Best of Sean McVay’s “Coach Cam” appearance during Rams-Chargers preseason broadcast

Stu Jackson

https://www.therams.com/news/best-of-sean-mcvay-s-coach-cam-appearance-rams-chargers-preseason-broadcast

INGLEWOOD, Calif. – For the first time since 2019, Rams head coach Sean McVay joined TV affiliate ABC7’s broadcast for live insight and discussion on the game unfolding before him.

Here are some of the highlights from that “Coach Cam” appearance during the Rams-Chargers preseason game Saturday night. The full video is available at the bottom of the article, as well.

Being a “developmental staff”

Offensive coordinator Liam Coen, pass game coordinator/secondary coach Chris Shula and run game coordinator/defensive line coach Eric Henderson all got the opportunity to call plays during Saturday night’s preseason game.

“Liam’s been doing an excellent job, and then Chris Shula did a really good job with the operation in the first half,” McVay told the ABC7 broadcast team of Andrew Siciliano, Mina Kimes and Andrew Whitworth midway through the third quarter.

McVay said “it’s great” to be able to hand over those responsibilities to assistants in the preseason, and that those are important developmental opportunities for coaches. He also credited defensive coordinator Raheem Morris for empowering his coordinators on that side of the ball.

“We try to be a developmental staff,” McVay said.

Whitworth chimed in, adding that Morris told him pregame: “We develop players, why wouldn’t we develop coaches?”

Diagnosing the action in realtime

With the Rams defense facing a 3rd-and-short situation, Siciliano asks McVay what the playcall is in that moment.

“I would think another situation to be able to play sticky here,” McVay said. “Coming out in a 3-by-1, we’re holding a little bit, looks like we’re in a zone. We’re probably in our three-deep rotation coming down. Good job by (cornerback) T.J. Carter flashing in that window, and God, I cannot believe he got across the four (yards), but it looks like he’s short.”

More than just an evaluator of offensive line play and technique

At one point in the interview, Whitworth praises wide receiver Lance McCutcheon for McCutcheon’s patience on his route in the back of the endzone that led to the 2-point conversion.

“You said it Whit, he was nice and patient at the top,” McVay said. “You guys just think Big Whit’s just an exquisite left tackle his whole career, he’s got an appreciation for the All-22, too.”

McVay had (perhaps jokingly) mentioned this week that he would be recording Saturday night’s broadcast to evaluate Whitworth’s performance after the game when he got home. When asked about that, he offered more praise for Whitworth.

“I have no doubt that this is a very smooth transition,” McVay said. “He’s always worked at whatever he does. He’s one of those guys that, you almost get pissed off because he’s just good at everything, whatever he decides to put his mind to. I have no doubt that my guy has been outstanding, and I’m sure you guys would agree he’s a great partner to have up in the booth with you guys.”

Welcome to the Sean McVay Moment: Inside the pressures that brought him to the pinnacle and why satisfaction is still so hard to come by

Seth Wickersham

https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/34363420/welcome-sean-mcvay-moment-pressures-brought-pinnacle-why-satisfaction-hard-come-by

SEARCHING FOR A vodka soda, Sean McVay walks me through the expansive refurbished kitchen of his new 9,000-square-foot house in a double-security-gated Hidden Hills community that also is home to Drake, Miley Cyrus, the Jenners and Kardashians just up the 101 Freeway from Los Angeles. It’s a May afternoon, in the spring after he got everything he ever wanted. He and his soon-to-be wife, Veronika Khomyn, have just moved in. Boxes are scattered. Shelves and walls and rooms are vast and mostly empty; a soft echo accompanies conversation. He just got home from work and wants to unwind. Where the vodka sodas are stored, he’s unsure. He walks to a built-in cabinet and presses the door. It doesn’t open. He presses it again. Nope. He moves to another. It opens, but it’s empty.

“Where …?” he asks.

He wheels into a pantry area and scans a shelf. Success. He then heads to the backyard, which has an infinity pool and a TV tuned to an NBA game. It’s golden hour, the air cool but the ground warm. To the side of the patio is his home office. A Lombardi trophy is on one of the desks. At 36, McVay is the youngest head coach ever to win one. In the coming months he’ll receive a proclamation of recognition from his hometown city council in Atlanta, and his alma mater, Miami University in Ohio, will announce that it’s going to build a statue of him.

He stares at the scenery and takes a pull off his drink.

Only recently has McVay been able to catch his breath after the most fun and stressful months of his life. There was, of course, the Super Bowl win over the Bengals. Then an opportunity to leave coaching for the booth, if he so desired. Wedding planning, after delays due to the pandemic. The dull panic that the Rams are behind the rest of the league, after the long playoff run in the longest season in NFL history. And then the texts: Veronika is Ukrainian and still has family outside of Lviv, an initial and repeated target. Both of them check their phones constantly during the night. Half of Veronika’s family won’t be able to attend the wedding at the Beverly Hills Hotel, including her dad. It’s been surreal for McVay to reach the pinnacle of his profession, watch his wealth exponentially increase, move from one beautiful home into another, all set against the backdrop of war. A lot of feelings are in the air, some that McVay can articulate and some that he can’t, but today as he stares at the new house, he’s reflective.

“Still can’t believe we live here,” he says.

McVay is a young man but a veteran coach, with hair always gelled, forearms always swollen, scruff always at two-day growth — he shaved himself clean once and “it scared Veronika,” he jokes — and eyes that default to a sort of worried look. He leans back into his white patio couch, trying to enjoy the life he’s built through a game that he bent to his will — and that he knows might destroy him. He still has unfinished work from today, because there’s always unfinished work — passing-game film to break down, which he’ll do either tonight or in the morning, depending on how the evening goes.

“Dropback install,” he says. “Got 208 clips to go through.”

THE MORNING AFTER he won Super Bowl LVI, McVay woke up and looked in the mirror. Running on fumes and semi-hungover, he saw his career, and his life, with weird clarity, as if he had finally understood something essential about himself. He had imagined and considered what it would feel like to join the exclusive list of coaches with at least one ring. After losing Super Bowl LIII to New England in 2019, he had sat with Veronika in a near-catatonic state. “I can’t believe it,” he kept saying, mostly to himself. He told his family not to worry; they worried anyway. The game itself was a blur, a schooling by Bill Belichick so thorough and traumatic that to this day, McVay hasn’t watched it in full. He felt he coached “like an amateur … so in over my head,” and he swore that it would never happen again.

It didn’t. But McVay’s first glimpse of himself after L.A.’s 23-20 win over the Bengals was odd. He didn’t feel like a better coach, aside from having accumulated the knowledge of having coached another game, another book in a growing library. He didn’t feel like the living truth of his outstanding résumé: that he, in only five years — without a day under .500; with playoff wins over Pete Carroll, Bruce Arians and Sean Payton; with his own football tree, four head coaches strong — has a chance to be one of the greats, maybe the greatest ever.

No, like Vince Lombardi and Belichick on mornings after some of their championships, McVay felt grateful and humble, reduced at the moment when his presence to the world was bigger than ever, overwhelmed with the reality that his life would change and benefit from events beyond his control. He knew that if not for defensive coordinator Raheem Morris’ counsel during dark times in the winless month of November, if not for the brilliance of Aaron Donald, Matthew Stafford and Cooper Kupp in high-leverage moments, if not for overcoming his own mistakes, none of this would have happened.

Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford, left, and McVay celebrate after the Rams defeated the Cincinnati Bengals in Super Bowl LVI. AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez
Months after that morning, as he sits at a table and describes it, McVay is certain of one thing: If they had lost to the Bengals, he definitely wouldn’t have this new house. Would Amazon have courted a two-time Super Bowl loser, offering a booth job for $20 million a year, after word on the street was that he had finally burned himself out coaching? McVay isn’t convinced. Either way, he wasn’t ready to leave his job, and he received a raise.

Otherwise, he’d still be in his previous home, high in Encino Hills with a view of San Fernando Valley, a place he loved but that both he and Veronika had outgrown — or, rather, his fame had outgrown. It was in a dense neighborhood. People would buzz, asking for autographs or money. A burglar had once stolen more than $100,000 of stuff, and McVay had to build a fence and hire security. This feels like more of an adult house. McVay wanted to bring the basketball hoop from the pool to the new place, but it felt childish. “Gotta leave it,” Veronika told him.

And now, all that’s left is the rest of his life. McVay has always tried, with varying success, to think beyond the next game. He can imagine kids running around his backyard one day, a happy family. He can hear it. But then he wonders: Who will he be when that day arrives? Will he be retired, with a cushy booth gig, fully engaged with his family — or will he still be a coach, secretly thinking about 208 dropback install clips or a hundred other tasks, present in body if present at all?

He isn’t the first to suffer from the game’s “mental mind f—” that “I can’t distance myself from,” as he puts it. But McVay is trying to understand what success is, or happiness is, or how a finish line looks, if it even exists. His goal was to be the youngest head coach to win a Super Bowl. But did he “ever have a goal of winning the most Super Bowls of a head coach in NFL history, or winning the most games?” he says. “No. Now, what that means, I have no idea.”

The problem is, he knows.

“I’ll be sitting here when I’m 60,” he says during another quiet moment, with deep resignation. “And we’ll be saying, how the f— are you still coaching?”

I SPENT MANY days with McVay this offseason, at his home and at work, watching a man at odds with himself. He wanted to process out loud, knowing that many of his predecessors in this profession, his heroes, guys he studies and steals from and tries to match, extreme personalities and legends, are like him, happiest when unhappy. Since the Super Bowl, McVay has been consumed by trying to understand the job and himself, and what it means for his life. He wants to understand his own wiring, sometimes feeling powerless over it — feeling “intrinsically motivated to the point” that he’s “sick,” he says one morning.

“It’s not a choice,” he says. “I don’t make a choice to be driven.”

When I explain all of this on a May evening over dinner in the Atlanta suburbs with his parents, Cindy and Tim, they laugh. Welcome to their world raising him. As a 3-year-old, Sean went to a roller-skating party. He had never skated, but he took off on the rink, leaving the rest of the kids behind, until he crashed into the boards and looked back to see whether the group was gaining on him, before taking off again.

