Sean McVay as the Redskins head coach never could have realistically happened

One of the common refrains among the Redskins fan base is that the team should have fired Jay Gruden to hire Sean McVay as their head coach. While that may be nice in theory, it never really could have happened.

We love to play the “what if” game when covering sports. There are always questions that never have answers, and it’s interesting to hypothesize what might have happened if one thing changed. For the Redskins, there are a lot of these burning questions.

What if Robert Griffin III never suffered that ACL tear in the playoffs?

What if the team had traded Kirk Cousins instead of letting him walk in free agency?

What if Sean Taylor hadn’t been murdered?

These questions will never have answers, but they will always be thought about by Redskins fans, nonetheless.

However, in recent weeks, a new “what if” has reared its head once again. This one surrounding current Rams head coach and former Redskins offensive coordinator, Sean McVay. The Rams have qualified for the Super Bowl in McVay’s second season as head coach. That has left many bemoaning the fact that McVay isn’t with the Redskins, and has led many to say that the ‘Skins should have fired Jay Gruden to promote McVay to head coach.

In theory, that sounds like a great move. In practice, it never could have happened.

When McVay took the Rams’ head coaching job just after the 2016 season concluded, the Redskins were seemingly in solid shape on offense. They had one of the league’s best offensive units and were coming off their first back-to-back winning seasons since 1996-1997. Gruden was seemingly improving the team year-to-year, and while they had a crushing defeat in the 2016 finale in a win-and-in game, there was no way to justify parting with Gruden at the time. He was the first coach since Norv Turner to lead the team to back-to-back winning seasons. With some defensive upgrades, the team was considered to be a potential playoff contender.

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It’s easy to say that, in retrospect, McVay did have a big role in the Redskins’ success on offense. And he is currently a better head coach than Gruden. That said, not only would it be impossible to justify firing Gruden, but it also would have been difficult to get McVay to take the job.

It can be uncomfortable for coordinators to be elevated in the wake of firing a head coach, and there’s no guarantee McVay would have taken the job, as ESPN’s John Keim has pointed out. McVay had long worked with Gruden, and it’s unlikely that he would have been happy to overtake one of his mentors, especially considering Gruden’s relative success at the time.

Essentially, the Redskins were always going to lose McVay. Even though they may have known what they had — a talented offensive wunderkind who had the makings of the next genius coach at the NFL level — there was no way to smoothly transition out of Gruden and to McVay. It may have been different if Gruden had produced a couple of lackluster seasons, but he hadn’t. And with McVay getting head coaching offers, there simply was no way to keep him around.

Also, it’s worth noting that McVay was just 31 at the time he was hired by the Rams. That was a risky move on their part to add such a young coach in a major role, so it’s not like the Redskins passed on a sure thing.

It’s fun to think about the possibility of McVay coaching the Redskins. And in hindsight, he probably would have been a better option than Gruden. Still, there was no way for this to ever happen, so it will always remain a “what if.”

Perhaps McVay will return to the Redskins someday. But for now, we’re wishing him the best of luck in the Super Bowl against the Patriots.