The Wall Street Journal - 16.08.2019

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Sean McVay

A big test for the Rams’ wunderkind coach:

staying ahead of a league trying to copy him

Sean McVay, above, heard all the

jokes about how NFL teams want to

hire someone just like him. Left, Zac

Taylor is the new Bengals coach.

FROM TOP: ERIC RISBERG/ASSOCIATED PRESS; JOHN MINCHILLO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

SPORTS

down as a “Biles II,” Radnofsky

wrote. Gymnastics grades moves

on a scale of difficulty from A to I,

and what Biles did Sunday was

probably, well, a...J.

“There’s no such thing as a J

rating,” Radnofsky wrote.

“SIMONE BILES HAS CHANGED

GYMNASTICS FOREVER,” read a

headline on Slate.

“FLIPPING SIMONE BILES STILL

FLOATING THROUGH UPPER ME-

SOSPHERE,” wrote The Onion, not

terribly overstating it.

“Even after Biles someday re-

tires, the changed landscape of the

sport will remain,” Slate’s Rebecca

Schuman wrote.

This is what the greatest ath-

letes do. Their dominance inverts

the whole game. Kareem Abdul-

Jabbar, then Lew Alcindor, caused

the NCAA to ban dunking; Bob

Gibson prompted Major League

Baseball to lower the pitcher’s

mound. Remember when golf

courses used to try to “Tiger

proof” their layouts, just to give

the rest of the field a chance

against Tiger Woods?

Gymnastics can’t really do that.

That’s good, because I want to see

how far Biles can take this. What

happened at nationals is likely a

sneak preview of what Biles will

unleash at the 2020 Olympics in

Tokyo next summer.

I can’t wait. Can you?

She is now a six-time all-around

national champion, a four-time all-

around world champion, and a

four-time gold medalist at the

Olympic Games. “She’s been com-

peting against herself for a long

time,” Louisa Thomas wrote in the

New Yorker. Biles has a case as

one of the best athletes on the

planet—certainly among the most

riveting. Gymnastics may not grab

the everyday attention of the ca-

sual sports fan, but a Biles perfor-

mance stops the clock. Video of

her triple twisting double somer-

sault filled social media for at

least a day.

Such thrills have the potential

to airbrush real turmoil inside

USA Gymnastics, which is still

rightly under siege for having a

serial sexual abuser in its ranks.

But Biles, who has said that she,

too, was abused by the now-incar-

cerated Larry Nassar, is refusing

Simone Biles builds on her legend with gravity-defying moves. She plans to defend her Olympic all-around title at the 2020 Games in Tokyo next summer.

CHARLIE RIEDEL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

to let that outrage get buried.

“It’s hard coming here for an

organization having had them

failed us so many times,” Biles

said as nationals began. Of USA

Gymnastics, she said: “You had

one job. You literally had one job

and you didn’t protect us.”

It was brave and stirring. You

would not have blamed Biles if she

just wanted to focus on her com-

petition, but she refuses to check

her anger. The best athlete in her

sport is using her platform to

speak up for others, and hold

power accountable.

It is a rare athlete who can take

all that pain and pressure — and

keep rising above.

But Simone Biles can fly. I’ve

seen it with my own two eyes.

Irvine, Calif.

S

ean McVay has heard all

of the jokes.

They usually go some-

thing like this: even

McVay’s local barista was

offered a head-coaching gig this

off-season because NFL teams were

so desperate to hire somebody as-

sociated—anybody—associated

with the 33-year-old Los Angeles

Rams coach.

The gags are not too far from

the truth. The Bengals hired Zac

Taylor, his quarterbacks coach last

season. The Packers hired Matt

LaFleur, his offensive coordinator

from the year before. The

punchline was hammered home

when the Cardinals hired Kliff

Kingsbury and made sure to note

that he and McVay are “friends.”

“It’s been an awesome reflection

of the success that we’ve had,”

McVay says.

And now, a year after taking the

Rams to the Super Bowl in his sec-

ond season at the helm, McVay

knows the NFL’s obsession with

emulating him means he has to

change his own approach to stay

ahead.

The rest of the league is out to

steal his ideas. So he’s focused on

ginning up new ones.

“When he came on board, what

he did was different,” said Bill

Cowher, the former Super Bowl-

winning coach for the Steelers,

who watched more than half a

dozen of his assistants go on to be-

come head coaches during his 15-

year tenure in Pittsburgh. “Sustain-

ability and not to allow

complacency to set in is the big-

gest challenge that he has.”

McVay has established himself

as the NFL’s unparalleled wunder-

kind. When the Rams hired him, he

was 30 years old and the youngest

coach in modern history. Two

years later, he became the youn-

gest coach in Super Bowl history.

He’s still the youngest coach in the

league. And now he has the experi-

ence of two highly successful sea-

sons, including last year when the

Rams came within one game of

winning it all before getting

stopped by the Patriots.

The McVay effect has been clear

in Los Angeles. He transformed an

offense that ranked worst in the

NFL in 2016 into one that finished

first in 2017 and continued to pick

apart defenses last year. But the

McVay effect has been even clearer

around the rest of the league,

where almost every other team

making a head coaching hire has

wanted to find someone who could

catch up to the offensive schemes

brought forth by innovative

coaches like McVay.

