BREAKING NEWS: A new coach has been hired by the Los Angeles Rams.
It is not surprising that the Washington Commanders have asked permission to speak with the Los Angeles Rams’ defensive coordinator because Raheem Morris has a stronger resume to become a head coach this time around than when he was hired to be the Buccaneers head coach in 2009. Morris has a wild card game this week against the Detroit Lions to prepare for, but Morris will undoubtedly interview with Washington when the rules permit him to, and Sean McVay will undoubtedly grant the request.
After the divisional round of the playoffs, teams are allowed to hold in-person head coach interviews. Last year, the NFL moved up the date of these interviews by one week to allow coordinators like Morris to concentrate on the postseason.
Morris has many attributes that his rivals for head coaching positions will lack. He was an assistant under Jon Gruden in Tampa Bay in the 2000s, just like McVay and many other notable coaches, and later under Mike Shanahan in Washington in the early 2010s.
When he was only 33 or 35 years old, he spent three years as Tampa Bay’s head coach, from 2009 to 2011. Morris’ second season with the Bucs ended with a 10-6 record.
In 2020, he served as the Falcons’ temporary head coach following Dan Quinn’s midseason firing.
He has coached both offense and defense, having worked with Shanahan and Gruden on defense and secondary, and Quinn on offense and receivers. In 2020, he made his debut as a defensive coordinator. Two years later, in 2021, he was brought in to take Brandon Staley’s place, giving him four seasons in a position he had never held before.
Morris, a Super Bowl-winning coordinator, took over the least expensive and experienced defense team in the NFL in 2023 and helped Los Angeles qualify for the postseason by ranking mediocre in the majority of categories, despite the Rams’ lackluster defense. Morris’s mediocre defense with this team is probably more impressive than his top-5 defense with a group of players who average $20 million annually and first-round picks.
Throughout the Rams defense, Aaron Donald is the only player who was selected in the first or second round.
Does Morris, though, wish to travel to Washington?
Morris may find a selling point in the new ownership that did not exist under Dan Snyder’s tenure as team owner. With the second overall pick in the draft, the commanders are expected to select a quarterback, which will attract a lot of potential players who hear they have a vote in the decision.
Washington reportedly asked to speak with Ravens DC Mike MacDonald and assistant head coach Anthony Weaver, as well as Lions offensive lineman Ben Johnson and defensive end Aaron Glenn. Others, no doubt, but it appears that Washington is not concentrating only on offensive prospects at this time, contrary to what many expected teams to be preoccupied with.
The Rams will receive two third-round compensatory draft selections in 2024 and 2025 as a minority candidate if a team decides to select Morris as their head coach. When the Lions hired general manager Brad Holmes in this manner, the Rams received two third-round picks, one of which was used to select linebacker Ernest Jones.
