Super Bowl 2022: Rams coach Sean McVay wants to use past title loss to his advantage

LOS ANGELES – Having a freakily photographic memory like Sean McVay is generally a benefit. It allows him to recall situations from games played weeks, months, years ago, ones he was personally involved in and some he wasn’t. Names, faces, emotions, outcomes, he uses that information to formulate game plans and in-game decisions.

It’s also probably pretty neat for winning bar bets and providing cocktail party entertainment.

There is a curse to it, though. He doesn’t get to choose what he remembers, so it’s all there. Most of what stems from his five years as head coach of the Rams is good stuff, including 81 regular-season wins and six more in the postseason. But there are also bad memories that linger and rattle around in his soul.

Chief among them is Super Bowl LIII.

That was the game in which the Rams lost to the Patriots, 13-3. The game in which the young wunderkind coach was schooled by Bill Belichick and the Rams’ high-octane offense was held to a field goal. It was a game that McVay said, in the immediate aftermath, that he was "outcoached," and later noted how "humbled" he was by it.

It’s the game he wants to forget but can’t.

So three years later, all he can do is use it. He’ll try to make the hurt and the pain work for him as he brings the Rams back to the Super Bowl.

"I think what you do to get over it is you look at yourself in the mirror, you take accountability, and you keep it moving," McVay said this week. "As a competitor you have to be able to handle those tough moments, and I’ll never run away from the fact that I didn’t do a good enough job for our team within what I feel like my role and responsibility is to these guys."

This time there is no Hall of Fame football robot coaching on the other sideline but instead one of his proteges in Zac Taylor. The quarterback he is opposing, Joe Burrow, is the hottest thing in the NFL right now, but far from as accomplished as Tom Brady was when the Rams faced him three years ago.

"I think it was a blessing to be in that game," McVay said. "Certainly, you don’t forget about it. You want to be able to do better. But I don’t think you press when you do get another opportunity to be in this moment and this stage again. I think you look at it as a blessing, you take some of those learning lessons, you apply them, and let’s go cut it loose and play to the best of our ability. I’ll coach to the best of my ability as well."

This year’s Rams are the best team NFL money can buy, a roster built to win now with Super Bowl-or-bust additions that began a year ago with the trade for quarterback Matthew Stafford and continued throughout the season with the acquisitions of Sony Michel, Von Miller, Odell Beckham Jr., and, most recently and perhaps most surprisingly, Eric Weddle. A loss to the Bengals on Sunday would put a serious dent in McVay’s short but already impressive legacy in the NFL.

The fact that McVay still has a chance to become the youngest head coach to win a Super Bowl title on Sunday at age 36 only speaks to how young he was when he tried to do it three years ago. Maybe, too, how much he has learned and grown since then.

"I think you say, OK, if you had it differently, what are the things that you learn as far as the decision-making, the adjustability, the ability to be totally in the moment during the game and be able to make those adjustments quicker than what we were able to do and how you approach the two weeks of preparation?" he said. "But whether it was a game like that or whether it was a game from a couple weeks ago, you’re always trying to learn, you’re always trying to evolved, and I think you want to be able to learn from previous experiences but not allow it to inhibit your ability to be able to move forward."

That, after all, is the balance between having complete recall and shackled by it.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.