California’s Thousand Oaks. August saw the Los Angeles Rams head coach, Sean McVay, give the signal to stop the loud music coming from the sideline speakers and gather his squad around him in the middle of the field during a late-afternoon practice.
As McVay strode around the middle of the circle, some of his words—including a few curses—carried on the dry breeze.
Early in training camp, McVay, who is currently coaching one of the NFL’s newest teams—a squad attempting to contend even amid a partial rebuild—became frustrated with the lack of focus on little but crucial issues and urgency. So he would call a meeting and end practice. With their names inscribed on stickers on the front of their helmets, players huddled around him, trying not to betray signs of exhaustion by putting their hands on their hips.
The veteran right tackle Rob Havenstein described McVay’s instructions to the players during such instances as “‘Pick your a-up,’” and similar things. We’re acting in certain ways that aren’t typical of successful teams. There will be certain learning curves to navigate. However, hopefully, we can make it there.
Before the snap or when breaking the huddle, some younger players appeared untrained and exhausted, according to McVay, who brought this up in a news conference at the start of camp.
“I warned them that I wouldn’t back down from my high expectations for their abilities,” stated McVay. “There is acceptance that there will be many errors and a certain amount of tolerance. He takes issue with the repetitious ones, the ones that make us feel a little sleepy and stop thinking clearly, and the ones that we keep doing.”
Anyone who has been watching carefully for a short while will have noticed that the best indication of how “back to the fundamentals” McVay and his coaching staff have gotten in 2023 is the suspension of practice. For many years, both throughout their Super Bowl-winning season and their disastrous collapse the following year, the Rams have been a top-heavy senior squad. These days, their 53-man roster consists of 25 players with less than three years of experience and 14 rookies (all of their draft selections were selected). During training camp, they had forty rookies on their roster of ninety.
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