Is Sean McVay only an average play-caller?

This stats model says Rams head coach Sean McVay is only an average play-caller

When the Los Angeles Rams are losing, the first thing that some tend to point to is head coach Sean McVay and his play-calling. Following the Week 1 loss to the Detroit Lions last season, McVay’s play-calling in the red zone came into question. After quarterback Matthew Stafford threw the ball 46 times in a 23-15 loss to the Miami Dolphins, the typical narrative of McVay not running the ball enough was as loud as ever.

This isn’t to say that McVay is perfect as a play-caller, and the Rams coach would say as much. At the end of a poorly-called game, McVay is the first to point a finger at himself. That’s not always the case with other play-callers around the NFL. When the Rams lost to the Buffalo Bills in Week 1 of the 2022 season, McVay said,

“When you look at a lot of the ways that this game unfolded, I feel a huge sense of responsibility to this team..I’ve got to do better. There were a lot of decisions that I made that I felt like didn’t put our players in good enough spots.”

That’s part of what makes McVay special as a coach and why the players respect him as much as they do.

McVay’s offense took the NFL by storm when he joined the Rams in 2017 as they finished eighth in offense DVOA. The Rams hadn’t had an offense finish inside the top 10 since 2001. In fact, during those 15 years, they had 10 seasons of finishing inside the bottom 10.

However, the NFL is never stagnant and defenses respond which is exactly what they did to McVay. The first defensive coach to do that as Vic Fangio and because of that, McVay has had multiple variations of his offense. After back-to-back seasons of top-10 offenses in 2017 and 2018, the Rams have had three in the six years since. The best Rams offense since 2018 according to DVOA was in 2023 when the Rams finished seventh.

Steven Patton

In EPA, which speaks to the overall health of a unit, the results have actually been worse. The Rams offense finished 15th in EPA per play last season which was a drop-off from ninth in 2023. After finishing third in 2018, the Rams dropped to 18th in 2019 and 23rd in 2020. According to EPA, the best Rams offense since that 2018 season was in 2021 when they finished eighth at 0.082 EPA per play. That was almost twice as good as the 2023 unit that finished ninth but at just 0.042 EPA per play.

Joseph Bryan of the NFL stats and analytics community recently created a model to quantify play-calling. Bryan explained his methodology below,

“I created a passing score, rushing score, and composite score using Principal Components Analysis on metrics like: EPA, Yards per play, explosive rate, and success rate…I then used team PFF grades from all relevant categories. Things like passing grade, rushing grade, blocking, route running, and opponent defense. I predicted the offensive ratings created using these PFF grades at a GAME level…If you are familiar with statistics, you know that the residual of a prediction is everything your independent variables could not account for. That’s how I attain my coaching ratings. This is not a perfect process, The residual definitely contains more information than JUST coaching. Things like luck, weather, injuries are all in there too, but I do think the majority of this residual is coaching/play calling.”

Joseph Bryan

Using Bryan’s model, McVay finished as the 14th best play-caller in the NFL with a composite score of 51.1 percent. This was just below Kyle Shanahan and behind others such as Mike McCarthy, Press Taylor, Todd Downing, and Kliff Kingsbury. It’s worth noting that neither McCarthy, Downing, or Taylor will be play-callers in 2025.

When breaking down the overall composite score from a run and pass standpoint, McVay falls below average from a pass score standpoint while falling right on the middle line in run score.

Joseph Bryan

The model certainly isn’t perfect, and many would still consider McVay a top-three play-caller in the NFL. Back in February, Dan Pizzuta of The 33rd Team ranked the 32 NFL play-callers and McVay finished number two behind Kyle Shanahan. In a more recent ranking done by Pro Football Network, Brandon Austin ranked McVay second behind Shanahan as well. Said Austin,

“Sean McVay remains one of the NFL’s most dynamic and adaptable play-callers, as his offensive identity is defined by constant reinvention. During McVay’s tenure, the Los Angeles Rams have undergone several notable changes, including the swap of quarterback Jared Goff for Matthew Stafford. McVay has taken different concepts from his time in LA and blended them. His creativity and adaptability paid off again in 2024, as the Rams ranked 11th in PFSN’s Offense+ metric and top 10 in offensive EPA.”

McVay’s offense remains among the most innovative in the NFL and will continue along that path as he now has to adjust to life without Cooper Kupp. When McVay came to the Rams, his offense was built around wide zone runs and play-action. That evolved to more of a spread offense in 2021 as the Rams operated heavily out of empty sets. In 2023, McVay introduced more gap scheme and inside zone as he built the run game from scratch. Without Kupp in the picture, there has been some speculation that the offense could feature more 12 personnel.

There is certainly a difference between calling an offense and designing an offense. With that said, McVay has proven to be successful at both. One of the foundations of the McVay offense is making the complex simple. It’s an offense that is hard to predict as everything looks the same. The Rams had a pass rate over expected of -3.0 percent which ranked tied for 19th. In neutral situations it was -1.6 percent which was also outside the top-10 at 14. It was -2.5 percent in the red zone which ranked 22nd.

While McVay may not be a perfect play-caller, he is certainly much better than average as some of these models would suggest. The Rams offense has been one of the more consistent units with McVay as the mad scientist behind it. As long as he continues to call the Rams offense, it will likely remain that way.