I’ll never forget where I was when I watched Baker Mayfield’s debut with the Los Angeles Rams.
I was standing in the general admission section of The Granada Theater in Lawrence, Kansas, in attendance at a Flatland Cavalry concert. And while Cleto Cordero was crooning the lyrics to “If We Said Goodbye,” I had my phone in my right hand, trying to keep it out of other patrons’ sightlines as best as I could, watching a former first-overall pick try to save his career from the brink of collapse.
The Rams
beat the Las Vegas Raiders in dramatic fashion that early December night, Mayfield’s flailing career seemed to immediately bounce back (and that has only continued since signing with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers the following offseason) and Sean McVay had accomplished one of the more impressive feats of the 2022 season.
This is relevant today because of a clip that’s circulating on social media this week from McVay’s sit-down with the Bussin’ With The Boys podcast, in which he discussed how close he was to hanging up the headset that year.
“I almost quit coaching. You can use the narrative that I was going to go to media or whatever, but the truth would have been: I was quitting. Because I couldn’t handle the losing. It was almost like a scarlet letter.“
The 2022 season was obviously the worst of the McVay era for the Rams. One look at the 5-12 final record establishes that quickly. But context matters, and it certainly does for that campaign. It wasn’t a great year anyway, but to lose Matthew Stafford after nine games and being forced to start the likes of Bryce Perkins and former Arizona Hotshots standout John Wolford before Mayfield showed up is going to put any team in a bind.
Add on the massive brain drain from the coaching staff following the Super Bowl run, not having any high-end draft capital to infuse cheap talent into the roster (worth it for the prior year’s ring, of course) and the general difficulty in trying to repeat after a title, and you’ve got a lot of roadblocks in one season.
This isn’t to absolve the Rams of a bad season. We don’t need to sugarcoat it too much. And it’s not like they suddenly became a world beater with Mayfield under center. But from afar, watching the end of that season unfold, the one lingering thought I had was that McVay was doing everything he could to try to win and to keep his guys in the fight. That’s not easy to do. It’s why he’s one of the best coaches this game has seen, at least in modern times.
McVay has talked about how he felt that year plenty in the past. Jourdan Rodrigue’s immaculate “The Playcallers” series at The Athletic dove into it quite a bit. But still, to hear him talk about how close he was to giving it all up is so jarring. Even after a bad season, no one sensible would have tried to discredit him (and anyone who did wasn’t worth your time), but he felt as low as he could get.
This is why the greats are great, though. They are truly built different. They hate losing more than they love winning. How many times have you heard the story of Michael Jordan getting cut from the varsity team in high school and how he let that fuel him for years? It’s that kind of intensity and fire that makes legends.
Since this point, the Rams have won 10 games each season and were one of the best teams in the NFL for the duration of 2025. They’re the favorites to win the Super Bowl in 2026. Sean McVay is still at the top of his game.
And I would argue that how he fought through the struggles of that 2022 season and what’s come from it is as much of an indication of his greatness and uniqueness as any of the success in the seasons since.
