Sean McVay coaching tree to extend to a major college football program?

Former Rams assistant coach Jedd Fisch is rumored as the top candidate for the University of Washington

With many expecting Sean McVay’s coaching tree to grow again soon with if and when an NFL team hires Raheem Morris to be their next head coach, the L.A. Rams remarkable expansion of those branches could also reach one of the top college football programs in the country next: The University of Washington, this season’s runner-up in the national title game.

After losing head coach Kalen DeBoer to Alabama after Nick Saban’s retirement, the Washington Huskies have reportedly narrowed down their search to Jedd Fisch, a former offensive assistant under Sean McVay from 2017-2018.

If the Huskies do hire Fisch, that will give him one of the top programs in the country and arguably the best team on the west coast right now, in addition to these former McVay assistants in the NFL: Packers HC Matt LaFleur, Vikings HC Kevin O’Connell, Bengals HC Zac Taylor, and numerous offensive and defensive coordinators who were with the Rams at some point between 2017 and 2021. If Morris is hired next, that will make four former McVay assistants who are NFL head coaches and will even out the fact that the Chargers fired Brandon Staley.

Staley is the first head coach off of the McVay tree to be fired.

Fisch’s first NFL job came with the expansion Texans in 2002 as a defensive assistant, then he worked with the Ravens, Broncos, Vikings, and Seahawks before going back to college to be the OC at Miami. He then coached for the Jaguars, the Michigan Wolverines, and spent a year at UCLA prior to being hired by McVay as a senior offensive assistant on the 2018 Super Bowl Rams. He was the assistant offensive coordinator in 2019 prior to becoming the Patriots quarterbacks coach in 2020.

Fisch then made the leap to being Arizona’s head coach in 2021, taking over a program that has typically finished in the basement of the Pac-12 and had gone 5-7, 4-8, and 0-5 in the three seasons prior to his arrival. Fisch went 1-11 in his first season, improved to 5-7, and then this past season went 10-3 with a 7-2 conference record and a top-15 finish in the final CFP poll.

Washington, which has produced a few Rams players in the Les Snead era, including Greg Gaines and Taylor Rapp, is scrambling to replace DeBoer after their best season in 30 years. The Huskies went 14-0 until losing the national championship to Michigan. Their next best hope might be to do what a lot of NFL teams are doing…Ask “What would Sean McVay do?”