Sean McVay led the Los Angeles Rams to a Super Bowl victory in February 2022 and then spent the next 12 months slowly losing his grip on everything that got him there.
The following season, the Rams went 5-12 — the worst record by a defending champion since the 1999 Denver Broncos — as Matthew Stafford, Cooper Kupp, and Aaron Donald missed a combined 22 games due to injuries.
McVay, who had never experienced a losing season as a head coach, struggled with the results and admitted it changed him as a coach.
Sean McVay Reveals How Rams’ Super Bowl Hangover Forced Him to Rebuild Coaching Identity
Sitting down with Will Compton and Taylor Lewan on the “Bussin’ With The Boys” podcast this week, the 40-year-old coach got candid about that period in his coaching career.
McVay has talked about nearly quitting after 2022, but this was the first time he peeled back the curtain and provided a look into his psyche.
“I coached from a place of fear in a lot of instances, and especially early on when we had some success, I actually became fragile,” McVay said. “You became more transactional than transformational. You became a fraud where you know how to say the right things, but you’re not really feeling it.”
That is a remarkable admission from a coach who built his reputation on authenticity and energy. The youngest head coach in modern NFL history when he was hired at 30, McVay was the guy whose sideline intensity and play-calling instincts turned the Rams from a bottom-feeder into a perennial contender within two seasons.
McVay essentially described that he was performing the role of head coach rather than inhabiting it.
McVay told Compton and Lewan elsewhere in the interview that he “almost quit coaching” that year, saying the losing felt like a “scarlet letter” he could not shake. A conversation with his wife Veronika and a phone call from former college football coach Chris Petersen convinced him to keep going. But the decision to remain was only the beginning.
“It took really going down and really having that ’22 season to be like, ‘Man, I don’t really like who I am,'” McVay said. “And there needs to be some real work on consistently applying things where these are skills and tools that you can develop to be the person that you want to be as a person and as a coach.”
The transformation he describes is not abstract. McVay laid out what it looked like in practice, beginning with a reframing of the anxiety every coach and player carries into game day.
“Being courageous, that’s a strong word,” McVay said. “But you think about it. It’s like, ‘Okay, raise your hand before we go out for kickoff if you’re not feeling that anxiety.’ Now, what does that mean? It means we’re alive. Lean into that.”
During the same interview, McVay admitted that he mishandled Jared Goff’s trade to the Detroit Lions in 2021, saying he lacked the courage to tell Goff face-to-face that the Rams were moving on. McVay called himself “an amateur” in how he communicated the trade and said the handling of it was “exactly the antithesis of how I would hope to handle things going forward.”
Listening to McVay, one thing becomes clear: he was a young coach who achieved extraordinary things but he did not have the internal tools to sustain his success and he still had a lot to learn.
He clearly put in a lot of work after that 2022 season to ensure that he wouldn’t find himself in that same position again. Now, the Rams have posted three consecutive double-digit-win seasons and reached the 2025 NFC Championship Game before losing to the Seattle Seahawks. McVay recently signed a multi-year extension with Los Angeles, and the Rams enter the 2026 season among the favorites to hoist the Lombardi Trophy.
