Sean McVay has been nothing short of brilliant in Los Angeles this season. He’s put together one of the best starts for a first-year head coach in NFL history, leading the Rams to a 9-3 record after they won just four games last season.

Whether it’s elevating the play of Jared Goff or once again making Todd Gurley a dominant force at running back, McVay has done just about everything right in L.A. If there’s one area where he’s struggled, though, is clock management.

Earlier in the season, he was burning timeouts left and right. He’s gotten better about that, but he struggled to manage his timeouts at the end of the first half against the Cardinals.

The Rams got all the way down to the Cardinals’ 13-yard line with 1:14 left before halftime. The next play, Todd Gurley ran 8 yards to get the Rams to the 5-yard line with 41 seconds left – seemingly a perfect time to use one of their two timeouts. Instead, he opted to run the clock all the way down to 14 seconds before calling a timeout.

The Rams ran one more play, called a timeout and settled for a field goal, potentially leaving four points on the board. It didn’t wind up costing them, but McVay admitted his mistake Monday.

“Those types of things are inexcusable, and that’s all me. When you look at it, you get the first down. The first thing you wanna do, you wanna come away with points right here, make sure that you’ve already got a field goal,” he said.

“When you get into a situation where you gain a first down, if you had it over again, when Todd has the 8-yard run on first-and-10, would’ve liked to have said, ‘OK, let’s go ahead and let it bleed it down and probably 30 seconds we take a timeout on second-and-2.’ Now you give yourself another chance, still with another timeout remaining, to say ‘Alright, let’s run our best play right here, where if we get a first down, now we can at least compete for a touchdown.’”

McVay said it was “100 percent” on him for only leaving the Rams with four seconds left on the clock after converting on third down, preventing them from running another play. That certainly wasn’t ideal, and while the Rams still wound up winning by 16 points, McVay knows he made a mistake at that point in the game.

“We ask our players to be accountable, and that’s a situation right there where I’ve gotta be better. You try to learn from your mistakes, certainly that was one. Fortunately it didn’t cost us, but those are the types of things that get you beat, and I can’t do that to our team.”

No harm, no foul, but McVay has to do a better job of managing the clock.