NBC Sports’ Jason Garrett: How McVay Will Handle Rams’ 17-0 Expectations

Rich brought up the phrase Nick Saban made famous, rat poison, and asked Jason Garrett what Sean McVay is supposed to do with a fan base already saying 17-0 out loud.

Garrett did not have to reach for a reference point.

"I worked for Nick Saban for 2 years and I heard a lot of those rat poison speeches," Garrett said.

The setup is real enough. The Rams return essentially everyone from a season that ended in the NFC Championship game, a Super Bowl they could have made. Myles Garrett is now on the roster. Aaron Donald, as Rich put it, could be in the ether. That is the kind of roster that generates a specific and dangerous type of chatter.

Garrett's point was that the noise problem does not care which direction the noise runs.

"There's a lot of noise around the team, and typically when people talk about noise, it's negative," he told Rich. "But that positive noise is a challenge as well."

He would know. Garrett pointed back to the Cowboys Super Bowl teams of the '90s, where winning one and then winning a couple of them meant there was suddenly a whole category of stuff to contend with that had nothing to do with football.

His answer for McVay is the same answer Saban would give, and Garrett said so without pretending otherwise.

"Get the right people together and do things the right way each and every day and focus on that and the results will come," Garrett said, describing the process language he absorbed working for Saban. "I think lock in on that, double down on that."

What makes it more than coach speak, and Garrett openly admitted he was about to give Rich all the coach speak, is his read on who is actually in that Rams locker room. He believes McVay has the right kind of guys, players who will do anything they can to win, and that when a group is focused on that instead of individual accolades, it has a chance.

The rest is just surviving the calendar. Garrett laid out what the next several months look like inside a building carrying that much expectation, and it is not subtle.

"There's going to be a lot of noise over the course of five or six months and 17 games," he said. "When they win, it won't be they won by enough. And when they lose, the sky'll be falling."

That is the trap. A team picked to go undefeated does not get graded on wins. It gets graded on margin, and then on catastrophe. Garrett's prescription is to eliminate the noise, focus on yourselves, and focus on each day, and his confidence comes from the belief that McVay has already built a program on exactly those things.

"Obviously, fantastic coach and a fantastic leader," Garrett said. "It's an amazing program."

Rich closed by pushing for something the audience clearly wants, which is Saban himself sitting down on Garrett's podcast. Garrett did not hesitate.

"We'll get that done."

Rich suggested it might need to be a special two-hour episode. Coach to coach. Given how much of Saban's language still lives in Garrett's head all these years later, two hours might not be enough.