“We looked at each other like, ‘Oh my god,'” Tim says, smiling. “What have we created?”

But Sean’s ambition is more than just something he’s carried with him since he was a boy. It’s a force without a clear destination, both toxic and enriching, rooted in trying to be great at a coin flip of a game and addicted to the high of the feeling of improvement, even if — especially if — it’s invisible to the outside world. As a kid, he was exposed to football’s blessings and costs, and he internalized not the hokey sanitized version of the game but what it truly takes to author a legend. Some of Sean’s earliest memories are of attending San Francisco 49ers walk-throughs with his grandfather — former executive and five-time champion John McVay — and speaking with Steve Young and Jerry Rice. But Sean also watched his own father steer away from that life, aware of its dangers.

Tim played football at Indiana, and considered going into coaching. But he knew what it took to be successful, growing up with a loving father but one who was always at the office, working for the legendary Bill Walsh, who revolutionized the game at the expense of not only his own happiness and sanity but also those around him. Tim chose television instead. “He wanted to be able to raise his family,” Cindy says. “To be able to be around his family.”

Sean knew as a young adult that he would pursue a career in sports. But when he told people he wanted to coach, his parents and some friends saw all of the warning signs, with his compulsive personality coupled with a spectacularly unhealthy profession. Did he want to be his grandfather or his father? He decided on both — with his own belief that someday, however noble and naive, he might find a way to make life in pro football palatable.

A string of leg injuries in college at Miami University ended Sean’s life as a receiver, accelerating his coaching career. He landed an entry-level gig at Jon Gruden’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2008. He left college before classes ended, finishing remotely. Cindy went with him to Tampa to help him find a place to live. He had to learn the basics and had a long way to go. The first time Sean stood in front of the staff to draw the O’s for an offensive play, Gruden cut him off. “Your circles are the s—tiest f—ing circles I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Still, McVay was hooked on coaching. In 2010, he joined Mike Shanahan’s staff in Washington, starting as a quality control coach before moving to tight ends coach for Kyle Shanahan, who was offensive coordinator. From Mike, McVay learned how to set a vision for an entire football operation, with no detail too small. From Kyle, he learned how to reimagine offense, exploiting holes in the defense that others couldn’t see. When that staff was fired and McVay stayed on with new head coach Jay Gruden as offensive coordinator, he learned how a leader can provide not only opportunities — McVay was only 27 years old — but also protection. Washington went 4-12 that year, and Gruden publicly took the blame for the poor offense, shielding McVay. If McVay had been blamed, his entire reputation would have been altered. The rising star would have been tagged as another overmatched legacy hire.

The next season, when the offense improved, Gruden credited McVay’s design and execution. Buzz ensued. McVay’s rise had been fast, but he was proud that even with family connections, he hadn’t skipped any steps, from grunt work to position coach to coordinator. He felt like he had willed and whittled 20 years of work into 10, and it set him up for head coach interviews in January 2017 at age 30. After the Rams meeting, McVay called his parents, at 2:30 a.m. in Atlanta.

“It went really good,” Sean said. “I’m going to get this job.”

“Are you ready?” Cindy asked.

“I’ve been ready my whole life,” he replied.

McVay, sitting for portraits in his new home in L.A. Shayan Asgharnia for ESPN
THIS PAST JANUARY, on the day after the regular season ended, when franchises jettison failing coaching regimes, Veronika asked Sean, “What would you do if you were on one of those teams that wasn’t winning and you might get fired?”

“Well, that just wouldn’t f—ing happen,” he replied. “Why would you ever think that way?”

He knew it sounded cocky, as if he were somehow immune to the fate of all coaches, even elite ones. But underneath it was a stark fear, not of being fired — he knows that it’s part of his chosen life — but of the losing that would precede it. Before the Super Bowl, McVay found a deeper admiration for Bengals coach Zac Taylor, his buddy and former quarterbacks coach. Taylor stomached six total wins his first two seasons before guiding the Bengals to the final game. “I’ve never really had to lead in circumstances that were real adversary,” McVay says now.

McVay has only won, just enough to keep him sane. In his first year, the Rams — an organization that had gone 14 years without a winning season and was slow to appeal to fans in a new market — went 11-5, led the league in scoring and hosted a playoff game. But McVay was essentially a glorified offensive coordinator rather than a complete head coach, calling plays, trying to establish a culture and not in the weeds on defense or special teams.

In college, McVay had interned at KTVU-San Francisco, where his dad was the general manager. He watched how Tim led an organization, how he knew the names of every staffer, something he learned from John, who learned it from Walsh. Tim “showed me a path, whether I realized it or not, of being able to lead in a way that’s authentic to my personality,” Sean says now.

He tried to apply it to his new job. Even if he excelled with his eye for creating space and confusion on offense — and even if he was “a phenomenal leader” who took “extreme ownership and accountability,” says Green Bay head coach Matt LaFleur, at the time the Rams’ offensive coordinator — it was still brutal at times. Rams executives were stunned at how McVay, after being jovial all offseason, seemed to switch personalities as soon as the games began. If a staffer or executive stopped by his office, McVay sometimes said, “What the f— do you want?” But on the spectrum of raging head coaches, McVay was still on the generally decent end, and he’d usually later apologize.

And to think: “Ignorance was bliss,” McVay ‘says. If he truly knew all of the pains of the job … the time management, contract disputes with coaches and players, staff nitpicking and arguing with him on every decision, the way McVay himself used to do with Jay Gruden … he might not have survived. During one practice, there was a disagreement between offensive line coach Aaron Kromer and LaFleur. McVay entered the fray, weighed in, backed Kromer and went about practice, not thinking much of it.

Later that day, LaFleur entered his office, livid that McVay had sided with Kromer. “You showed me up in front of the players,” LaFleur said. “With all due respect, you should just fire my ass right now.”

McVay felt his blood pressure rise. The Rams were playoff-bound — and LaFleur, one of his best friends, was complaining about this?

“You know what?” McVay replied. “I f—ing hate this job. I’m f—ing quitting. F— this s—. I hate myself. I hate that I’m treating you like this …”

“No!” LaFleur said. “You can’t do that!”

McVay hugs his father Tim McVay and mother Cindy McVay during pregame at Super Bowl LIII against the New England Patriots. Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images
What LaFleur felt was a ninja management psychology move by McVay — “He flipped the switch on me,” he says now with a laugh — was actually rooted in desperation. McVay was irritable and overwhelmed, and hated that he was irritable and overwhelmed. The Rams reached the Super Bowl the next year and lost, and his ego and insecurity grew, widening his mood swings. He had always gotten good press: He was successful, and enjoyed hanging out with reporters, mostly national ones, trading gossip and inside stories. But he admits now that he had gotten “reliant” on all the praise.

“I’m at my best when it’s not about Sean,” McVay says. “And it’s been about me more than I probably ever would like to admit.” The Super Bowl loss had fundamentally altered the narrative around McVay, from boy wonder to another lovely tombstone in Belichick’s graveyard. He spoke to Brad Stevens, Steve Kerr and Andy Reid after the loss, learning a way forward. And McVay entered the 2019 season hellbent on proving that he could take the final step as a coach. If he came off as an a–hole in the building — if he was an a–hole — so be it.

“I lost my humanity a little bit,” he says. “I let the frustration of the expectations be more about me than I’d ever want anyone to know.”

The Rams went 9-7. It was McVay’s worst season. “So miserable,” he says. He let it carry over into 2020, when the Rams went 10-6. McVay was trying to grow into a total head coach. McVay won, but he began to lose faith in the quarterback on whom he had once bet his career, Jared Goff. As Goff struggled, McVay coached him harder. It backfired, destroying the quarterback’s confidence, about which McVay still feels guilty. He felt his intentions were right but the execution was wrong, and he retreated inward, trying to fight his internal storm alone. He worked more from home, not only due to COVID-19 protocols, not only due to the efficiency of it, where nobody could stop by, but also because he felt it was how he could best get his head right — all while feeling on the verge of a breakdown. “It was just that constant torment hanging right here,” McVay says, touching his stomach. “Like you have a f—ing problem and you’ve got to fix it, but you don’t know how to f—ing fix it. Nobody puts more pressure on themselves than I do of me, but I think a lot of that pressure is a result of when I lose sight of what matters. If I had listened to the advice I give our players all the time, I would eliminate a lot of my own internal struggles.”

After losses, Veronika would drive Sean and his parents home, his mood so dark it became atmospheric. “Worrisome for a parent,” Cindy says. Veronika would mostly be silent. “I never know how he’s going to be, because sometimes he’s upset after a win,” she says. “He likes us to be around but not ask too many questions.” Cindy would ask them anyway, diving into the game’s critical plays. Tim would try to offer perspective — that the Rams were winning, on their way to the playoffs again …

“I don’t want to f—ing hear it right now, Dad. I don’t want to hear any pep talks.”

McVay would eventually calm down. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he’d tell his family. They’d share a few drinks before hitting the sack. Still, Tim knew his son well and felt that Sean was losing his way. Then, sometime in the middle of the night, the McVays would hear Sean tiptoeing to his home office, too sick to sleep.

Sean McVay and wife Veronika Khomyn. Shayan Asgharnia for ESPN
“WHO THE F— wakes up at 3:45 in the morning on a Tuesday in the offseason?” McVay says in his Rams office in Thousand Oaks. It’s dark and quiet. He has a cup of instant coffee, two bottled waters and two flavored seltzers. On the wall behind him is a sign that says URGENT ENJOYMENT.

“Cheesy as hell,” he says. “But a reminder for myself.”

A lot of coaches are up this early on a Tuesday in the offseason, of course. For sure the best ones, as if hours logged can force a fumble to bounce a certain way — or maybe reduce fumbles altogether. No matter how many conversations league executives have at hotel bars about the burnout rate of coaches, of why the stress and demands and the unsustainable nature of the job has likely led to the trend of younger hires, and no matter how many head coaches pledge to change this destructive way of life, after so many divorces, unhappy marriages and children essentially raised by a single parent, it remains irrevocably broken. Diminishing returns are acknowledged but aren’t an excuse. America doesn’t care. The game demands what it demands. McVay knows no other way, an obsessive grinder who studied obsessive grinders. He’s at heart a creative, the game a creative challenge.

