Sean McVay has been one of the most coveted potential media personalities in sports for years. And it turns out the closest he came to actually doing it had nothing to do with a passion for sports media.
On a recent episode of Bussin’ With The Boys, McVay opened up about just how dark his headspace was following the Rams’ 5-12 season in 2022 — the year after he won the Super Bowl — and what was really behind all of those headlines during that period.
“You could use the narrative that I was going to go to media or whatever,” McVay said, “but like the truth would have been I was quitting because I couldn’t handle the losing.”
Ever since the Rams won Super Bowl LVI, McVay has been a persistent target for television networks looking to land the next Tony Romo. When the Rams collapsed the following season, those rumors fired up again, with networks reportedly making serious runs at him. McVay told Adam Schefter he was committed to the Rams’ title defense and not pursuing any TV opportunities. Then the Rams went 5-12, the roster was stripped down due to financial constraints, and the media speculation fired back up again. Networks reportedly made another run at him early in 2023, and McVay acknowledged the interest while insisting his focus remained on coaching.
What McVay is saying now is that he was, at least in part, using the media interest as a socially acceptable exit. It wasn’t that broadcasting was appealing. It was that losing had broken something in him, and he wasn’t sure he could put it back together.
“My identity, whether I realize it or not, was so fixated on winning and losing,” McVay admitted. “It was like my self-worth… I was counting down the days for that season to be over. What a fraud.”
The person who talked him out of it wasn’t a network executive or an agent. It was his wife, Veronika, who was pregnant with their first child at the time. McVay had been laying out his case for stepping away, rationalizing it, running through all the reasons it made sense, and she listened to it all before delivering a response that only someone who loves you unconditionally can get away with.
“She just kind of looked at me, and it was very loving and supportive, but it was like — she said, ‘You know, that never really sounded like the kind of leader you wanted to be,'” McVay recalled. “And I was like, boom.”
He stayed, and it worked out about as well as it possibly could have. The Rams rebuilt into one of the NFL’s most coveted primetime properties, McVay won back his reputation as one of the best coaches in the game, and the league rewarded them with a record-tying seven primetime games in the 2026 season. And through all of it, the conversation about his broadcasting future has hummed along in the background, never quite going away.
What McVay had never explained until now is what that conversation was actually covering for. At the time, he was a man who had built his entire identity around winning, watched one catastrophic season strip all of that away, and found in the media speculation a public narrative that looked nothing like the private reality of someone who had simply stopped wanting to show up.
The media career that everyone has been waiting for is probably still coming, and McVay has acknowledged as much. It just turns out the version of it that almost happened in 2022 would have been the wrong one, for the wrong reasons, and McVay knew it the moment his wife said so.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.