Sean McVay’s Way Could Be The Highway As The Los Angeles Rams Coach Considers Stepping Away

The Los Angeles Rams had their exit interviews on Monday and now many wonder if coach Sean McVay is leaving.

McVay is coy about his future in the wake of the Rams’ disastorous season, which mercifully came to end on Sunday with yet another loss, this one to the Seattle Seahawks.

It was telling that the 71-year-old Pete Carroll, the Seahawks’ coach, seemed to have more life, more enthusiasm and more fun than the beaten-down, 36-year-old McVay.

One year after winning the Super Bowl, McVay is giving every indication that he’s looking forward not to the offseason, but to a season or two off from coaching in the NFL.

“(I’ll) take the next couple of days to really be able to reflect and (have) a lot of conversations that will dictate and determine the decision that’s best for me and my family,’’ McVay said.

McVay’s impact on the Rams, since being hired after the 2016 season, is hard to overstate. L.A. had produced 13 straight seasons without a winning record before McVay replaced Jeff Fisher, and McVay took the Rams to two Super Bowls in six years.

When selected by L.A., McVay, at 30, was the youngest NFL coach in the modern era. He went on to become the youngest head coach to win a Super Bowl, appear in multiple Super Bowls and be named the NFL coach of the year.

If he’s done with the Rams, McVay flees with a 60-38 (.612) regular-season record and by winning seven of his 10 postseason games.

Why would McVay, who signed an extension through 2026 before the year that sportico.com estimates is worth $14 million annually, consider fleeing?

Maybe McVay isn’t up to the rebuilding job that awaits the team after it finished 5-12. The Rams are always up against the salary cap and that’s true next year. Plus, with their lack of draft capital, it could be a slow rebuild.

Or possibly McVay needs some time after undergoing some significant changes away from the field. McVay lost his grandfather recently and his new wife’s family remains in Ukraine, where it wrestles with the terrors from a war on a daily basis.

Then there’s the option of working as a television analyst, which pays as much as coaching with not as many of the headaches and heartaches. It was reported by the New York Post after last season that Amazon was offering McVay a $100 million deal for five years.

Remember, McVay hemmed-and-hawed about coming back last year in the weeks after the Rams defeated the Cincinnati Bengals for their first Super Bowl title in L.A.

“This has been years,’’ McVay said of him contemplating a drastic change. “This is not a new thing.’’

McVay reiterated that he enjoys the chess match of positioning a team to win, but it sounds as if his get-up-and-go, well, it got-up-and-left.

“Do I love coaching?’’ McVay asked. “Hell yeah.

“Have there been a lot of things that have made it a challenge and a strain because of my own self-inflicted things? No question about it.’’

The burning question in L.A., other that how much punch the latest round of storms will produce, is if McVay will be on the Rams’ sidelines for next year’s opener.

While McVay won’t say it yet, we will: not a chance.

The Rams’ slogan was to “Run it Back” this season. Instead, they lost more games than any other defending Super Bowl champion and are now they appeared poised to lose their dynamic coach.