Though Sean McVay traveled to Arizona separately from the Rams because he’d been feeling under the weather late in the week, Los Angeles still thumped the division-rival Cardinals 45-17 on Sunday.
It was an effective bounce-back performance after the Week 13 loss to the Panthers, which McVay noted that he could sense coming during the week.
“I thought the guys did a great job,” McVay said postgame. “This is a mentally tough group. This is a resilient group. You have to earn it. I thought they had a great week of preparation. I thought even just the maturity of — even some of the stuff where I wasn’t around a little bit, just because of what I was dealing with — just the way they handle it. These are grown men and they do such a great job.
“This is a player-led team. I can’t say enough about what a great job our coaches do [and] I don’t mean that to be minimizing them at all, but we have a lot of really great leaders in that locker room. I think they take the ownership, initiative of what we want to be about and how you ultimately want to be able to respond, not react, when we do have some of those setbacks. This is exactly in alignment with what we wanted and now we have to continue to build on it.”
As for his absence, McVay said that his illness hit him Friday night after it went around his family at home.
“Just wanted to be smart [and] not give ourselves a chance of giving it to anybody else because of how contagious this can be,” McVay said. “Hopefully I didn’t by passing out game balls, trying to do the fist bump as much as you can. You realize how out of the norm it is for me — I’m a big hugger so hopefully I’ll feel better and can get back to being normal with these guys because I don’t like this. I felt good. I don’t want to get too descriptive with you but we fought through it and ultimately, the guys did a great job. I’m really proud of them.
“I think this is a cool reflection of the coaching staff in general too. It was a good step in the right direction and now we have to continue to build on this.”
