Sean McVay wants Odell Beckham Jr. back in L.A.

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Rams receiver Odell Beckham Jr. tore an ACL during the Super Bowl, throwing a major wrench into his effort to land a new contract for 2022. That’s a major advantage for the Rams, if they want to keep him. By all appearances, they do.

Appearing recently with Adam Schien of SiriusXM Mad Dog Radio, coach Sean McVay made it clear that the Rams want Odell.

“We definitely want to get Odell back,” McVay said. He separately added that he’s “hopeful that there will be many more years working together.”

The most immediate question is whether 2022 will be one of those years. The last time he tore the ACL in his left knee, Beckham wasn’t cleared to play for 11 months. A similar timeline would result in Beckham missing most if not all of the 2022 regular season.

Hopefully, the Rams will re-sign him before he’s cleared to play. Hopefully, they’ll reward him financially for the contributions he made, and for the mature, professional approach he took to his time with the team. Wisely, the Rams tied his incentives to organizational goals and not personal ones; as the team won, Beckham got paid. Ultimately, he added $3 million to his 2021 compensation.

It becomes harder to properly compensate him now, given the injury. The Rams may be tempted to wait for him to be heathy. They shouldn’t. They should get him signed, sending a clear message to Beckham and the rest of the locker room that contributions to championships won’t be forgotten. That readily-available leverage won’t be used against valued members of the organization.

As previously explained, Beckham could be out of luck when it comes to injury protection for 2022, since he had a one-year contract. Unless pending arbitration in a different case results in a finding that an injury occurring before the remaining years of a contract void, Beckham could end up getting nothing from anyone until he receives full clearance to perform.

The right thing for the Rams to do would be to forget about that and to give Beckham a fair contract that properly acknowledges the things he has done, and the things he can still do. He was, frankly, the best offensive player on the field before the non-contact injury in Super Bowl LVI, and but for the tearing of the ligament (possibly thanks to the artificial surface onto which his foot planted), Beckham could have been the MVP of the game.