Colin Cowherd Floats Sean McVay Leaving Rams to Join ‘Thursday Night Football’

Sean McVay is regularly discussed as the next big thing in the broadcasting realm. After he won the Super Bowl with the Los Angeles Rams, reports strangely began to emerge that the young head coach might be more interested in joining a network as a color commentator or analyst rather than coaching for the rest of his career. Which is usually not a thing that happens when a coach wins a Super Bowl, making it notable.

McVay obviously didn’t go anywhere and is back on the sideline this year, watching as the Rams collapse under the weight of numerous injuries. Their next matchup comes tonight against the Las Vegas Raiders and it’s all rather depressing for Los Angeles. The team’s three best players are all on IR and they owe their first-round pick in this year’s draft to the Detroit Lions as part of the Matthew Stafford trade, so at 3-9 they’re really just running out the clock on the season.

This leaves plenty of room for speculation, and Colin Cowherd touched upon the McVay to the media theory today during The Herd. He said he wouldn’t be surprised if McVay fled the sidelines and threw out Thursday Night Football as a potential suitor for the coach’s talents, whatever they may be in the booth.

It still feels weird we’re talking about McVay like this but when there’s smoke there’s fire. However, it does not seem likely he’d bail on the Rams after this season because they’ve gotten laughably unlucky. If it were obvious Stafford was over the hill or whatever, that would be one thing. But there is nothing to suggest the Rams’ Super Bowl formula cannot be replicated with everyone healthy again. Even early in the year when Stafford, Cooper Kupp, and Aaron Donald were all on the field, the Rams were playing with a shorthanded roster because the offensive line was decimated by injuries.

The other side of this is if Amazon would really be willing to pony up what would undoubtedly be a tidy sum to steal McVay away. They made Al Michaels a $10 million man and Kirk Herbstreit definitely didn’t come cheap, either. Amazon’s first season as an NFL rightsholder hasn’t gone super well and the Michaels/Herbstreit pairing hasn’t blown the doors off, but adding McVay doesn’t really solve their problems. There are also legitimate questions about the validity of a three-man booth for professional football.

If McVay really wants to be done with coaching then this is possible. But if he’s waiting for an extremely lucrative offer to lure him away, Amazon probably isn’t going to be the one to do it. Not this year, anyway.