'Growth Process!' How the 2022 Season Sparked a Mid-Year Turnaround For Sean McVay, L.A. Rams

A subpar 2022 season, in a sense, helped the Los Angeles Rams right the ship partway through the 2023 campaign.

For some, the Los Angeles Rams' midseason turnaround in 2023 might have begun after their bye week. For head coach Sean McVay, however, it began last season, in a sense.

McVay was in the midst of his worst season record-wise as a head coach (5-12) immediately following a Super Bowl win in the 2021 campaign. The 2022 season had gone about as poorly as one can as L.A. lost key players like Matthew Stafford, Cooper Kupp and Aaron Donald along the way.

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The Rams coach is not one to lightly tolerate failure, so late in the campaign, he began to do some self-evaluation and determined a few changes that needed to be made on his end.

"There was a pivot towards the end of the season when we were getting ready to play Seattle the second time where you're almost saying, 'OK, hey, what kind of leader do you want to be?" McVay said. "What kind of things are you letting fall by the wayside?'

"And you just say, 'All right, let's at least start to try to make sure that these standards, the culture and the way that you want to operate are more in alignment with the person that you want to be."

McVay, in short, "wasn't proud" of the leader he became in 2022, but that experience helped spark some late success this season, even if the year once again began poorly in L.A.

"I didn't enjoy that and I wasn't proud of it, but man, did we need it," McVay said. "And it was a part of the growth process, and there's going to continue to be different things that we have to navigate through, and I feel like that circumstance and situation will make us more equipped to do it."

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The Rams turned around a 3-6 start to the year (once again hampered by injuries) into a 10-7 finish and playoff appearance. Although they departed the postseason in the Wild Card round, they found a step towards making another Super Bowl push, and the right focus in the offseason could help make that a reality in 2024.