Sean McVay not happy with first Rams-Raiders practice: ‘Didn’t like how sloppy it felt’

Sean McVay was critical of how sloppy the Rams’ first practice with the Raiders was due to “unnecessary stuff.”

The Rams had a visitor in Thousand Oaks on Wednesday morning, hosting the Raiders for a joint practice at their facility. It was the first of two practices to be held by the teams but Sean McVay is looking for Thursday’s session to be much better than Day 1.

With scuffles breaking out a couple of times and plenty of stops in play, McVay didn’t like how sloppy the practice was. He was fairly candid in his meeting with the media afterwards, pointing to “unnecessary stuff” that disrupted the practice.

“I didn’t like how sloppy it felt overall,” he said. “There was a lot of breaks in the action because of unnecessary stuff. It wasn’t exclusive to one side or the other, but for us to get the work that I know Coach Gruden and his group wants, and for us and our group, we have got to clean up some of the mechanics. I have to do a better job of managing some of the things as well. There’s going to be a lot of good things that we can learn from, but it just didn’t feel good the way that it ended just based on a lot of unnecessary things that took away from football. There are still some things I know we can take away and be able to learn from it, but there were a lot of unnecessary things that I know both of us want to be able to eliminate, to try to get better and we’ll figure out what that looks like for tomorrow.”

The first incident happened when Jalen Ramsey put a big hit on Josh Jacobs, which the Raiders took issue with. Then later on, Richie Incognito and Sebastian Joseph-Day got into it, leading to a much bigger skirmish on the field.

McVay puts a lot of value in joint practices because he doesn’t play his starters in the preseason, so these sessions almost replace preseason games for the Rams’ top players. So for him to be so critical of how the practice went, it’s clear he doesn’t feel the Rams got enough out of it.

He’s going to look back at the film from practice and figure out where things can be cleaned up before Thursday’s session, hoping Day 2 can be better than Wednesday’s practice was.

“I’ve got to really go back and look at it. I think part of it is how we structure the practice to get the things that we want out of it,” he said. “I don’t want to make it like it’s negative, like we didn’t get anything out of it. There was a lot of things that we can take away. I just felt like for the most part, when we’ve worked with them previously and then when we’ve worked with other clubs, there hasn’t been as many things that have taken away from just the football that it felt like to me. Sometimes when you’re fresh off the field and you’re like, ‘Ah, maybe it wasn’t as bad as you think,’ but there was just a lot of things that I think we can clean up. And I think it starts with me.”

The Rams and Raiders will play a preseason game on Saturday night at SoFi Stadium, so hopefully calmer heads will prevail before that matchup.