Sean McVay takes blame for pair of ill-advised…

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It’s a good thing the Rams didn’t need to take any late timeouts on Sunday against the 49ers. The Rams had none, because coach Sean McVay activated the replay process through a couple of ill-advised challenges.

On Monday, McVay took the blame for having the red flags backfire on him.

“So, the accountability lies with me,” McVay told reporters. “The first one with the quarterback sneak, it was not a great decision by me. It was kind of one of those [where] you’re hopeful, you see the side shot of it. Going back to Arizona, where we ended up challenging the one on the QB sneak, you’re kind of hopeful that if they give you the top down shot that maybe it goes through. But that one was totally on me. And then the other one, it looked like it was kind of a bang-bang play. In the flow of the game, there was a possibility that we thought there was a fumble there. [I would] do that one a little bit differently, but ultimately those decisions are my responsibility.

“I’ve gotten great information all year. Those guys do a great job. In those instances yesterday [it] didn’t work out, but there’s nobody that’s responsible other than myself. . . . [Y]ou got to be able to learn from it. Fortunately, it didn’t hurt us. But it is important to be able to have those timeouts in your back pocket if you need those and being a little bit smarter with those challenges that was something I didn’t do a great job for us with yesterday.”

Usually, a head coach hears a crush of voices in his head when it’s truly clear and obvious that the ruling on the field was wrong, based on the initial post-play looks. When it’s close, the coach hears crickets.

If someone gave McVay bad information on Sunday, he didn’t throw them under the bus publicly. Privately, however, the Rams need to shore up their approach to using those challenges. Getting it wrong results in lost timeouts, and having those timeouts can be the difference between the Cowboys (who had none) running out of time against the 49ers and the Chiefs (who had all three) getting into field goal range against the Bills with only 13 seconds on the clock.