Possibilities are endless, and he believes that he can find the answers, after all his dedication and curiosity, after all the coaching books and documentaries and podcasts and conversations and thought over the years. McVay also needs to believe. Coaches can’t control the games they’re paid to control, so the default is to try to control everything else, sociopathic neuroses layered upon relentless anxiety, driving themselves and everyone around them crazy. It would be hilarious if McVay didn’t have one life to live. Then on game day, he and other coaches preside over a series of mostly random events that profoundly impact their families and happiness. No wonder, as McVay puts it, “we’re all f—ed up.”

Sleep has always been a struggle for McVay, and his heroes have never needed much of it. He witnessed Gruden arriving at 3:30 a.m. He watched as Mike and Kyle Shanahan spent long days over months reinventing offense to utilize Robert Griffin III, then long days over a week to switch to a completely different style for Kirk Cousins. He’s gotten beers with Belichick, and is floored by his staggering football knowledge attained by singular devotion and ethic. The templates from those men reinforce McVay’s own cadences and obsession and “competitive stamina,” he says. The more he learns about football, the more he has to learn.

McVay’s lack of sleep is one of the main topics of discussion with his father, who not only is worried about his son but also believes that he will make better decisions if fully rested. “It’s not a badge of courage for you to get 3-4 hours,” Tim once told Sean. “For you to be at your best, you have to prioritize sleep.”

At first, Sean was dismissive. “I don’t need that much. I wake up at 2:30 and I’m just laying there. Why should I just lay there?”

But Sean tried to adjust. He listened to a podcast about banking sleep over the course of the week, averaging out to seven hours a night. On Monday through Thursday during the season, the goal is four to six hours. But sometimes he’s up at 2:30 anyway, no alarm, “mind racing,” and so he goes to the office. On Fridays and Saturdays, he aims for eight hours to be rested and sharp on game day. After games, he’s either too keyed up or too pissed off — and not just after losses — to turn off his brain.

Then he starts the week all over again, watching film, not just to check a box but to reach that magical realm of focus when time seems suspended and background noise all but disappears. It sometimes takes a while. McVay has always been envious of Belichick and Shanahan, “cyborgs” who can concentrate for hours, he says. McVay can’t. People are always interrupting him. His phone is always buzzing; answering texts and emails only creates more texts and emails. He has to clear his mind and then reset. He used to disappear to the sauna, until he learned that his phone could withstand the heat. So now he hits the steam room, where phones don’t function well. Then he dives back into film study, helping him win 67% of his regular-season games and 70% of his playoff ones, a life that feels sustainable or not, depending on the day.

“I’m not going to burn out coaching,” McVay insists. “That’s not going to happen.”

Are his parents worried about him burning out?

“Yeah,” Tim says.

“Of course,” Cindy says.

SAME TOPIC BUT different day, Veronika overhears our conversation and smiles out of the side of her mouth, knowing where it’s headed. The costs in Sean’s life are also costs in her life, and even if she signed on for it, even if it’s brought blessings beyond belief, even if she graduated from George Mason with a degree in international business and earned a master’s in global management from Arizona State and now has her own career in real estate, McVay still feels guilty about it — and guilty about his competing desires, as if he’s cheating both his personal and professional lives if he attempts to find balance.

On this June evening, two days before their wedding, papers are scattered on the counter, detailing seating assignments and schedules for the reception. Yesterday they signed their marriage license.

“Not having second thoughts yet?” Sean asks her.

“Too late now,” she says.

“When did you first realize I’m crazy?” he asks during a different quiet moment.

“First date,” she says.

They got serious in 2016, when they were both in Washington. After the Rams hired McVay, his buddies begged him to stay single for the first year. They had a plan: All of them would share a home in the hills and hunt around town as a pack, a football Entourage. It was a staggering misread of McVay’s ambition. He wanted to be a great coach, only a great coach. Veronika was essential to that plan. McVay asked her to move to L.A. with him, the unofficial-official beginning of their marriage. She not only helped enrich his life but also simplified it. In Washington, McVay was a prolific but unhappy dater. She provided not total balance, because that’s impossible in the NFL, but “a bit more balance,” McVay says.

Veronika didn’t care about football — when he introduced her to various team owners at a league party, she was unfazed — but she did care about its role in Sean’s life. Whether the Rams won or lost didn’t affect her soul, her sense of self, her essence, like it did for him. She is patient and supportive — patiently supportive. Cindy once told her that she would have been a better mother to Sean if he had handled games the way Veronika does, with steady calm. McVay might not be happy all the time in this job, or even a lot of it, but he’s happier with Veronika and has had his best professional years since they fell in love.

“Not by coincidence,” he says.

Veronika was with Sean in Cabo San Lucas in January 2021 when he at his darkest, so down as to be broken. The Rams had just lost to the Packers in the divisional round. He had hit a wall with Goff, and knew he needed to move on from him, but didn’t know how — not with the four-year, $134 million extension that Goff had signed a little over a year earlier, a deal McVay had championed.

Smart opposing coaches, especially in New England, were as impressed with how McVay managed to solve for Goff’s limits as they were confused by the contract the quarterback received. Everything McVay wanted to be seemed to be slipping away, and he was not blameless. He later fired a few staffers he had invested in, and even if he felt it was the right decision, he still felt guilty. Then, McVay’s mood perked up: He found out that Stafford was vacationing at the same resort — and that he wanted out of Detroit.

They met for drinks poolside, talking football. A bond forged over sun and booze. McVay returned to his hotel and, “a few tequilas in,” he says now, hopped on a FaceTime with Rams brass, unleashing a plea that’s now legendary around the team’s office. “Here’s the f—ing deal, OK? We can sit here and exist, and be OK winning nine to 11 games, and losing in the f—ing divisional round and feel like, ‘Oh, everything’s OK.’ Or, we could let our motherf—ing nuts hang, and go trade for this f—ing quarterback, and give ourselves a chance to go win a f—ing world championship. You ready to f—ing do this or what?”

Laughs followed, not pushback. Stafford was an obvious upgrade. And within days, he was a Ram. That acquisition, coupled with the Rams’ general indifference to high draft picks, prompted them to be labeled as the NFL’s first superteam since John McVay’s 1994 49ers — all-in for one year, championship or nothing. Sean chafed at the label but not the stakes. The Rams started 7-1, then lost all three games in November, just the second time in McVay’s career that he had lost three straight. Throws that Stafford had hit in his sleep in September and October suddenly became pick-sixes. McVay likes to deploy a hurry-up attack when his offense struggles, but injuries to receivers and new players in new positions essentially killed that option. McVay started down a familiar dark path.

“It was a f—ing joke how pissed and how — I can’t even articulate. The disgust. The sickness. The constant pit in your gut. You have to fight what you’re feeling. You have to get up and lead and really authentically be able to demonstrate the strength that I think is a responsibility and necessity for a good leader — while not minimizing that I’m a human being too, and I f—ing hate this s—.”

McVay didn’t want his mood to affect the entire building, so he often retreated to his home office. It created a void. The team didn’t crack — cornerback Jalen Ramsey’s leadership helped — but it was in danger of it. It needed more of McVay at a time when he was barely hanging on. The only coach who could tell this to McVay was Raheem Morris, one of his best friends since their Washington days.

Morris is a ruthless competitor but knows that there’s something bigger than football at stake, which McVay intellectually understands but often struggles to practice. Years ago, McVay’s Rams beat the Falcons, where Morris was an assistant, and Cindy and Tim hosted a postgame party at their Atlanta house. Morris arrived with his family, smiling and gracious. Cindy later asked Sean whether he would have shown up if the roles were reversed. “Sure,” he said. Then he fessed up. “No.”

One day in November, Morris asked McVay, “You all right?”

Both men knew the answer. Morris reminded McVay that he gets lost inside his own head, alienating himself.

“Think anybody else knows?” McVay asked.

“Absolutely,” Morris said.

“Sometimes people need you,” Morris told McVay. “Sometimes when your voice is around, you give people comfort. Make them feel better. You make them want to go play.”

McVay had forgotten something essential about himself, something that is as responsible for his success as his ambition, his ethic and near photographic memory, the way he imagines formations and anticipates action and is able to simplify those ideas into teachable concepts: He’s magnetic. People like talking to him and enjoy his presence, at least when he’s at his best, and they like how he can laugh at himself, especially after he screws up. It not only gives the rest of the team permission to admit mistakes, but it also reminds everyone that they’re all imperfect and in it together.

McVay had grown accustomed to people quieting when he entered a room, aware and wary of the boss. He reminded himself that he has always told the team that “it doesn’t have to be miserable in the pursuit of greatness,” and resolved to embody it, making himself more available. He watched videos of Tom Brady’s postgame news conferences after losses in 2020, looking for clues into the positive mindset required to rally and win it all.

And on the Monday before the three-game skid ended, McVay met alone with Stafford. An impromptu meeting turned into a two-hour session. “It was basically like we were each other’s counselor,” McVay says. The most hyped union in the offseason had reached an impasse. They were true friends — McVay not only went to Stafford’s house for Easter but even brought his parents — but both felt insecure, and were internalizing the pressure, almost afraid to acknowledge its existence.

“This isn’t too much,” McVay told Stafford. “But it’s a f—ing lot.”

Stafford spoke, and as he did, McVay realized that he had lost sight of an important tenet as a playcaller: to simplify the quarterback’s job. Stafford’s presence had given McVay a passer whose talent was equal to the coach’s play innovation, but both men felt enough outside pressure, and the constant throwing on offense added to it. McVay promised Stafford that they’d run the ball more, then added: “Who gives a f— what everyone else says? Let’s enjoy it, let’s compete to the best of our ability, let the chips fall where they may, but nobody is going to get more criticism and scrutiny than we are.”

“It was as honest and as good a conversation as I’ve had with a coach or teammate ever in my football career,” Stafford says now.

