How Rams’ Steve Avila’s leadership makes him right fit at center
It was a hot August afternoon in 2022, the Fort Worth air heavy with humidity. TCU was a week into training camp and had just finished a practice. And Steve Avila was not happy.
Avila had gone through a lot during his five seasons with the Horned Frogs. More losing seasons than expected when he committed out of nearby South Grand Prairie High. So much that head coach Gary Patterson, the man with a statue outside the stadium, had been replaced following the previous season.
And after a week of good practices, the senior was dismayed by what he had seen that day. Teammates missing assignments, jumping offsides, allowing sacks. Avila couldn’t let it stand.
“Steve got the team together and ripped everybody and said, ‘This isn’t the standard. This is not what we’re here to do,’” head coach Sonny Dykes recalled. “He really challenged all the players and we didn’t have another bad practice the rest of the year. That was one of those moments where as a coach I thought, ‘OK, this has a chance to be a good football team.’”
The old sports maxim goes, “Good teams are led by coaches, great teams are led by players.” That TCU team went on to reach pinnacles no other group of Horned Frogs had, making it all the way to the national championship game for the first time in program history.
Looking back on it, Dykes views that post-practice speech from Avila as a turning point, especially coming from a player who didn’t usually speak up in front of the team. Avila, on the other hand, gets a little sheepish when it’s brought up.
“My emotions got there. That really doesn’t happen. When I look back in hindsight, I probably could have spoken a little bit differently, more of a leadership role where I’m not screaming at everybody,” Avila said. “I think that was honestly one of the first moments that I got out of my shell and into a leadership role. I do feel like after that moment I gained a little bit of respect from everybody and I felt like a lot of people jumped on board with what we were trying to do.”
Entering his second season with the Rams, Avila will be asked to step into more of a leadership role. After Avila played every snap at left guard as a rookie, the Rams signed free agent Jonah Jackson with the idea of moving Avila to center. It’s a position that carries some inherent leadership responsibilities, helping to get the offense’s blocking assignments set prior to the snap.
It’s a job that Avila’s coaches and teammates believe he’s ready for.
Familiar territory
This isn’t the first time Avila has played center, nor the first time he’s made a position switch for the benefit of his team.
His first four years at TCU, Avila played center. But shortly after Dykes was hired, he recruited his old center from SMU, Alan Ali, across county lines to Fort Worth and kicked Avila out to guard.
“He never blinked,” Dykes said. “I remember kind of talking to him before and going, ‘There’s a possibility this might happen and we’re doing it because we think it’s going to make us better.’ He said, ‘Coach, all I care about is the team and whatever’s going to make us better, I’m for it.’”
Still, there’s a difference between playing any position at the collegiate level and in the NFL. A year ago, Avila tried to learn center simultaneously with left guard in case he was called upon to move inside, but quickly abandoned the effort as he realized how complex learning one position as a pro was. But he was able to glean some knowledge from playing alongside Coleman Shelton and Brian Allen as a rookie.
Beyond the obvious of snapping the ball and building a rapport with Matthew Stafford in that area, center also provides a new challenge given its proximity to the line of scrimmage, which alters an offensive lineman’s technique.
“That neutral zone is even smaller, that amount of space between you and the defensive linemen in front of you,” Rams offensive line coach Ryan Wendell said. “So it’s just a little bit of a different timing issue but just like guards, centers are expected to set the depth of the pocket on the inside and to move defenders in the run game. So there’s a lot of carryover for Steve, there’s just smaller details that he’s been working on.”
The more complicated aspect of Avila’s new job to work on during the offseason and in training camp is a center’s pre-snap reads, identifying the looks from the defensive front and getting the offensive line on the same page in terms of blocking assignments.
This can be difficult to work on in practice when you go up against your own base defense over and over again. You know what you’re seeing because you’ve seen it so many times.
Avila finds this is when positional meetings and film study are most beneficial to him. And he’s borrowed a trick from receiver Cooper Kupp, too, to help him prepare for the season.
“In meetings, I feel like I get into my own world. Like, it’s so weird. I think Coop talked about how he runs routes in his head. And I do the same thing like mentally with trying to see what I would get during a certain play,” Avila explained. “I try my best to know what Im supposed to do. And if I don’t, that’s when I open my book up and go over it again, because I don’t want to mess up when I’m out there.”
“I think he’s done a great job. It’s not something that … night and day, you come in, you play guard and then you try to move the center and it’s going be like this,” Stafford said with a snap his fingers. “It’s a process, but is he picking it up? Is he owning it? Absolutely. I’m excited and obviously the physical talent is through the roof, so I’m excited to work with him. He’s been great so far.”
Speaking up
Avila is a gregarious presence in the Rams’ locker room. He rarely passes someone without some kind of personal interaction. This includes staffers outside of the coaching staff, many of whom he greets with a hug or thanks for their contributions to the Rams in ways big and small.
When Avila learned the team had a secondary office in Agora Hills, he made a point to show up weekly. Sometimes he brought donuts, other times he hopped on the phone and called season-ticket holders. He showed up dressed as Santa Claus to the Rams’ front office Christmas party and passed out candy canes. When he learned that a member of the Rams’ video staff had bruises on her shoulder from carrying her camera around, he bought a protective pad for her.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when head coach Sean McVay talked with Avila about his transition to center, he told the second-year player that he believed the position change would bring out his inherent leadership abilities.
“I think he’s got a nice way about himself. He’s refreshingly secure in himself. He has a great way that he just kind of moves from one snap to the next and he can play really physical in between snaps, but he is really confident to be able to make calls,” McVay said. “You have to keep earning it every day, but so far he has done a great job.”
Avila knows leadership looks different in the NFL than in college. He’s dealing with grown men now, he can’t start yelling like he did in Fort Worth two Augusts ago.
Not that that’s ever been Avila’s style. He’s thought a lot about that moment, and what he would do differently if given another chance, even if it was a moment that spurred on his teammates. He’d rather do things his own way.
“I feel like me being in my second year, I would be leading more by example than being a vocal voice because we still have those guys like Rob [Havenstein], like Ernest [Jones IV], like Coop, like Matthew,” he said. “And that might change. That might change in the middle of the season where I feel more comfortable, where I feel like I have respect gained from a lot of my teammates. But I try to do everything step by step.”