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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.
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...