Sean McVay sits for a portrait in his LA home. Shayan Asgharnia for ESPN
L.A. won nine of its final 10 games, including two playoff fourth-quarter rallies by Stafford against the Bucs and 49ers. Late in the divisional-round game against the Bucs, the Rams had blown a 27-3 lead in less than a half and took over tied with 42 seconds left. It looked dire, a repeat of the Patriots-Falcons Super Bowl. But McVay knew from study that Bucs defensive coordinator Todd Bowles would give him one Cover 0 during hurry-up drives. Sure enough, on second down, Bowles played to tendency and called a blitz. McVay had a deep route to Kupp called, and Stafford hit him for 44 yards to set up the winning field goal and send Tom Brady into a monthlong retirement — one of the best answers of McVay’s career.

In the Super Bowl, injuries to Odell Beckham Jr. and two of the Rams’ tight ends kept the game closer than McVay expected. Offensively it was down to Stafford and Kupp, and McVay scheming of ways to get Kupp open with the entire football-viewing world knowing that the ball was headed his way, which amazed coaches around the league. All of them delivered, for the third straight time. And on Cincinnati’s fourth-and-1 with 43 seconds left, Rams up three, McVay crouched over, saw a running back split wide — a giveaway that it was a pass. McVay dropped his eyes and thought, Oh my god. “Aaron Donald is going to make a play,” he said over his headset. After Donald forced an incompletion, McVay knelt and hugged Stafford, neck to neck. The quarterback tapped the coach’s leg a few times, triggering something deep in McVay. He finally let go. McVay doesn’t cry often, but when he does, the tears arrive fast. His eyes dampened almost instantly, reddening his face.

After the postgame interviews and before the team party, McVay sat alone in his stadium office, showered and in a suit, with the Lombardi trophy and a stiff headache, trying to decompress. His head pounds after most games, his focus so intense that it almost seizes him.

Morris, suffering a headache of his own, stopped by. Stafford and Kupp arrived, both still in partial uniform. Other players and staffers filtered in, followed by Stan and Josh Kroenke. The group posed for a photo, index fingers at the sky. McVay was almost prouder of how he — and the team — survived November than the Super Bowl win, conquering his worse impulses.

A few months later, McVay spoke to the business side of the Rams’ building. “Everybody’s talking about, ‘Hey, superteams never work.’ F— you, motherf—er! It f—ing worked!”

Just barely. And now it has to work again.

AT 4:45 ON a dark spring morning, McVay is cleaning leaves. He has a plant near the foyer of his house, and the combination of sun and breeze from the door opening and closing causes the plant to shed. The pile on the floor triggers his compulsion. He sweeps them, then walks outside and into his Aston Martin SUV, trying to figure out something on the dashboard before giving up.

“I can’t keep up with all this technology,” he says.

He steers out of his neighborhood and onto the freeway as the sky lightens.

“Ah, man,” he says, staring ahead.

The Super Bowl gave McVay a measure of peace, of accomplishment, of license to see whether there are ways to make the job more sustainable — or at least feel more sustainable. Like many post-pandemic setups, his home office has turned into his primary one. It has all of his binders and material, with screens both on his desk and mounted on the wall. His facility office is windowless and the shelves are empty. There’s no trace that anyone works there, except for his stationery, which reads COACH McVAY.

At home, he can watch film, walk outside and absorb some sun, pop in and out of conversation with Veronika or houseguests, before returning to the clicker. He’s trying to learn the lessons from last year: to be more present at the office but also have a chance of a life. He wants the same for his staff. This spring, McVay all but ordered assistants to leave the building in the early afternoon, forcing family time. “I don’t want the guys to be there,” he says. “We work too hard during the season.”

As we enter the facility, McVay subtly changes. He turns on film of all of the team’s screen passes, ready to dig in. Something primal kicks in, the fierce bottom line of his work. Are the Rams good enough to repeat? Is he good enough?

“Last year has zero to do with this year,” he says.

After the Super Bowl, McVay glanced at the Amazon opportunity because of the money. But he didn’t actually take any meetings. There “was no way” he was going to leave coaching. Why? “The people,” he says. He’s got Stafford, Kupp and Donald in their primes. He loves his staff and appreciates general manager Les Snead and COO Kevin Demoff, even when all of them want to kill one another. He wonders what life would be like on the other side, discussing the game rather than coaching it, with more sleep and income, with children, supporting his family after Veronika spent so many years supporting him.

Sometimes when he discusses it, he sounds like he’s testing out how it sounds, not to us, but to himself. Could he live without coaching? Could he live with himself without coaching? He wonders whether it might be the right time to retire when Stafford walks away, whenever that is. But then he circles back to that thing inside him he can’t live without. He has few hobbies or outlets. He reads mostly coaching or leadership books. He sometimes swims in his pool — at 3:30 a.m. Anchoring a broadcast crew, even if collegial, isn’t the same thing as leading a football team. Rams execs have joked with him that if he had to broadcast a blowout, or a game between two bad teams, he’d hate the job, and hate himself for taking it, so much that he would kill every player and decision, burning every bridge, an act of public self-sabotage to reverse-engineer a return to the sideline, where he belongs.

“There are times I say to myself, what the f— am I thinking? Would I have done it differently?” he says a little later. “Yeah, probably. But those are temporary feelings. I wouldn’t know what to do if I had too much time on my hands.”

The pain of last November comes up again. “You can only really replicate that misery when you’re in that moment. Working through all that …” He shakes his head. Then he smiles.

“But I need that, too. There’s a part of me that, you love your f—ing misery.”

He laughs at himself, not because it’s funny but because he knows it’s futile, pointless to fight. Veronika rolls her eyes whenever he talks about broadcasting. “You’re a coach,” she says. Of course, if he stays in coaching, it will mean the inevitable losing season. If you ask McVay what will happen if the Rams go 4-13, he scoffs, as if you mentioned something cosmically inconceivable. But when you ask his parents:

“That’s when announcing sounds really good,” Cindy says.

THAT AFTERNOON, McVay stands at a counter holding a folded piece of thin cardboard. It’s the playcalling sheet from the biggest game of his life, titled: Game #21 Bengals Super Bowl 2/13/22. The type is tiny. Plays are broken down by situation, down and distance and level of disaster, with one category called GBOT: Get Back on Track.

Along the bottom are handwritten reminders. “Notes to myself,” he says. “Nobody else sees this but me.”

See the game one play at a time

Trust Yourself & Everyone Around You

LMMAIOYP (Lord Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace)

Present & Still is Key

Patient & Joy

He hangs on joy for a moment. “I actually did a pretty good job of that,” he says.

He looks it over, a document that explains so much about who he is and wanted to be, the pinnacle of something, worthy of preservation. The card’s ink is smeared, its edges wrinkled, vaguely worn and damaged. I suggest that he should frame it before it’s too late.

“Ha,” McVay says.

Nope, not now. He wants it handy, needs it handy, should the Rams face the Bengals this season. “For reference,” he says as he carries it back to his office. Maybe it’s wise, or tragic, but most of all, it’s inevitable.

Later that night, just past 9 p.m., McVay looks at his watch. He likes to stay on East Coast time, so right now his body clock is past midnight and into tomorrow. Veronika was downstairs with us earlier, snuggling with Sean on the couch as they drank red wine and watched playoff basketball. But the game ended, and she’s retired for the night. It’s quiet and still. McVay is tired, not literally but existentially. He checks his phone one last time for the evening, making sure there’s no Ukraine news or work drama.

A task still hangs over him: the 208 clips of dropback install.

He walks behind the bar, inserts a stopper into the wine bottle and stands for a moment, wondering what to do. Straight ahead is his office; to the right are stairs to the bedroom.

He climbs to the second floor, with the answers he needs for tonight.

well, that’s a shame.

URL = Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, ending right to abortion upheld for decades : NPR

Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, ending right to abortion upheld for decades

June 24, 202210:43 AM ET

The U.S. Supreme Court officially reversed Roe v. Wade on Friday, declaring that the constitutional right to abortion upheld for nearly a half century, no longer exists.

Writing for the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the 1973 Roe ruling and repeated subsequent high court decisions reaffirming Roe “must be overruled” because they were “egregiously wrong,” the arguments “exceptionally weak” and so “damaging” that they amounted to “an abuse of judicial authority.”

The decision, most of which was leaked in early May, means that abortion rights will be rolled back in nearly half of the states immediately, with more restrictions likely to follow. For all practical purposes, abortion will not be available in large swaths of the country. The decision may well mean too that the court itself, as well as the abortion question, will become a focal point in the upcoming fall elections and in the fall and thereafter.

Joining the Alito opinion were Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by the first President Bush, and the three Trump appointees — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Chief Justice Roberts, appointed by President George W. Bush, concurred in the judgment only, and would have limited the decision to upholding the Mississippi law at issue in the case, which banned abortions after 15 weeks.

Dissenting were Justices Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Clinton, and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, appointed by President Obama.

“With sorrow — for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection — we dissent,” they wrote.

Alito’s opinion is a tour de force of the various criticisms of Roe that have long existed in academia

Indeed, the 78-page opinion, which has a 30-page appendix, seemingly leaves no authority uncited as support for the proposition that there is no inherent right to privacy or personal autonomy in various provisions of the Constitution — and similarly, no evidence that peoples’ reliance on the court’s abortion precedents over the past half century should matter.

Alito pointed for instance, to Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that upheld the central holding of Roe and was written by Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter, all Republican appointees to the court. Alito pointed to language in the Casey opinion that he said “conceded” reliance interests were not really implicated because contraception could prevent almost all unplanned pregnancies.

In fact, though, that 1992 opinion went on to dismiss that very argument as “unrealistic,” because it “refuse to face the fact” that for decades “people have organized intimate relationships and made choices … in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.” Not exactly the concession that Alito described.

It is not unusual for justices to cherry pick quotes but not so out of context and not from former colleagues who are still alive and privately, not amused at all.

In the end, though, Alito’s opinion has a larger objective, perhaps multiple objectives.

