The Los Angeles Rams' two coordinators are already being sized up by teams anticipating head-coaching vacancies in January 2026. Offensive coordinator Nate Scheelhaase, 33, and defensive coordinator Chris Shula, 36, are separately fielding informal interest from at least five NFL organizations mapping their post-2025 succession plans, according to league executives with knowledge of the conversations.
Scheelhaase joined the Rams staff in 2022 after three seasons as a Chargers assistant. He called plays for 22 games this season after Sean McVay handed him the sheet, a signal McVay himself received in Washington before his own hiring. Shula, grandson of the Hall of Fame coach, runs a defense that ranked eighth in EPA allowed per play despite losing Aaron Donald to retirement. His unit held opponents under 20 points in 11 of 17 games. The Rams finished 10-7 and reached the wild-card round.
The market mechanics matter because NFL teams no longer wait for Black Monday to begin their search. The informal vetting starts in November, intensifies during the playoffs, and crystallizes the week after the Super Bowl. Teams that missed the postseason use the extra weeks to build dossiers. A GM in the NFC told colleagues his owner asked for a shortlist in December, five weeks before the coach was actually dismissed. Scheelhaase and Shula are on multiple versions of that list.
What makes both coordinators attractive is the same thing that made McVay attractive in 2017: they are young, offense-or-defense specialists who learned under McVay's program discipline, and they come with no coordinator baggage from failed head-coaching tenures elsewhere. Scheelhaase's age—he would be among the three youngest head coaches hired in the last decade—also fits the ownership preference for long runway hires. The contract math works cleanly: a five-year deal signed in February 2026 locks a coach through his age-38 season, the prime window for second contracts.
The Rams face the same structural problem the Shanahan and Reid trees have faced for years. Losing one coordinator is manageable. Losing both in the same cycle creates succession risk McVay would need to solve while preparing for his own 2026 season. The Rams have $31 million in cap space projected for 2026, enough to retain Matthew Stafford on a restructured deal but not enough to overpay replacement coordinators in a bidding war with other staffs. McVay's own timeline matters here: he has discussed stepping away multiple times, and losing both coordinators might accelerate that calculus if he views 2026 as a rebuild year rather than a window year.
The teams showing early interest include two NFC franchises expecting ownership pressure on current regimes and one AFC club where the head coach is in a de facto contract year despite two seasons remaining. A fourth team, in the NFC South, already interviewed Shula for its defensive coordinator job in 2023 and views him as a head-coach candidate if its current staff doesn't reach the playoffs next season. The fifth is a West Coast organization that has quietly asked around about Scheelhaase's play-calling process and whether he actually designs the concepts or simply relays McVay's decisions. The answer—he does both, and McVay has stepped back from weekly game-planning—satisfied that team's concerns.
What happens next depends on whether the Rams extend either coordinator before the 2025 season. McVay signed his own extension in September 2022, a move that briefly removed him from the head-coaching speculation circuit. The Rams could offer Scheelhaase and Shula raises and title upgrades—assistant head coach designations that signal internal succession planning—but that rarely stops a coordinator from taking a head job. The real leverage is January 2026 timing: teams that win in the playoffs can delay their coordinators' interview windows, buying a few extra weeks to either promote from within or poach someone else's staff.
The case study is Mike McDaniel, who left the 49ers for Miami in February 2022 after San Francisco's NFC Championship loss. The 49ers replaced him with internal promotions and didn't miss a beat. The Rams have less internal depth—Scheelhaase and Shula were themselves external hires—but McVay's staff tree is deep enough that he could call five former assistants who are currently coordinators elsewhere. Whether he wants to rebuild his own staff for a third time in eight years is the real question.
The next milestone is May 2025, when NFL teams can formally request permission to interview coordinators for head-coaching jobs during the league's annual spring meeting window. That early window is mostly symbolic—real interviews happen in January—but it establishes the market publicly. If six or more teams request interviews with Scheelhaase or Shula during that window, the Rams will know they're managing a short-term asset, not a long-term one.
The takeaway
Two Rams coordinators are drawing 2026 head-coach interest now, forcing McVay to plan for dual-coordinator succession risk before next season starts.
los angeles ramscoaching carouselsean mcvayfront officesuccession planningnfl
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