No one can say the Browns took the easy road in the preseason.
It would be absolutely no surprise at all if their last two opponents, the Los Angeles Rams on Saturday at Huntington Bank Field in the finale and the Philadelphia Eagles eight days before that, end up meeting in the NFC Championship Game in about 4-1/2 months with a spot in the Super Bowl on the line. The Eagles are the defending Super Bowl champions, having held off the Rams 28-22 in the divisional round last year in a game that went right down to the wire. It was the Eagles’ second trip to the Super Bowl in three years.
As for the Rams, they have made the playoffs in four of the previous five seasons, winning the Super Bowl in 2021.
Along with the Eagles’ Nick Sirianni, a former star wide receiver at Mount Union, the Rams’ Sean McVay is among the best young head coaches in the NFL. In McVay’s first eight seasons with the Rams, they have missed the postseason just twice. Before McVay arrived in 2017, the Rams had gone 12 straight seasons without a playoff berth.
The 39-year-old McVay, with an overall career record of 88-57 (.607) is a Dayton native who, again like the 44-year-old Sirianni, played as a wide receiver at a Ohio college, Miami.
McVay’s late grandfather, John McVay, was the head coach of the New York Giants in the late 1970s and then spent 20 years as an executive with the Rams’ longtime archrivals, the San Francisco 49ers, working there with former Browns president and Youngstown native, Carmen Policy. McVay played for Massillon High School and ended up coaching several Ohio high schools. He was born in 1931 in Bellaire, Ohio, exactly eight months before iconic Browns radio play-by-play announcer Gib Shanley was born there.
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Steve King