Writing for the majority, he said forthrightly that abortion is a matter to be decided by states and the voters in the states. “We hold,” he wrote, that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.” As to what standard the courts should apply in the event that a state regulation is challenged, Alito said any state regulation of abortion is presumptively valid and “must be sustained if there is a rational basis on which the legislature could have thought” it was serving “legitimate state interests,” including “respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development.” In addition, he noted, states are entitled to regulate abortion to eliminate “gruesome and barbaric” medical procedures; to “preserve the integrity of the medical profession”; and to prevent discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or disability, including barring abortion in cases of fetal abnormality.

Ultimately, the translation of all that is that states appear to be completely free to ban abortions for any reason.

Near the end of the opinion, Alito sought to allay fears about the wide-ranging nature of his opinion. “To ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion. ”

But in his concurrent opinion, Justice Thomas said the legal rationale for Friday’s decision could be applied to overturn other major cases, including those that legalized gay marriage.

“For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” he wrote. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous.'”

The court’s liberals noted that Thomas’s language cast doubts on Alito’s majority opinion that said the court’s decision did not mean that cases like Obergefell would be affected.

“The first problem with the majority’s account comes from Justice Thomas’s concurrence—which makes clear he is not with the program,” they wrote. “In saying that nothing in today’s opinion casts doubt on non-abortion precedents, Justice Thomas explains, he means only that they are not at issue in this very case.”

The next steps on abortion across the country would play out in a variety of ways, almost all of them resulting in abortion bans.

Several states — among them Mississippi, North Carolina, and Wisconsin — still have decades-old abortion bans on their books; with Roe overturned, those states could revert to a pre-Roe environment. Officials in such states could seek to enforce old laws, or ask the courts to reinstate them. For example, a Michigan law dating back to 1931 would make abortion a felony. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, has been working to try to block that law.

A cascade of newly active state laws

Another path to banning abortion involves “trigger bans,” newer laws pushed through by anti-abortion rights legislators in many states in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s action. Some 15 states – in the South, West and Midwest – have such laws in place, according to CRR and Guttmacher, but they fall into different categories.

Some states will act quickly to ban abortion. According to a new analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, South Dakota, Kentucky and Louisiana have laws in place that lawmakers designed explicitly to take effect immediately upon the fall of the Roe precedent. Idaho, Tennessee, and Texas – where most abortions are already illegal after about six weeks of pregnancy – have similar laws, which would take effect after 30 days. Guttmacher says seven other “trigger ban” states have laws that would require state officials such as governors or attorneys general to take action to implement them.

Sue Liebel, state policy director with the anti-abortion rights group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said she expects officials in many of those Republican-controlled states to take swift action to do so.

“We have been talking to all of those about acting immediately,” Liebel told NPR. “So when that happens, let’s be ready. How do you get that back into play?”

In recent years, many states also have passed gestational bans prohibiting abortion at various stages of pregnancy. Courts have blocked many of those laws in response to legal challenges, including laws in Georgia, Ohio, and Idaho that ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Now those laws may take effect immediately. So too, could a law recently enacted in Oklahoma, that makes performing abortion a felony punishable by time in prison.

“It will be a tremendous change in an incredibly short period of time,” said Julie Rikelman, senior director of litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights. Rikelman argued the Center’s challenge to Mississippi’s abortion ban at Supreme Court this term.

A host of other restrictions could limit where, by whom, and under what conditions abortion can be provided. Some examples include laws requiring parental notification or consent for abortions involving patients who are minors; and other health regulations for doctors and clinics that many medical groups say are unnecessary, expensive, and difficult to comply with.

Finally, Liebel said some governors may consider calling special sessions to pass new legislation in response to Friday’s ruling.

More legal uncertainty

Legal experts say the court’s decision will pose new questions for other courts to deal with – questions about how to apply the specific language of the final ruling to individual state laws.

If Roe is indeed overturned or substantially rolled back, Rikelman, the Center for Reproductive rights attorney, predicts “legal chaos” in states across the country in the immediate aftermath of the decision.

“I think what we will see is far more litigation in the federal courts – not less litigation,” Rikelman said.

Some states such as Texas and Oklahoma have multiple abortion restrictions on the books, raising potential questions about which ones would be valid. Those laws each include different provisions and carry different penalties, adding to the potential confusion and prompting additional litigation in state and federal courts.

Liebel, with SBA Pro-Life America, acknowledged that more legal battles are likely.

“That’s gonna take us back, frankly, to where we always have been. Each side tries to put their big toe right on that line and push the envelope,” Liebel said.

Battles in state courts are also likely. Some state constitutions may offer protections for abortion rights notwithstanding the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. In Florida, for example, the American Civil Liberties Union and other reproductive rights groups are challenging a 15-week abortion ban modeled on Mississippi’s law, on the grounds that it violates privacy rights protections guaranteed in Florida’s state constitution.

Even without overturning Roe, Rikelman points to the Texas law known as S.B. 8, which took effect in September. The law, which has spawned several copycat proposals in other states, including Oklahoma, relies on individuals filing civil lawsuits to enforce an abortion ban.

Interstate enforcement battles

Abortion bans in restrictive states will likely bleed over to states that protect abortion rights as well, Rikelman said. She notes that some state lawmakers are trying to prohibit people in other states from providing abortions to their residents.

“What we are seeing already are states and state legislators impacting even people’s ability to access abortion in places where it would remain legal,” she said.

For example, an omnibus abortion law passed by a Republican supermajority in Kentucky earlier this year includes a host of new requirements for dispensing medication abortion pills, and a provision for extraditing people from other states who illegally provide abortion pills to Kentuckians. It’s unclear how enforceable those types of laws would be.

Meanwhile, some states are trying to expand access to abortion in preparation for more patients traveling from restrictive states for procedures. Connecticut lawmakers passed legislation this year designed to protect abortion providers from out-of-state lawsuits.

“This just raises a whole host of issues,” Rikelman said. “All of those different disputes will have to be worked out in the courts” including, potentially, in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Even as abortions have now become far more restricted overall, the Guttmacher Institute reports that the long-term decline in abortions has reversed. In 2020, there were 930,160 abortions in the U.S., an increase of 8 percent more abortions than in 2017. The Institute also said that at the same time, fewer people were getting pregnant

Here are just a few excerpts.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Rams released inside linebacker Travin Howard, who had some big moments in the latter part of the season/postseason. My understanding is that the move was not related to any injury or off-field detail, and the team could very well bring Howard back at a number even lower than his current original-round tender ($2.54 million) if he clears waivers. With Aaron Donald’s restructured contract in place as well as Kupp’s, the Rams are squeezing their finances where they can.

A highlight of offensive coordinator Liam Coen’s press conference Wednesday came when he was describing the way veteran linebacker Bobby Wagner moves. Coen, who especially in installation periods takes a “back-to-front” view of the offense so he can try to see the field the way Stafford sees it, said of Wagner (who is usually directly opposite Stafford): “He’s such a slow, patient mover,” said Coen, who clarified — he’s not saying that Wagner lacks speed; he’s saying that the game moves slow for Wagner because of his high football IQ and elimination of wasted movements. Coen even demonstrated, crunching up his torso and swaying from side to side.

“The way he moves, he’s just so quiet and still in his movements. Great communicator. Does all the right things, smiling all the time in the building. Such a great pro.”

Interior defensive linemen Bobby Brown Jr. and Marquise Copeland appear to have taken a step forward this spring, in both OTAs and in minicamp.

There was a whole lot more, but you get the flavor with these three, I think.

i found this particular quote interesting.

Interior defensive linemen Bobby Brown Jr. and Marquise Copeland appear to have taken a step forward this spring, in both OTAs and in minicamp.

i have high hopes for bobby brown iii.  this guy has all the ability in the world.  no joke.  but can he translate it onto the football field?  could be a huge difference maker for this defense.  brown and the edge rusher opposite to floyd is what i’ll be watching for most.

Kyren Williams

Height: 5-9, Weight: 194

Nice fit for one of the draft’s most complete runners. Not a speedster by any stretch. But built low to the ground with quick feet and plus contact balance. Useful receiver out of the backfield.

from: https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/draft/draft-tracker/

…

KYREN WILLIAMS | Notre Dame 5092 | 194 lbs. | rSO. St. Louis, Mo. (St. John Vianney)
8/26/2000 (age 21.67) #23

BACKGROUND: Kyren Williams, who is one of three children, grew up in the St. Louis area and started playing flag football in first grade and tackle football in third grade. After attending a public middle school, he enrolled at St. John Vianney High, an all-boys Catholic school in Kirkwood, Mo., and the alma mater of former NFL quarterback Trent Green. Despite missing part of his sophomore season with a hip pointer, Williams led the team to the 2016 state championship, mostly as a slot receiver. He moved to more of a backfield role as a junior and finished with 922 rushing yards, 774 receiving yards and 34 total touchdowns, adding 37 tackles, 3.0 sacks and four interceptions on defense as a safety and linebacker. Williams led Vianney to the 2018 Class 5 state title as a senior (the school’s second in three years), rushing for a state championship game-record 286 yards. He rushed for 2,035 yards as a senior, recorded 55 catches for 725 yards and scored 40 total touchdown, adding 92 tackles, 8.0 tackles for loss, 5.0 sacks and eight interceptions on defense. He also had a passing touchdown as he earned 2018 Class 5 offensive player of
the year honors. Williams finished his career with several school records, including career touchdowns (112), receptions (204), receiving yards (2,696) and interceptions (13). He finished second in school history in career rushing yards (3,947) and career total yards (6,643). A four-star recruit out of high school, Williams was the No. 24 running back in the 2019 recruiting class and the No. 6 recruit in the state of Missouri (Alabama WR
Jameson Williams was No. 1). Kyren Williams started to receive scholarship offers as a sophomore and narrowed down his final three to Michigan, Missouri and Notre
Dame. Williams always gravitated toward the Irish and voluntarily took extra classes at St. Louis Community College prior to his senior year of high school so he could enroll early in South Bend in January 2019. His father (Larry) played linebacker at Northern Illinois. His uncle (James Gregory) was a nose tackle at Alabama and was a member of the 1992 national championship team. His uncle (Darren Holmes) was a defensive lineman at Kansas State in the early 1990s. His grandfather (Kenneth Gregory) was a defensive back at Missouri (1970-73). His younger sister (Grace) is a freshman lacrosse player at Missouri Western. Williams elected to skip his final two seasons of eligibility and enter the 2022 NFL Draft. He also opted out of Notre Dame’s 2021 bowl game.

