Jaguars coach Liam Coen worked three stints for the Los Angeles Rams.
Jaguars coach Liam Coen worked three stints for the Los Angeles Rams and coach Sean McVay.
- Coen’s career was significantly influenced by McVay, for whom he worked with the Los Angeles Rams starting in 2018.
- As a young coach, Coen was tasked with drawing all of McVay’s pass plays, giving him unique insight into the offensive innovator’s system.
- Coen is now part of a successful coaching tree that stems from McVay, which also includes head coaches like Zac Taylor and Matt LaFleur.
So you’re Liam Coen during the 2018 football season.
You’re 32 years old. You’re living on the West Coast for the first time. You’re in the NFL after coaching eight years at four colleges. And you’re working for Los Angeles Rams coach/offensive innovator Sean McVay.
Your task: Make McVay’s passing game make sense via hundreds of computer-drawn play sheets.
What a challenge and gift.
“That opportunity gave me access to Sean that maybe not every single coach on the staff had,” Coen remembered.
Seven years later, that opportunity helped Coen get hired as the Jaguars’ coach and Sunday in London, it is student (Coen) vs. teacher (McVay).
This won’t be some kind of revenge game for Coen, who started as the Rams’ assistant receivers coach and rose to offensive coordinator (he had three stints with the Rams) before leaving for Tampa Bay and his first chance at calling NFL plays. This is about the 4-2 Jaguars wanting to avoid entering their bye week with a two-game losing streak.
Coen’s chief football mentor is his father, who coached him in high school. But after that, McVay tops the list of influencers. But who wouldn’t want to win a match-up against an old boss?
“I think it’s a fun narrative, but it’s still the Rams vs. the Jaguars,” McVay told reporters Wednesday before batting practice, er, football practice at the Rams’ Oriole Park at Camden Yards headquarters in Baltimore. “You can see the identity and the personality of the team in a lot of ways is reflective of the good traits Liam has.”
Drawing plays tedious process
Coen was responsible for the Rams’ pass drawings on a software system called Visio.
How tedious is learning Visio? I got on YouTube this week to watch a beginner’s guide to drawing plays. One play lasted 57 minutes. It was confusing for those of us (re: me) who aren’t crazy about drawing squares, circles, semi-circles and rectangles or straight, diagonal and curled lines. The process was time-consuming but instrumental to Coen’s growth as a coach.
“You talk about it to young coaches, ‘Learn Visio, learn how to draw,’” Coen said. “If you can draw, you may always have a job and that opportunity (with the Rams) was always really cool for me.”
(Assistant receivers coach Tyler Tettleton draws the passing plays for the Jaguars.)
Coen telling this story began Monday when I asked him, upon joining the Rams from 2018 from Maine, what project McVay gave him that told him, “Hey, this is a guy who will really help me develop as a coach.”
Coen did the drawings for three years.
“When you’re responsible to draw the passes, you’ve got to hear it from Sean’s mouth in terms of the details, the precision, the yardage, the depth and the ‘why’ (of each play),” Coen said. “You’re getting an inside look at the ‘why’ behind every pass play.”
The “why” is a staple word for any coach in general and play-caller in particular. Players at this level know the game. They want to know “why” this is a zone beater or a man beater, is a clear-out route or a downfield shot, etc. Why … will … this … play … work?
As Coen pointed out, every team runs the same routes, it’s about how they set those routes up via formation and pre-snap shifts/motions.
“Everybody runs these plays, but the detail in which I learned from (McVay) because of my access to working him (was beneficial),” Coen said.
Willing student of McVay
Coen was a willing student … and a quiet student.
“I wasn’t really saying anything, really,” he said with a laugh. “I’m just sitting in there, Sean is teaching, he’s coaching, he’s up on the whiteboard, he’s showing me clips and film examples so that I can draw those plays.”
After that meeting, Coen would return to his office and pull the video clips that would serve as equal parts examples for him to draw on Visio and be presented to the players during positional sessions.
“Now, it wasn’t always a fun job,” Coen said. “You’re down on the clock rushing to meetings at 9 a.m. with the pass drawings you just finished up.”
Coen was the assistant receivers coach in 2018-19 and the assistant quarterbacks coach in 2020. In those three years, the Rams went 13-3 (lost in Super Bowl), 9-7 and 10-6 (lost in divisional round), ranked second, 11th and 22nd in points per game and second, seventh and 11th in yards per game. After the 2020 season, Coen left for Kentucky to call plays and the Rams traded quarterback Jared Goff to Detroit for quarterback Matthew Stafford.
Once Coen got to Kentucky for two one-year tours and last year with the Buccaneers, he put his own stamp on an offense, something McVay has noticed.
“He’s done an excellent job of evolving, bringing his offense to life, what he wants to be able to do and what he wants their defense and their (special) teams to look like,” McVay said.
Coen is a part of the McVay Coaching Tree that includes Zac Taylor (Cincinnati), Matt LaFleur (Green Bay) and Kevin O’Connell (Minnesota). McVay himself is from the Mike Shanahan Tree having worked for him in Washington.
If either of them called defense, then this would be a really spicy storyline this week of wit matching. Instead, it’s just cool.
“What I do know,” McVay said, “is you’re going against a (team) that you know is really well-coached.”
O’Halloran can be reached at [email protected]
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