Mike LaFleur stood with two of his new position coaches nearby, and the Rams’ offensive coordinator reached back into his past, two jobs ago, to try to describe what Sean McVay’s done to Los Angeles’s tried-and-true scheme this offseason.
Five years ago, LaFleur was Kyle Shanahan’s pass-game coordinator in San Francisco, and the 49ers brought the Navy SEALs in to train the players. The coaches got educated, too.
“It’s like what the SEALs say: You always have to evolve,” LaFleur says. “For them, if you don’t evolve, you’re dead. Now, this is a whole different deal, it’s football. But it’s the truth, and Sean knows that. If you’re not always evolving, trying to be one step ahead of the league, and one step ahead of defensive coordinators, it’s hard to be successful. He’s always been evolving, so this just gave him something to grab, where you say, .”
And if McVay, like LaFleur says, is always adapting, it’s fair to say that he, and his offense, have done more of it this offseason than ever before.
Coming off the Rams’ worst year under McVay on that side of the ball (they ranked 32nd in total offense and 27th in scoring through an injury-riddled season), the seventh-year head coach didn’t just shake up his coaching staff. He turned an entire coaching tree’s philosophy on hiring upside down.
Rather than replacing coordinator Liam Coen, tight ends coach Thomas Brown and line coach Kevin Carberry by simply dipping back into his own past, McVay seized what he saw as an opportunity to change things—to the point where you might mistake this latest evolution as a revolution.
Yes, LaFleur is connected to McVay. The new OC’s older brother, Packers coach Matt LaFleur, is one of McVay’s best friends, and was on his first Rams staff. But Mike LaFleur had never worked for McVay, instead coming up under Shanahan, first with the Browns, then the Falcons and 49ers. And McVay and Shanahan’s systems have veered from each other over the decade since they last worked together.
Then, there’s Nick Caley and Ryan Wendell replacing Brown and Carberry, respectively. Those two not only have never worked with McVay before, but they’re also from outside the Shanahan family coaching tree altogether. Wendell played eight of his nine NFL seasons for the Patriots and got his coaching start under Brian Daboll, whose offense has a heavy New England influence. Meanwhile, Caley spent all nine of his NFL seasons in Foxborough.
“We really wanted to do our due diligence in finding the best coaches that were out there,” McVay says. “And I have tremendous respect for the background of all those guys knowing that, hey, man, I was so fortunate to be around really good people that taught me, and I had tremendous respect for. Whether it was Ryan Wendell’s background as a player under Dante Scarnecchia and Bill [Belichick] and learning from Josh [McDaniels], then being under Aaron Kromer in Buffalo, who, there is some familiarity with our background.
“And then Nick Caley, I mean, a lot of it, I trust his experience is there. I heard great stuff from Brian Daboll about them. From Josh, from Bill. And then Mike I’ve known forever, but I know how close he and Kyle were, how instrumental he was in a lot of the things that they were doing.”
There’s a humility to it, too, in the admission that the ballyhooed system McVay’s built, one that’s succeeded not just in L.A. but in a bunch of corners of the NFL, isn’t the be-all and end-all. There’s plenty McVay can learn, and the Rams can benefit from, outside of it.
The harder part is figuring out how to put it all together. And that’s been a work in progress from January until now, with the season just two weeks away.
• It started, simply, with McVay using the new hires to gain institutional knowledge on how the system he learned under Shanahan had changed. LaFleur says the language shifted so much, and was so different from San Francisco to L.A., that he and McVay initially resorted to using Washington terminology to be more efficient in communicating. Plus, McVay could also learn how other schemes worked.
“It’s even stuff as simple as, ” McVay says.“ Because a lot of people run the same plays, but there’s certain people that when they run this play, it just looks different, because of the sell or the execution or the understanding of how to solve the problems.”
“He’d be like, ,” Wendell says.“And then we’d try to work it out. … Sean already had a lot of ideas and questions, like, .”
And while LaFleur’s library of knowledge on the Niners was being mined, he was right there with McVay in his enthusiasm to pick the brains of Caley and Wendell.
“From afar, it’s, ” LaFleur says. “I got some of those experiences with Wes Welker in San Francisco, and he was just a player in New England. But you could tap into that. That was always cool. And then the respect we had for Josh McDaniels, I remember sitting in with Kyle in Atlanta, early years in San Francisco, and we’d always buzz New England [tape] every Monday, because we always felt like Josh had a few little wrinkles, and it was so different than what we were doing.
“And we plucked a lot more than people know.”