Six of the eight head-coach hir-

ings this off-season had an offen-

sive background. Many were hired

for head-coaching jobs before any-

body would have ever imagined.

Kingsbury had never even been an

NFL assistant before, with his only

coaching experience coming in col-

lege. Taylor was just a year re-

moved from being an assistant

wide receivers coach. New Browns

coach Freddie Kitchens had no ob-

vious connection to McVay but it

wasn’t difficult to see the resem-

blance: an up-and-coming offensive

mind who experienced a meteoric

rise from not even being a coordi-

nator to start last season.

Only the best coaches in football

have to confront this problem. It

means that they’ve done so well

that the only recourse for the rest

of the league is to pilfer their plays

and coaches to try to keep up.

Which means that while other

teams try to copy the 2017 and

2018 Rams, McVay knows the 2019

edition has to be different to stay

ahead of the curve. “We’re always

trying to push and make sure that

we’re looking inwardly,” he says.

In a peculiar way, this makes the

youngest coach in the league a

peer of his oldest colleagues.

McVay is young enough to be the

child of Bill Belichick, Andy Reid or

Pete Carroll, but just like them the

NFL is burgeoning with his aco-

lytes. Their continued success

amazes him: they have sprawling

coaching trees, but have been able

to keep on winning even when

their disciples try the same ideas

elsewhere.

When McVay watches tape of

their teams, one of the biggest rev-

elations is that these coaches in

many ways play completely differ-

ently than they did even just a cou-

ple of years ago. Sean Payton will

thrive by spreading the field one

year and then jamming it up the

middle the next. Reid was at the

forefront of adopting college

schemes. McVay’s takeaway:

they’re never too proud to study

something new and go back to the

drawing board, even when every-

thing has been working just fine,

because they don’t want the rest of

the league to catch up.

“That’s where it’s like, ‘Shoot, I

certainly don’t know, and haven’t

been coaching nearly as long as

those guys,’” McVay says. “But if

you’re going to try to compete with

them you better make sure that

you’re pushing the standards and

really challenging yourself and the

coaches and the players to evolve.”

It isn’t difficult to see the

changes McVay could have in store.

The Rams traded up to draft Dar-

rell Henderson, a 5-foot-8 running

back from Memphis who could give

the offense a change-of-pace op-

tion out of the backfield that Los

Angeles has lacked behind Todd

Gurley—and a type of weapon that

teams like the Patriots have

thrived using. Gerald Everett, an

athletic and agile tight end, may be

poised for a bigger role to give the

Rams an option they didn’t capital-

ize on at key points last season, in-

cluding the Super Bowl loss where

he finished without a catch.

All of these adjustments could

hold the key to putting quarterback

Jared Goff in a position to fully

make the leap he showed indica-

tions of last season. There were

times when he was transcendent—

like when he threw for 465 yards

and five touchdowns in a win over

the Vikings, or when he outdueled

Patrick Mahomes in the record-set-

ting 54-50 Monday Night Football

win over the Chiefs. Goff also led

the NFC Championship comeback

against the Saints, which also in-

cluded the help of an infamously

missed penalty.

But McVay also saw indications

that some of these tweaks he’s

looking at now were necessary

even a year ago. Goff threw as

many touchdowns, six, as intercep-

tions over the season’s final five

weeks. Then, the Rams failed to

score a touchdown in the Super

Bowl where they lost to New Eng-

land 13-3.

“Hopefully,” McVay said, “we’ll

have some better answers than

what I did for our team last year.”

BYANDREWBEATON

Simone Biles can fly.

Until it’s proven

otherwise, I will re-

main convinced.

There’s too much evi-

dence it’s true, that

Biles can really fly, or at least

vault into the air and remain

there, briefly, magically, like no

one’s ever done.

That’s just the half of it, of

course. Did you see the video of

Biles’s floor routine at last week-

end’s U.S. national gymnastics

championships? Early in the rou-

tine, the 22-year-old from Houston

crosses the mat and launches into

what is known as a “triple twist-

ing double somersault,” a jaw-

dropping move in which she

flipped twice, rocketed off the

ground, spun her body, and really,

for a moment, looked as if she was

defying gravity.

She was flying. I don’t know

how else to put it.

It looked unprecedented be-

cause it is unprecedented. Nobody

in women’s gymnastics had ever

done anything like this—and, as

some observers have pointed out,

Biles may do this triple twist dou-

ble flip even better than the few

men who have done it, because of

her control and command, the way

she tucks her body through the

motion and nails the landing.

Look: I’m not going to pretend

to be an expert here. For exper-

tise, you’re going to have to turn

to my Journal colleague, Louise

Radnofsky, who really knows what

she’s talking about. I just know

that from my untrained eye, it

looked incredible, one of those

moments when an athlete does

something you’ve absolutely never

seen another human being ever

do.

Theydon’tevenhaveawayto

measure it. Louise wrote about

this, that once more, Biles—who

actually got off to an uncharacter-

istically bad start at nationals—is

redefining the boundaries of an

entire sport. There is already a

signature floor move named after

her—called a “Biles”—and there’s

a “Biles” on the vault as well. This

new floor move probably goes

No One Can Fly Like Simone Biles

GYMNASTICS|JASON GAY