To fix the ‘Zachwards Pass’, Rams coach Sean McVay proposes pretty much everything

A week ago, we learned that the Los Angeles Rams wanted to remedy the play they still hold responsible for ruining their season when they played the Seattle Seahawks in Week 16. I said then there were two likely paths the Rams would take to propose a change.

Well, I was wrong. It turns out there weren’t two options to choose from, there were three and a half, and Sean McVay proposed all of them.

Because more is more.

Here is a slight oversimplification of the proposals:

• A 40-second maximum timer for the initiation of any booth review
• Any successful reversal of a play from incomplete pass to backwards pass with recovery, would be placed “at the spot of the backward pass.” It is unclear if this means the origin of throw or point of contact with ground
• Adding the two-point conversion to the list of 4th down, and final two minutes of a half, wherein the ball cannot be advanced on a fumble
• (the half) in order to get here, a backwards pass that is deflected by either team and recovered by the offense will be treated as a fumble

Can’t fault a guy for being thorough I suppose.

“If it doesn’t go through, I’m not losing any sleep over it,” McVay told reporters on Tuesday. “It was just because it was an impactful play in the season. I think my feeling is even if I was on the other side, those are things that I think we would probably agree should fall under the same bucket as that. You have to write it in a way that makes it a little bit more complicated. Long story short, we were trying to get that play to be falling under the same parameters of not being able to advance a fumble in those types of situations even though it wasn’t considered a fumble because it was a backwards pass.”

My personal take is that had McVay – or whoever it was for that matter, but McVay is the spokesperson at the moment – played it a little more cool, this could have had a strong chance of success. The timer alone might have done it. But this is quite a rework, and three-quarters of the teams have to sign off on this for it to go through.