YEAR (GP/GS) CAR YDS AVG TD REC YDS AVG TD NOTES
2019: (4/0) 4 26 6.5 0 1 3 3.0 0 Redshirted
2020: (12/12) 211 1,125 5.3 13 35 313 8.9 1 Freshman All-American; Second Team All-ACC; ACC Rookie of the Year; Led team in rushing
2021: (12/12) 204 1,002 4.9 14 42 359 8.5 3 Led team in rushing; Team captain
Total: (28/24) 419 2,153 5.1 27 78 675 8.7 4
HT WT ARM HAND WING 40-YD 20-YD 10-YD VJ BJ SS 3C BP
COMBINE 5092 194 28 5/8 9 69 7/8 4.65 2.69 1.57 32 9’8” – – – (no shuttles or bench press – choice)
PRO DAY 5091 199 28 3/8 8 3/4 70 1/8 4.66 2.58 1.62 – – 4.33 7.07 – (stood on Combine jumps; no bench)

STRENGTHS: Short, compact body type … runs low to the ground with natural balance to pinball off contact … takes quick, controlled steps to clear expiring holes and
cut away from trouble … stays patient behind his blocks as an inside runner … trusts his eyes to navigate through traffic … not a forceful runner, but will pump his legs
through contact and step out of tackle attempts … quick, reliable hands as a pass catcher to snatch the football in stride (42 catches and only one drop in 2021) … has the quick feet to beat press from the slot or separate mid-route … gutsy in blitz pickup, squaring and striking defenders … averaged 10.8 yards as the featured punt returner in 2021 (14/151/0) … goal-oriented individual with a long list of references ready to glow about his character (voted a team captain as a sophomore) … durable runner with back-to-back 1,000-yard rushing seasons and no major injuries while averaging 20.5 offensive touches per game the past two seasons.

WEAKNESSES: Below average long-speed and won’t out-run NFL defensive backs … disappointing testing results at the NFL Combine … stretch runs to the perimeter
will be tougher in the NFL … doesn’t have push-the-pile power as an inside runner … lacks shifty creativity in the open field … tends to lose momentum out of his cuts … too easily tripped up by ankle tackles … his ball security must improve, with eight fumbles over the past two seasons … willing in pass protection, but gave up 27 pressures over the past two seasons because of his lack of size and consistent technique.

SUMMARY: Williams earned the starting role the past two seasons in offensive coordinator Tommy Rees’ zone-based scheme. He was a slot receiver before he was a running back in high school and proved himself as an all-purpose weapon for the Irish (was the only FBS player in 2021 to surpass 1,000 yards rushing, 350 yards receiving and 100 yards as a return man). Williams is highly effective on counters and cutbacks with the plant-and-go quickness to make strong cuts in any direction. He has limited inside power, but is a problem-solving runner thanks to his sharp footwork and blend of patience and decisiveness. Overall, Williams is an average athlete and ideally projects as more of a complimentary back in the NFL, but he is an elite competitor with the darting quickness and pass-catching skills to be a third-down weapon. He shows some similarities to New England Patriots RB James White.

GRADE: 4th-5th Round

https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs/story/7-women-scientists-whose-discoveries-were-credited-to-men-1911896-2022-02-11

Day of Women and Girls in Science: 7 women scientists whose discoveries were credited to men
On the Day of Women and Girls in Science, here are 7 women scientists whose discoveries were credited to men.

History and science books are littered with mentions of ‘great’ men, many of whom were of course not that great. Incredible women who have created history (and science) have often been simply written out, many a time because some man was there to take the credit for her work.

And there are many such cases and these are only the ones that we know of and not completely lost to time which show that there have been ground-breaking discoveries and inventions made by women.

And this is all the more significant because are talking about periods of history where women definitely didn’t have equal education, forget about equal opportunities, especially in the field of science.

But there were many who were walking outside the boundaries drawn for them in their times and sadly lost out visibility through time because of men who not only took credit for their work casually but through mentions in journals, winning major awards, earning millions and being iconised in history.

All the while, the names of many women scientists and researchers have been either entirely wiped out from history or delegated to a footnote both in research papers and in the lens of history itself.

As we celebrate the Day of Women and Girls in Science, we are fully aware that even today, we haven’t reached a space where women in STEM get equal opportunities and equal pay for their work.

Here are 7 women scientists whose discoveries were credited to men:

1. Rosalind Franklin: The Double Helix

Cambridge University scientists James D Watson and Francis HC Crick are credited for discovering the double helix strand structure of the DNA which pushed forward our understanding of the human DNA to a great extent.

However, it was British chemist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin who produced the one ground-breaking image ‘Photo 51’ while she was engaged in this research at Kings’s College, London, in 1951 when she produced a ground-breaking image.

One of her colleagues showed the image to the male scientist duo without telling Franklin. It took Franklin a year more to fully interpret and describe the double helix structure.

Two years later, Watson and Crick published their findings in 1953. Franklin was published in the same journal but in later pages which gave people the idea that her work supported that of the other two.

A year later, Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer and four years later, Watson and Crick picked up the Nobel Prize in 1958 for the double helix discovery.

Apart from this work, she unravelled the structure and porosity of coal for her PhD thesis, which led the British to develop better gas masks during WWII.

Also, her later work on RNA and viruses supported Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Aaron Klug’s work of creating 3D images of viruses.

2. Eunice Foote: The greenhouse effect

British scientist John Tyndall is most often credited for discovering the greenhouse effect — the gradual warming of Earth’s atmosphere which is a foundational discovery in the field of climate science.

However, it was Eunice Foote, a pioneering American scientist and a women’s rights activists who first theorised and demonstrated the greenhouse effect.

She conducted a series of experiments in the 1950s where filled glass cylinders with different gases and kept them in the sun to measure how the temperature changes differed.

Eunice Foote found that the sun’s rays were warmer when passing through moist air rather than dry, and warmest when passing through carbon dioxide than any other gas.

She did publish her findings in the American Journal of Science in 1857 but she was not even allowed to present her research at a scientific conference and had to ask a male colleague to do it.

Though her work was published three years before Tyndall, it is the male scientist that most people remember for discovering the greenhouse effect.

3. Lise Meitner: Nuclear Fission

Nuclear fission — the ability to split atoms — was a ground-breaking development that led to the atomic bomb and nuclear reactors.

It was legendary physicist Max Plank’s students, Austrian and Swedish physicist Lise Meitner who suggested the idea of bombarding uranium atoms with neutrons in order to learn more about uranium decay to her colleagues Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman.

Meitner was also the first German woman who had a professorship at a German university. Nevertheless, she was Jewish and living in Berlin in 1938. To escape the Nazis, she had to leave her research behind and escape to Stockholm. Her colleagues continued the research and got some unexpected results.

Lise Meitner then partnered with Otto Frisch, an Austrian-born British physicist who was in Sweden at the time. Together, they named what Hanh and Strassman has discovered — fission.

In 1945, Hahn received the Nobel Prize for the heavy nuclei fission discovery and Meitner was not even mentioned. She went on to receive 49 Nobel Prize nominations for Physics and Chemistry but never won.

In 1966, the US awarded her the Enrico Fermi Award alongside Hahn and Strassman for her contributions to nuclear fission. She died two years later.

4. Hedy Lamarr: Wireless communication

Austrian-born Hollywood actor Hedy Lamarr is the brain behind wireless communication.

The silver screen star in the Golden Age of Hollywood had worked closely with George Antheil during WWII to discover ‘frequency hopping’ so that they could prevent the bugging of military radios. They created a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes.

The US Navy ignored her patent and later used her work to develop several new technologies and weapons systems. He work is the basis for Wi-Fi, CDMA, and Bluetooth technology.

Later on, her patent was rediscovered by a researchers and Lamarr finally won the Electronic Frontier Foundation Award. Shortly after, she died in 2000.

5. Lady Ada Lovelace: Computer programming

Lord Byron’s daughter, Lady Ada Lovelace wrote the instructions for the world’s first ever computer programme while collaborating with mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage in 1843 in the creation of the analytical engine — a precursor to the computer.

Her extensive notes decided how Babbage’s machine could be fed data in order to solve complicated math problems or even compose music.

But since it was Babbage who created the actual engine, Ada Lovelace’s contributions are often obscured by debate.

6. Alice Ball: Leprosy cure

Hansen’s disease or leprosy, a stigmatised bacterial infection, was quite a danger to the healthcare system since its first mention in an Egyptian papyrus from around 1550 BC.

Contagious patients were usually isolated and left to die. But 23-year-old chemist Alice Ball was trying to find a cure while working at the Kalihi hospital in Hawaii.

She was trying to figure out how to inject chaulmoogra oil directly into the bloodstream since it didn’t mix with blood. Oil from the chaulmoogra tree was used in Chinese and Indian medicine and was said to alleviate symptoms.

In 1916, Ball, the first woman and the first black Chemistry professor at the University of Hawaii, figured out how to turn the oil into fatty acids and ethyl esters that would make the medicine injectable.

However, just months later, she died from a lab accident complications. Arthur Dean, teh head of her department, took over her study, and published a paper on the ‘Dean’s Method’.

Later, it was changed to ‘Ball’s Method’ after a colleague of hers spoke up and helped change the name.

7. Candace Pert: Neuroscience findings

While she was just a graduate student, Candace Pert discovered the receptor that allows opiates to lock into the human brain. This was a ground-breaking discovery in the field of neuroscience.

However, it was her professor, Dr Solomon Snyder who walked away with an award for it. When Pert wrote to him in protests, he responded with, “That’s how the game is played.”

