Life cycling

 I don't know what Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay decides to do after today, but I do know I've never seen anything quite like this. Thirty-six seems a trifle young to be having a mid-life crisis, after all.

And yet, hell, why not?

This is a question too few people ask themselves these days, and we're a poorer society for it. In the Blob's humble opinion, America on the whole works too many hours for too little reward with too little mulling of what the heck we're doing and why we're doing it. What used to be defined career tracks in a better America have become just a hamster-wheel grind for the Man in too many cases.

 The Man gets absurdly rich; the hamsters get laid off so the Man can get even more absurdly rich. And so it goes, and so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say.

This doesn't exactly describe where Sean McVay is right now, but it does provide some context. He was one of the brightest young minds in the National Football League when the Rams made him their head coach in 2017, and five years later he was won the Super Bowl at 35. Now what?

Now McVay apparently will take some time off to consider that. If his career trajectory so far suggests he sticks around for the next 20 or 30 years to become some Rushmore figure in the NFL coaching pantheon, it's only a suggestion for McVay. That sets him apart from virtually everyone else who's ever trundled down this particular pike.

Hard to imagine a young Vince Lombardi or Tom Landry or Don Shula taking time off to do a little life cycling at 36, after all. But this is a different time and a different America, and McVay is a different cat. And good on him for it.

In the last year, he's won a Super Bowl and gotten married and had goo-gobs of dough thrown at him to come sit behind an analyst's desk and jawbone. It's a lot to process, and so McVay is going to take some time to process it. 

This indicates he's a man with some perspective, and not your average hamster. There's no hamster wheel quite like the NFL coaching hamster wheel, after all. Excessive scurrying is not only encouraged; it's not even considered scurrying. Which ain't normal, unless you consider it normal to sleep in your office so you can rise at zero dark thirty every morning to watch more game tape.

McVay may or may not have done his share of that, or something like it. He's also watched it go for naught this season as half his team got hurt and the Rams have limped to a 5-11 record going into the season finale at Seattle. That alone might make a man question why he's grinding away at this endless wheel.

That McVay's actually asking that question, apparently, sets him apart. And makes you think he might be, you know, normal, even if his profession isn't.