Sean McVay bucks the trend of bad bets on young NFL coaches

The recent history of youngest-ever NFL head coaches is littered with supposed boy genius flameouts. Once upon a time, the youngest coaches ever seen around the NFL could be the best. When Don Shula and John Madden first got to lead teams, they were two of the youngest ever to do it and still went down as among the best ever. But that was when the NFL was still relatively young and before a culture of nepotism and close-mindedness really took hold.

So it was in the early 1990s that Shula’s son David took the reins of the Cincinnati Bengals. He replaced Sam Wyche, the coach who guided the Bengals to their to-date highest point of respectability in the league: a pair of narrow Super Bowl defeats at the hands of the 49ers. 

Were it not for Rich Kotite’s infamous stint with the Jets, an outmatched David Shula would have been the go-to NFL coaching joke of the decade. He wasn’t far off, going 19-52 in four-and-a-half seasons. As it happens, after a 22-year absence from coaching, David returned to the gridiron at the college level this year to serve as receivers coach at Dartmouth.

It continued when Lane Kiffin was tapped by an aging Al Davis to become the NFL’s youngest head coach ever at the age of 31 in 2007. In recent years, Kiffin has tried to explain how he was hamstrung working under Davis and that he begged the Raiders owner to draft Calvin Johnson instead of JaMarcus Russell with the top pick in '07. There’s probably some truth to that, but you can’t deflect all the blame when you go 5-15 in little more than a season.

Toward the end of the aughts, there was more disappointment in the NFL coaching youth movement in the form of Raheem Morris and Josh McDaniels, who both still place in the top 10 of youngest head coaches at the time of their hirings. Neither of them lasted more than three seasons. To be sure, going young but not-quite-record-breaking young has gone well for some teams in the recent past. The Steelers' last two head coaches, Bill Cowher and Mike Tomlin, were both under 35 when they were hired. Both won Super Bowls and had (and still has in the case of Tomlin) consistent success.

All this is to lay out the context that faced the Rams when they made Sean McVay, a month shy of his 31st birthday, the new benchmark of youth in NFL head coaching. McVay had an impressive run serving as offensive coordinator in Washington, helping to transform Kirk Cousins from a contingency plan if Robert Griffin III didn’t work out into a bona fide franchise quarterback in his own right. But while good, those Washington offenses weren’t exactly revolutionary, and football history is littered with coaches who had success raising one quarterback only to flounder with others.

Given that the Rams suffered through the offensive doldrums of the Jeff Fisher era for five seasons and invested heavily in Jared Goff —  the team traded two first-, two second- and two third-round picks to move up to draft him in 2016 — it made sense to choose a path that at least ostensibly was best for his development. But there are a lot of supposed offensive masterminds out there. Surely it had to be nerve-wracking to pick one younger than some of the players, even if he was buzzed about in the world of experts and insiders. Those types have been wrong plenty of times before.

That plunge has been more than worth it so far. McVay has started his head coaching career 16-6, including the postseason. This year, the Rams are off to a 5-0 start, more than justifying their preseason status as Super Bowl favorites following an offseason of splashy acquisitions. McVay far exceeded expectations in his first season, when most would have been satisfied with marginal improvement in the Rams offense provided Goff was also making strides. Instead, Goff went from a quarterback many were already dismissing as a bust to one of the more promising young passers in the league, and Los Angeles won the NFC West title.

Even amid his success, McVay had detractors in his first year. Critics took issue with his practice of feeding audibles to Goff through in-helmet communication at the line of scrimmage up until the play clock reached 15 seconds. Though the tactic is within the bounds of NFL rules, some pundits complained it’s unethical, even though other head coaches have said it’s a great tool, especially with young quarterbacks. Even if one has misgivings with a coach feeding plays and adjustments to the quarterback at the line, that doesn’t account for the strides that Goff has made with his accuracy and awareness, things certainly owed at least in part to McVay’s guidance.

If anything, McVay’s lack of experience has kept him open to the expertise of others, rather than operate like a Bill Parcells martinet type typically seen among older coaches. He’s been willing to defer to others on his staff who excel in areas outside his specialty. This is understandable, especially since he has people like longtime defensive coordinator Wade Phillips around him.

Culturally, we tend to associate memory with older people, since they’ve seen and experienced more, even though we know recollection, at least in the short term, is one of the first things to deteriorate with age. McVay’s amazing recall abilities have been something of a parlor trick for media hype and pregame shows. But they are doubtlessly also a valuable asset on the field, where a coach with a good memory is able to know in the moment which plays have worked in which situations, against specific teams and against particular defensive alignments.

A little less than a decade ago, Tomlin became the youngest head coach to win a Super Bowl, in his second season at the age of 36. If McVay accomplishes the feat this year, he would have done it a little more than three years younger and pulled off an even more impressive turnaround of his organization. There’s a long way to go this season before anyone can feel secure pronouncing anything likely, but the fact that it’s a believable possibility speaks to the fantastic job he’s done so far.