The problem with Joe Rogan…and white boys

https://news.yahoo.com/problem-joe-rogan-white-boys-195152274.html

OPINION: A group of researchers, doctors and medical experts expressed concerns about the Spotify podcaster’s willingness to spread COVID misinformation. But no one cared when people raised those red flags about Rogan’s willingness to spread white supremacy.

If you’re reading this piece (and you are reading it, I can tell), you should understand what this piece will not be.

You are not about to read about how Joe Rogan is racist. You aren’t going to read how Rogan isn’t funny or even deserving of being considered the most influential podcaster of all time. However, I cannot, in good conscience, declare that I am unbiased when it comes to Spotify’s $100 million white man because of one fact:

I like Joe Rogan.

Perhaps “like” is too austere a word. I’ve paid to see him perform live. I have listened to hundreds of episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience and that number may well reach four digits if you include podcasters in the Rogan comedy universe such as Ari Shaffir, Tom Segura and Joey Diaz. I’ve heard Rogan speak about growing up in liberal San Francisco, living in Florida and spending his teenage years near Boston, which seems to have created a diverse set of interests, from mixed martial arts to Egyptology to dick jokes. My unvarnished opinion of Rogan is that he seems to be extremely interested in things and not just on a facile level. To be fair, I haven’t really listened to his podcast since he became exclusive to Spotify.

Still, there is no question that he created the most powerful platform in podcasting and may very well be the most powerful person in all of media. His estimated audience nearly triples Tucker Carlson’s, dwarfs all three networks’ late-night talk shows combined and, when Rogan’s YouTube views are included, his audience rivals The Oprah Winfrey Show at the height of its popularity. Plus, Rogan has cultivated a legion of young, mostly white, mostly male fans who have exalted him to a level that ranks somewhere between a guru and a renaissance man.

Rogan’s status as a counterculture icon of libertarian white boys who wear Ed Hardy shirts to jujitsu practice is why last week a “coalition of scientists, medical professionals, professors, and science communicators spanning a wide range of fields such as microbiology, immunology, epidemiology, and neuroscience” wrote an open letter to Spotify about Rogan’s “concerning history of broadcasting misinformation, particularly regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.” The letter didn’t ask Spotify to censor or ban Rogan. Instead, they wanted to express their concern over Spotify’s “failure to mitigate the damage it is causing.”

But even before he became the official COVID consultant to NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers and other prominent celebrities who weren’t worried about the coronavirus until they tested positive for the coronavirus, Rogan wasn’t shy about sharing his belief that young, healthy people like himself didn’t have anything to worry about when it came to COVID. Even though most people aren’t as healthy as Rogan, according to the data, he was statistically correct. More than 80 percent of the people who died from COVID were over 65, and many more had comorbidities. Then again, only 10 to 20 percent of smokers get lung cancer and most people survive gunshot wounds to the chest. But there’s a reason Rogan is so fearless about saying what doctors around the world will never tell you:

Joe Rogan is not a doctor.

In fact, Rogan has the same medical expertise as a monkey or a man who makes a living describing face kicks. Because Rogan’s job is to say things and a doctor’s primary role is to make sure each one of their patients doesn’t die, very few physicians would advise their patients to puff Newports while taking a slug to the torso. That’s why we rarely hear actual doctors say: “In my medical opinion, you’ll prolly be aight.”

Then Rogan got the ‘rona.

After he apparently cured himself with ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies and advanced medical care not available to people who don’t have the resources to move halfway across the country when they want “a little bit more freedom,” the comedian and UFC commentator would never be the same. He ranted about how ivermectin was not horse paste, blasted CNN and responded to public criticism by inviting COVID quacks on his show, most notably with Dr. Robert Malone, a scientist who has been banned from Twitter for spreading debunked medical misinformation during a global pandemic. During the Dec. 31 episode of Rogan’s show, Malone attributed the public’s acceptance of the world medical community’s consensus opinion to the debunked theory of “mass formation hypnosis.” Two weeks later, Rogan’s audience watched him chuck his usual evidence-based open-mindedness into the wind when his argument that COVID was worse than the vaccine was upended by peer-reviewed research in real time. Even as he read the words written by people who know stuff, Rogan could not accept the objective facts, much to the lament of some of his actual fans who clearly saw the cognitive dissonance.

For almost any other podcaster in America, this pattern of white wackadoodle doo would be laughable, but COVID broke Rogan. Part of his thing was that he was always open-minded, unbiased and would often verify the most innocuous fact. I’ve heard him dismantle the argument that the moon landing was fake, that vegans are healthier and that monkeys eating psychedelic mushrooms are what made the human brain evolve (Luckily, another Rogan guest explained that mushrooms clearly came from aliens).

“By allowing the propagation of false and societally harmful assertions, Spotify is enabling its hosted media to damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the credibility of data-driven guidance offered by medical professionals,” read the letter. “Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Rogan has repeatedly spread misleading and false claims on his podcast, provoking distrust in science and medicine. He has discouraged vaccination in young people and children, incorrectly claimed that mRNA vaccines are “gene therapy,” promoted off-label use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19 (contrary to FDA warnings), and spread a number of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.

“Mass-misinformation events of this scale have extraordinarily dangerous ramifications,” the letter continued. “This is not only a scientific or medical concern; it is a sociological issue of devastating proportions and Spotify is responsible for allowing this activity to thrive on its platform.”

When the physicians noted how they “bear the arduous weight of a pandemic that has stretched our medical systems to their limits,” in the letter, I knew exactly how they felt. When the researchers spelled out how they “face backlash and resistance,” a lot of Black people knew exactly how the experts felt because many of us have pointed out this problem for years.

I do not believe Joe Rogan is a white supremacist.

However, along with an interest in psychedelic drugs, recreational choking and chimpanzees, Rogan has always held a fascination with white supremacists. Long before a makeshift militia was indicted for attempting a coup on the American legislature, Rogan hosted a sit-down with Gavin McInnes, founder of a then-unknown group called the Proud Boys. He has welcomed people who dabble around the periphery of the alt-right, such as Peter Boghossian, who was one of the founders of the “grievance studies” hoax that evolved into the demonization of critical race theory. Right-wing troll Chuck C. Johnson has made it to the JRE along with Jordan Peterson who The Guardian notes, “attracts a heterogeneous audience that includes Christian conservatives, atheist libertarians, centrist pundits and neo-Nazis.” Rogan has also entertained the musings of far-right provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos and Stefan Molyneux, two of the handful of JRE guests who promote the long-debunked “race science” belief that people of African descent have lower IQs.

In all fairness, most episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience are not a three-hour discourse on the intellectual and social inferiority of people who don’t listen to Joe Rogan. Rogan sometimes openly disagrees with his guests and often pushes back against many of their ideologies. He believes that thoughts shouldn’t be censored, which is a valid point. But Rogan isn’t having a conversation with these guests in his living room over a joint and a cup of Bulletproof coffee; he’s asking them to speak into a microphone and talk, unfiltered, to tens of millions of people, many of whom are probably dumber than Rogan. And, while I don’t consider Rogan to be especially intelligent, he is probably more open-minded, more progressive and more informed than many of his listeners. Yet, his congenial, constantly curious personality sometimes makes it seem as if he agrees with what his guests are saying.

Moreover, in many cases, Rogan is just not intellectually equipped to challenge many of his guests’ ideas—especially ones that have formed debunked ideas based on faulty research, personal prejudice and anecdotal evidence. For instance, before he migrated to Spotify, Rogan was obsessed with the lawsuit accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-American descent. He repeatedly asserted that, by denying students who tested higher on standardized tests, the Ivy League institution’s admissions policy was “racist,” which was a good point…

Commentator Joe Rogan during the UFC 209 event at T-Mobile Arena on March 4, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)
Commentator Joe Rogan during the UFC 209 event at T-Mobile Arena on March 4, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)
But Rogan never mentioned the fact that research shows “wealthy students enjoy significant advantages throughout the college application process, and that income greatly impacts a student’s performance on standardized tests.” Rogan probably didn’t know that Asian Americans have the highest income in America. He didn’t acknowledge that most Black students attend underfunded, high-poverty schools that don’t have the same academic resources and curriculums. He didn’t consider the fact that standardized tests don’t accurately measure college success. He never spoke about the right of private institutions to curate a diverse academic environment because it more accurately reflects the real world. He never even quantified what he meant by “best students.” Rogan never even mentioned that the people who overcome disparities might be better students than those who graduate from the best schools, have the best test preparation money can afford and have been guided by people who know how to get into Ivy League schools. More importantly, he never considered that these disparities prove that white supremacy exists. However, there is a good reason for this:

Joe Rogan didn’t know what he was talking about.

He was just saying things. Into a microphone. To millions of people. Because he can. Because that’s what white boys get to do. As with COVID, Rogan and his minion of bearded free-thinkers who used-to-be-libertarian will never be substantially affected by the deadly virus of white supremacy. It is disingenuous at best and outright stupid at worst for someone as famous as Rogan to pretend that he is allowing his listeners to explore ideas without acknowledging the actions these positions can inspire and the harm these racist concepts cause in real life. Although Rogan may feel like the prototypical everyman, his guests know that millions of people are listening. Even if 1 percent of Rogan’s listeners are radicalized by a JRE guest, it means hundreds of thousands of people have been converted to a baseless philosophy thanks to Rogan’s pulpit.

It might be interesting for him to sit down with author Abigail Shrier to discuss The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters because Rogan or his children probably won’t be murdered by a transphobic bigot. It’s probably interesting to debate if white people are genetically more intelligent than sub-Saharan Africans because he doesn’t have to wonder if his kid’s teacher or his cousin’s employer saw that Rogan clip and reached a different conclusion. Far too many times, white boys will say something idiotic or harmful and wipe away the prospect of being held accountable by saying: “I’m just asking questions!” It’s a neat trick, really. It’s as if the entire universe is an Etch A Sketch for white boys to shake and erase the consequences of their actions. What could possibly be wrong with asking questions?

White boys are free to poke, prod and play around with the poisonous snake of white supremacy because they are born with natural immunity to its venom. They can publicly ruminate about how disenfranchised people should combat voter suppression with “personal responsibility.” They can sit on a Supreme Court and decide what women should do with their vaginas because they will never be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to full term. They can explain why Black people should just comply with police officers instead of running away because they have never been paralyzed by the fear of living in a country where they are hunted by people armed with guns and the authority of a legal system.

