Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay became the winningest in franchise history with the team’s 30-20 victory over the Minnesota Vikings on Thursday night. McVay tied John Robinson with his 79th win — including postseason — last weekend over the Las Vegas Raiders and now secures his 80th and the Rams all-time record.
In doing this, McVay becomes the second head coach since the 1970 merger to become a franchise’s all-time winningest coach before turning 40. The first was John Madden, who became that for the Raiders in 1972 at age 36, two years before McVay.
The other impressive piece of this is that Robinson required nine seasons atop the Rams organization — 1983-1991 — to reach 79 wins, whereas McVay was able to surpass him while still in the front half of his eighth season. McVay has won 10 or more games in five of his seven full seasons and has gone above .500 in six of seven seasons.
McVay has the opportunity to do so again despite starting 1-4 due to significant offensive injuries. The Rams have won two games straight and are starting to get healthy, as both Puka Nacua and Cooper Kupp were able to play on Thursday against the Vikings.
The Rams need to finish 7-3 in order to get a 10-win season and 6-4 in order to finish over .500. That could be doable as the Rams have winnable games against the Seattle Seahawks, New England Patriots, Miami Dolphins, New Orleans Saints and Arizona Cardinals still on their schedule.
But whatever McVay does from here on out, it would only be building on the record he has already set. And there is now no denying McVay’s place as the best coach in Rams franchise history.
Sean McVay shoots down Cooper Kupp trade rumors
The Rams’ season was at a crossroads, sitting at 1-4 going into their bye week, which led to some trade rumors involving some key players.
Cooper Kupp was chief among them as his name was in trade rumors all week with plenty of teams in need of quality receivers.
Sean McVay addressed the trade rumors surrounding Kupp, a franchise cornerstone during this era, and how much truth there was to them.
“Teams reached out. Some of the things I’ve seen out there, they’re just not true,” McVay said. “We’ve addressed it with those individuals. Teams have called about him and we let him know what the dialogue was there and there’s a lot of stuff out there where there’s not a lot of accountability to the reports and that’s unfortunate.”