Can Sean McVay rebuild the Rams again?
In 1966, the January weather in Chicago was bitterly cold (even by Chicago standards) and even colder inside the circuit court of Cook County, as the relationship between Bears owner George Halas and his defensive coordinator George Allen was at a standoff. Allen wanted to become the head coach of the Los Angeles Rams, and Halas believed he had a binding contract to keep Allen as his defensive coordinator.
Back then, assistant coaches under contract needed permission to seek other jobs, even for a promotion from their owner, before interviewing and accepting. On this frigid day, Judge Cornelius Harrington made his ruling after hearing all the evidence. Once Harrington ruled in favor of Halas, Halas walked toward the Judge’s bench, telling his lawyer Charles F. Short Jr, “Charley, I got this.” He then told Harrington he would drop the case, allowing Allen to become the head coach of the Rams. Halas wanted to prove a point, which he did. Allen left for the Rams and began his “Future is Now” revolution, which he then took to Washington in 1971 until it sputtered out badly in 1977.
Forty years later, when Sean McVay left Washington to join the Rams in 2017, he took over a team that had traded a bunch of draft picks to acquire Jared Goff. Then McVay and his general manager Les Snead did their best George AIlen impersonation and re-started the “The Future is Now” movement.
Unlike Allen’s plan, the Rams' plan worked, winning a Super Bowl in 2022, causing Snead to wear a T-shirt at the parade announcing his contempt for the NFL Draft. Snead only took one year to walk back his comments, as he recently told the LA Times, “I will admit that any time you probably say something like that … you're going to eat those words at some point. If we truly believed in effing them picks in that sense of the word, we'd just give them to our division opponents.”