Perhaps the greatest example of this is Rogan’s fascination with tossing around the n-word as if it were a lit firecracker and not a piece of dynamite. For Rogan, it is not a piece of dynamite. It does not conjure up the memories of his grandparents with nooses around their necks or the wealth stolen from everyone who will ever be in his family or the non-memories of cousins whose existences were snuffed out before they began. Watch him giggle while kicking the history of a people’s pain around as if it is a game of cornhole or a theoretical hackysack.

And no, Joe Rogan is not a white supremacist.

Rogan is just a man who built a soapbox on which he allows white supremacists to stand. Of course, some people will claim that holding Rogan accountable for the stage he built is “cancel culture.” But do not weep, my child; if there’s anyone who can’t be canceled, it’s Joe Rogan and white boys like him. If all else fails, he’ll be forced to earn millions of dollars performing comedy around the country while hosting his podcast on his own, where his pre–Spotify audience was even larger. White boys will never lose their freedom to speak, even if they claim they are just asking questions and exposing ideas to the public.

“Public opinion is a sort of atmosphere, fresh, keen and full of sunlight…and this sunlight kills many of those noxious germs,” wrote Supreme Court justice and free speech advocate Louis Brandeis. “Selfishness, injustice, cruelty, tricks and jobs of all sorts shun the light; to expose them is to defeat them.” Brandeis—a “militant crusader for social justice”—wrote volumes of fearless opinions on every social, political and economic issue—except for one. Whenever a case involved Black people, Brandeis would become curiously silent. In 23 years on the Supreme Court, he did not write a single opinion on the “race question.”

Louis Brandeis was not a white supremacist.

Just because he repeatedly voted in support of segregation, voted in favor of the Klan and helped elect a white supremacist president doesn’t mean Brandeis was wrong. Speech should be free, sunlight is the best disinfectant for toxic ideas and Joe Rogan is a bright and shining star.

But Joe Rogan is not the sun.

Of course, I could be biased.

Remember, I like Joe Rogan.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/11/30/congress-asleep-switch-biden-continues-trump-era-ploy-privatize-medicare

Congress ‘Asleep at the Switch’ as Biden Continues Trump-Era Ploy to Privatize Medicare
More than 1,500 physicians warn that the experiment threatens “the future of Medicare as we know it.”

JAKE JOHNSON

November 30, 2021
A Trump-era pilot program that could result in the complete privatization of traditional Medicare in a matter of years is moving ahead under the Biden administration, a development that—despite its potentially massive implications for patients across the U.S.—has received scant attention from the national press or Congress.

On Tuesday, a group of physicians from around the nation will try to grab the notice of lawmakers, the Biden White House, and the public by traveling to Washington, D.C. and demanding that the Health and Human Services Department immediately stop the Medicare experiment, which is known as Direct Contracting (DC).

The doctors plan to present HHS with a petition signed by more than 1,500 physicians who believe the DC pilot threatens “the future of Medicare as we know it.”

Advocates have been publicly sounding the alarm about the DC program for months, warning that it could fully hand traditional Medicare over to Wall Street investors and other profit-seekers, resulting in higher costs for patients and lower-quality care.

“Everything we know about Direct Contracting should be cause to halt the pilot,” Diane Archer, the founder of Just Care USA and the senior adviser on Medicare at Social Security Works, told Common Dreams in an email. “Direct Contracting effectively eliminates the more cost-effective traditional Medicare program designed to ensure that people with complex health conditions get the care they need.”

“The Direct Contracting experiment is likely to be both a healthcare policy and a political nightmare,” Archer argued. “We already know from the Medicare Advantage experiment that Direct Contracting won’t save money, nor will it be able to show improved quality.”

But healthcare campaigners’ concerns have fallen largely on deaf ears in Congress and the Biden administration, which has allowed much of the pilot program to proceed as planned.

In a phone interview with Common Dreams ahead of Tuesday’s demonstration at HHS headquarters, Dr. Ed Weisbart—chair of the Missouri chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP)—said that Congress is largely “asleep at the switch” as Wall Street-backed startups and private insurance giants close in on traditional Medicare, a 56-year-old program that covers tens of millions of U.S. seniors.

“People don’t know that it’s happening,” Weisbart, one of the physicians traveling to the nation’s capital, said of the DC experiment. “Most people in Congress don’t know that it’s happening. We’ve started having some of these conversations with congressional staff, and we’re hoping to have many more of them next week when we’re there, but it’s not on their radar either.”

“That’s the disturbing part,” he added. “How radical the transformation of Medicare is becoming under this new model, how widespread it will be—it’ll be the entire book of business—and yet that’s occurring with neither the awareness nor consent of Congress.”

The DC program was established by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) during the waning months of the Trump administration, which included former pharmaceutical industry executives, Wall Street bankers, and right-wing policy consultants notorious for gashing public health programs.

Under the DC model, so-called Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs) are paid monthly by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to cover a specified portion of a patient’s medical care—a significant shift from traditional Medicare’s direct reimbursement of providers.

DCEs are allowed to pocket the funding they don’t spend on care, an arrangement that critics believe will incentivize the private middlemen to skimp on Medicare patients—many of whom could be auto-enrolled into DCEs without their knowledge or permission.

According to a policy brief released by PNHP, “Virtually any company can apply to be a DCE, including investor-backed startups that include primary care physicians, [Medicare Advantage] plans and other commercial insurers, accountable care organizations (ACOs) or ACO-like organizations, and for-profit hospital systems.”

“Applicants are approved by CMS without input from Congress or other elected officials,” the group notes.

At present, the pilot includes 53 DCEs in 38 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Drs. Richard Gilfillan and Donald Berwick pointed out in a September article for Health Affairs that 28 of the current DCEs are controlled by investors, not healthcare providers. A second tranche of DCEs is expected to debut in January 2022.

Dr. Ana Malinow, a physician from San Francisco who is taking part in Tuesday’s petition delivery, said in a statement that “Medicare Advantage—the first wave of Medicare privatization—showed us that inserting a profit-seeking middleman into public coverage does not save money for taxpayers, but rather costs more money while also taking away care choices from seniors.”

“If left unchecked, the Direct Contracting program will hand traditional Medicare off to Wall Street investors, without input from seniors, doctors, or even members of Congress,” said Malinow. “Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra has the power to stop this Trump-era program in its tracks, and must do so now.”

“Next year, millions more Americans will find themselves in privatized Medicare, and most will never know what happened.”
The DC experiment was launched by the Trump administration but actually has its roots in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which established CMMI with the stated goal of identifying “ways to improve healthcare quality and reduce costs in the Medicare, Medicaid, and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) programs.”

The ACA granted CMMI, also known as the Innovation Center, the authority to test alternative payment and service delivery models on a national scale without congressional approval—latitude that, in the hands of the Trump administration, ultimately spawned the DC pilot program.

CMMI is currently headed by Elizabeth Fowler, who previously served as vice president of public policy and external affairs for WellPoint, Inc.—a health insurance giant that later became Anthem. Fowler also worked as chief health counsel to former Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus, a right-wing Democrat who infamously had single-payer proponents arrested in 2009 and helped ensure that the ACA did not include a public option.

Weisbart told Common Dreams that while the creation of CMMI may have been well-intentioned, the body’s ability to “so fundamentally and radically transform a public health program that so many Americans rely on” without congressional approval or oversight is a real danger that lawmakers must take seriously.

“Someplace there needs to be congressional oversight,” Weisbart said. “When the public does finally find out that [lawmakers] were asleep at the switch, they’re not going to be happy. This is your chance to do what democracy is intended to do.”

The Biden administration paused the most extreme form of Direct Contracting—known as the Geographic (GEO) model—in March, but it is allowing the Global and Professional Direct Contracting (GPDC) pilot to move forward. According to CMS, the GPDC pilot is expected to play out over a six-year period.

While lawmakers have largely been quiet about the Medicare experiment, a handful of Democratic members of Congress have echoed grassroots demands for an immediate end to the DC program in recent months.

“We appreciate that you paused implementation of the Geographic model,” Reps. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), and Katie Porter (D-Calif.) wrote in a May letter to Becerra and then-Acting CMS Administrator Elizabeth Richter. “However, we remain worried that the 53 DCEs participating in the GPDC model, a policy launched under the Trump administration, lacks oversight to protect Medicare beneficiaries’ care.”

“As members of Congress committed to protecting Medicare beneficiaries,” the lawmakers continued, “we ask that CMS immediately freeze the harmful CMMI DCE pilot program including the Geographic model and the Global and Professional Direct Contracting Model and evaluate the impact to beneficiaries.”

In September, Porter took part in a PNHP-hosted webinar that spotlighted the potentially far-reaching harms of the DC pilot.

“This program was supposed to make Medicare more efficient,” said Porter. “But actually it does just the opposite. Rather than allowing patients to go to providers directly under traditional Medicare, DCEs invite insurers and investors to step in and interfere with the care that Americans get.”

“This Direct Contracting Entity model is just one more example of the Trump administration’s many attempts to wreck a functioning, successful, popular government program for the sake of lining the pockets of its corporate donors,” Porter added. “The bottom line for Direct Contracting Entities is not to improve the quality of care. They drive up costs for patients to maximize their profits.”

In a column earlier this month, the Houston Chronicle’s Chris Tomlinson argued that the Biden administration’s decision to allow the DC program to continue “reflects for-profit health companies and investors’ power over both political parties.”

“Direct Contracting is also likely to kill any chance for progressive Democrats to make Medicare an option for any American who wants to enroll,” Tomlinson added. “If the government puts private companies in charge of all Medicare patients, it will eliminate any opportunity to overhaul our healthcare system truly.”

“Next year,” he added, “millions more Americans will find themselves in privatized Medicare, and most will never know what happened.”

A previous version of this story omitted Rep. Katie Porter’s (D-Calif.) name from the list of lawmakers who wrote to the HHS secretary.