Are McVay and Snead the Best Duo in the NFL?

The Los Angeles Rams are enjoying some of the best years in their franchise history thanks to the efforts by head coach Sean McVay and general manager Les Snead.

In the eight years that McVay has been in Los Angeles, the team has won 80 games, including a Super Bowl victory in 2021, their first since the turn of the millennium.

Continuity and longevity are cherished products within the NFL. It's important to have this for any franchise. Teams that have maintained it throughout rebuilds have seen success gradually and sometimes quickly over the course of a few seasons.

The Detroit Lions are a great example, having been at the bottom of the bit for many years before Dan Campbell and Brad Holmes joined the fray.

The Rams are and have been in a different situation, as is every team when it comes to roster construction and team-building within the organization. Snead was hired as general manager in 2012 with Jeff Fisher as head coach and has remained with the franchise since, even enduring the 5-12 season in 2022 that led to questions of whether the team could be in a full-blown rebuild.

Instead, Snead and McVay have gone with an approach that has led to 20 wins in the last two seasons. They began drafting and developing talent, allowing young players to see the field early and often, and focus solely on their strengths. This has led to the Rams entering the 2025 season as potential championship contenders after a deep playoff run this past season.

Because of the coaching brilliance and development from McVay and the drafting and talent identification from Snead in the last three years, is this head coach-general manager duo the best in the NFL?

If Andy Reid and Brett Veach of the Kansas City Chiefs didn't exist, I would say yes. McVay and Snead have shown to go with two different approaches that have found success with the help of continuity at coach and GM: acquiring as much high-end talent as possible (2017-2021) to trusting and developing young talents into key contributors and cornerstones (2022-present).

It is a similar approach the Chiefs took around the same time the Rams did, but the biggest difference is they offered tons of veteran leadership and had the world's best quarterback in Patrick Mahomes. Reid is a future first-ballot Hall of Fame head coach and Veach has become arguably one of the best general managers in sports. That is hard to beat any year.

Even so, the Rams have a great structure with their head coach and lead front office executive with an owner that allows the football people to make the football decisions.

Other teams like the Buffalo Bills (Sean McDermott and Brandon Beane), Lions (Campbell and Holmes), Baltimore Ravens (John Harbaugh and Eric DeCosta), and the Minnesota Vikings (Kevin O'Connell and Kwesi Adofo-Mensah) are all high-end head coach and general manager duos in the NFL that have seen consistent success in recent years.

However, the Rams and Chiefs, with their current structure and approach, are the cream of the crop until further notice.