Sean McVay, football robot, remembers every coverage the Chiefs threw at him late Monday night

Sean McVay has always been something of a football prodigy. The Rams made him the youngest head coach in modern NFL history when they tabbed him to replace Jeff Fisher, a jovial corpse who’d puppeteered the franchise Weekend at Bernie’s style to football purgatory from 2012-2016.

And on Monday night, after one of the greatest games in regular-season history, the 32-year-old showed exactly what makes him special — his ability to remember and dissect plays and strategies with shocking efficiency. Here he is breaking down the Kansas City coverage that his Rams exploited to score a game-winning touchdown with 1:49 remaining.

They were mixing in some two man and then going into a little bit of an invert ... I thought the one play to [Brandin] Cooks on the right sideline they they were in a two man, he hits him on an out route. You look at when [Jared Goff] let that thing go before [Chiefs cornerback Orlando] Scandrick could flip his eyes around, and then Brandin runs after the catch.

We had Tyler Higbee, Gerald Everett makes a play and then he finishes it off with a touchdown. So, it was a great job. He dropped the safety down in. [Goff] put it up and down and then Gerald took it, ends up, you know, got right down the sideline without stepping out of bounds. So many guys made plays today.

That’s a breathless McVay, breaking down the Chiefs’ defensive strategy with the excitement of a child rattling off the gifts he’d received at Christmas. And this statement didn’t come after McVay had broken down the game film or studied his team’s performance via replay. The savant coach was able to rattle off his opponent’s coverage schemes and pinpoint exactly how his third-year quarterback was able to exploit them moments after the most exhausting game of 2018.

McVay’s rise from fresh-out-of-college assistant to head coach of one of the NFL’s top teams has been fueled by a photographic memory that accesses and sorts plays in real time. He proved this during the offseason. Bryant Gumbel quizzed him on plays from the previous season, and McVay not only breaks down the play he called, but the action that preceded it, his motivation for calling the play, and its aftermath. It’s both impressive and slightly creepy.

His memory extends beyond 2017. Here he is bringing back plays from 2015 when he was offensive coordinator in Washington, even recalling the birth of Kirk Cousins’ “You like that!” meme in the process.

McVay’s brain is wrinkled with football memories, and he’s got access to that vivid recall with little to no delay. That’s incredible, and on Monday night he proved he doesn’t need replays or film sessions to show off this rapid response. We knew McVay was a walking warehouse of football knowledge when it comes to the plays he called coming into Week 11. Now we know he’s got his opponents’ coverage catalogued up there as well.