards per game last season, rising to third in the NFL. It was inevitable McVay would be coveted, just as it was inevitable 30-something wide receivers Pierre Garcon and DeSean Jackson would receive big contract offers that Washington would be reluctant to match.

With three significant pieces gone from last year’s offense, it’s impossible to compare that unit to this one. Oranges have replaced apples, and let’s wait at least until midseason — okay, a month, impatient ones — to judge how they taste. In the meantime, it’s fair to scrutinize whether this team is showing signs of progress in adapting to life without McVay’s organizational gifts.

Ask any person in the Washington locker room, and he will start by mentioning how detailed, energetic and smart the young coach is. He didn’t reinvent Gruden’s system, which is an adaptation of the popular and proven West Coast offense. He just explained it better than anyone. And because McVay is football obsessed by nature, the offense took on his serious approach.

“You sit down and talk to him,” left tackle Trent Williams said. “He knows football inside and out. There’s not a position, there’s not a scheme that he doesn’t know. He can sit up there in the box or on the sideline and tell you what’s happened, what’s going to happen and why it happened. In this game, any time somebody has that type of knowledge of the game, they’re going to be highly sought after.”

Four years ago, Gruden earned this job because of his good work as the Cincinnati offensive coordinator. His style in leading an offense was similarly effective, and it should be again. He’s clever. He relates well with players. But he’s also loose and not as rigid about particulars as McVay. He’s more focused on the big picture than McVay was because, you know, he’s the head coach.

But here’s the biggest difference: As a former quarterback who played professionally for a long time, Gruden coaches on instinct. McVay was a wide receiver who stopped playing upon graduating from Miami (Ohio) and immediately went into coaching. He is an analytical coach.

The game is like a science project to McVay, and he’s an A-plus student. At age 50, Gruden has a feel for the game that McVay may never acquire. There are positives and challenges to both coaching methods. The players are adjusting to the dissimilar styles. Or maybe they just need to suck it up and perform.

“To be honest, man, sometimes it’s splitting hairs,” Williams said. “Sometimes it’s more on the players than it is on the coach. You can have a brilliant scheme to run, but if my players don’t run it the right way or if I have one person missing his assignment and it equates to a loss of five on a play, everybody looks at you, like, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’

“It’s a pulley system. We have to depend on them to put us in the right situation, and they have to depend on us to make that right situation better and give them results.”

McVay wasn’t perfect during his two seasons calling plays, but the results were good. After one game and several preseason glimpses, Gruden is straining to live up to an old standard. Never mind that it’s a standard he oversaw.

That’s the burden of mentorship. Raise a prodigy properly, and then people start thinking you have to catch up.

Sean McVay fan club still exists among Redskins

John Keim
ESPN Staff Writer

http://www.espn.com/blog/washington-redskins/post/_/id/33108/sean-mcvay-fan-club-still-exists-among-redskins

ASHBURN, Virginia — Washington Redskins coach Jay Gruden spotted it when Sean McVay was barely old enough to drink. That’s why he hired him in the UFL. And it’s why Gruden tried to hire him away from the Redskins when he landed in Cincinnati.

The Redskins saw it, too. It’s why they denied Gruden’s request.

The players? They weren’t surprised, either. McVay spent seven seasons in Washington, working his way up from a 23-year-old assistant tight ends coach to tight ends coach to offensive coordinator. Now the coach of the Los Angeles Rams, McVay’s offense scored 30 of the team’s 46 points in a win over the Indianapolis Colts on Sunday.

“He’s like a mad scientist,” Redskins tight end Niles Paul said. “He’s a genius, man. He’s like a football genius.”

Jared Goff plays another good game and Kirk Cousinsstruggles for Washington. It’s not as if there’s pressure on Gruden, who has three more years on his contract.

And it’s not as if the Redskins’ struggles are directly related to losing McVay. They also lost receivers DeSean Jackson and Pierre Garcon. Some of the same questions that arose after Sunday’s loss to the Philadelphia Eagles existed under McVay, from play-calling to the lack of a run game. The Redskins’ offense struggled at times last December as well, scoring a combined 25 points in home losses to the Carolina Panthers and the New York Giants.

That said, the Redskins were long aware of McVay’s football acumen.

“He is organized and detailed,” Gruden said.

Those were two reasons why he let McVay call plays the past three seasons. Gruden said he married the Redskins’ existing system with his own but, because he’d sometimes uses Bengals terminology, he opted to let McVay call plays instead.

“It was a steady, good flow that he had about him,” Gruden said. “I didn’t have to step in a whole lot. I did from time to time, but he is a good playcaller. We just kind of let him roll with it.”

Gruden and McVay both relate well to the players: Gruden is comfortable operating a little more off-schedule, like the former quarterback he was in college. He’ll admit to going with a play based more on instinct. McVay, numerous people have said, was more about the details. Not that both coaches don’t have the other skill; each has their strengths. Both are personable, perhaps one reason they’ve remained close. Gruden said they talk every week or so. He called McVay to congratulate him Sunday.

McVay has always talked about how much he liked that Gruden let him develop as a playcaller by giving him freedom. McVay also coached three seasons under Mike Shanahan.

“You could tell he learned a lot under the tutelage of Mike Shanahan,” Redskins tackle Trent Williams said. “He learned a lot about how to make plays look the same that aren’t the same. He knows defenses extremely well so he knows how to set people up. He studies film more than you would believe. His ability to predict what’s coming and to put the players in the right position to me stood out. And what I liked that he did from a players’ standpoint he let everyone do what they did best. He didn’t have a cookie cutter style.”

Williams said Gruden does the same.

The player also said McVay took a big-picture approach, something Paul noticed when he moved to tight end in 2012.

“He goes through the whole progression of the offense,” Paul said. “He’ll tell you from the O-line to the receivers what the responsibility is, where he’s supposed to be at. A complete grasp of the offensive system. You feel like now he has a chance to be totally him. That’s what he’s always wanted to be. I know for a fact he’s always been capable of that.”

He’s a football junkie.

“I’m not surprised by his success because he puts the work in,” Redskins tight end Vernon Davissaid. “He stands out. His energy. It doesn’t matter what time of day it is or where he is, he’s always talking football, talking about plays. He’s even going back and reminding me of some plays I had in San Francisco that I don’t even remember. He remembers and brings it up.”

They also know some of what McVay will want to do Sunday; the tough part will be knowing when — and then stopping it.

“He’ll run naked [bootlegs] and keepers,” Davis said. “He’ll take shots deep. He loves to go deep. He loves the tight end so he’ll use them. You’ll see a lot of seam routes by the tight ends with him.”

“He’ll try to hit three or four shot plays,” Gruden said, “and attack our defense with some play-action shots. Some sort of play-action bombarooski. Those are the ones that make or break a close game. You hit that and it changes momentum. It changes everything. We have to figure out a way to hit some and I know he is.”