The Buffalo Bills Are a Mess, But Sean McDermott's Firing Was Totally Justifiable

a defensive guru whose defense collapses every postseason lives on borrowed time

I’m a Chicago Bears fan, with a classic American sports allegiance origin story - my father was born in Chicago. If you’re bothering to read this post you will be aware that you Bears experienced a playoff loss recently that would be considered to be of the classic “rip your heart out” variety, except for the convenient fact that quarterback Caleb Williams just completed his second year and offensive guru head coach Ben Johnson just completed his first. That means that a potentially-gutting playoff loss feels, instead, like the start of a great adventure. I’ve been telling my Bears fans friends to try and enjoy this moment, because this situation is rare and doesn’t last long - the playoff loss that leaves you excited rather than devastated. You can find a team that long ago moved from the first category to the second in the other team I follow closely, the Buffalo Bills.

My interest in the Bills echoes past years with particular investment in the Green Bay Packers and the St. Louis Rams. You see, I’m in a semi-keeper fantasy football league (we can keep three players each year) that started, if you can believe it, in 1992, when I was ten years old. This was before any online fantasy leagues existed, so we had to hand-score games out of the box scores in the paper. For that reason, it has been and remains a scoring-only league; we only get points for touchdowns, field goals, extra points, and safeties, nothing for yards or catches. (Plays do count double if they’re more than 50 yards, though.) Such a system is so antique that most fantasy sites that develop player rankings don’t offer it as an option. But we’re old and we like it that way. And what happens in a league where you might keep a star quarterback year after year is that you become invested in his team to an unusual degree. Because of how important your quarterback is to team success in a league like ours, if you hold onto a guy year after year, his team sort of becomes your secondary rooting interest. (Conveniently, the Bears and Bills are in different conferences and rarely play each other.) That happened to me with Kurt Warner when he was an MVP-caliber quarterback, it happened to me with a decade of Aaron Rodgers, and now it’s happened with Josh Patrick Allen, one of the greatest fantasy quarterbacks ever and a guy who (like his contemporaries Lamar Jackson and Joe Burrow) has enjoyed fantastic statistical success but has never been able to win a Super Bowl.

After yet another controversy-filled playoff heartbreak, the Buffalo Bills fired beloved head coach Sean McDermott, and in doing so set off a change reaction which has left team owner Terry Pegula showing his ass in a disastrous press conference, GM Brandon Beane looking like a snake, a ton of players feeling betrayed, and the Bills fanbase, no strangers to heartbreak, feeling heartbroken yet again. It’s all a big mess. What I want to argue here is the following.

1. I personally deeply admire and respect McDermott and the job he did pulling the Bills out from being a joke of a franchise, and I think his chops as a regular-season defensive guru are deeply underappreciated.

2. I think it’s very clear that the biggest problems on the Bills have been roster problems, which are the responsibility of the GM, and it’s both bewildering and maddening that Beane not only kept his job but was promoted.

3. The Buffalo fans and Buffalo local media have a right to be deeply upset about all of this, especially regarding how McDermott has been treated.

4. Despite all of that, firing Sean McDermott was entirely justified and the sense of betrayal about that particular move is misplaced.

I’m not going to take the time to make the case that a) McDermott has done a remarkable job dragging rosters with limited talent to 11 or 12 or 13 wins a year and b) that the team really did have limited talent. You can find plenty of those analyses out there right now, and to be honest with you I find these claims very hard to refute. The list of wide receivers that the Bills have gotten for Josh Allen since they traded away disgruntled star Stefon Diggs looks like some sort of practical joke. The team has invested relentlessly in its defensive line, only to feature one of the league’s worst rush defenses and to regularly fail to produce any pressure on opposing quarterbacks in important games. (Zero sacks in the playoff game against Denver and a near-record-low pressure rate.) Drafting misses abound, such as ultra-bust cornerback Kaiir Elam, linebacker Boogie Basham, and wide receiver Keon Coleman. Major signings like Von Miller, Josh Palmer, Joey Bosa, and Larry Ogunjobi have failed to make any difference in the playoffs. (Ogunjobi was suspended for the first six games of the season and then was a healthy scratch in the pivotal Broncos game, despite being sold as an impact signing by management. Yeesh.) Injuries have hurt a great deal, but every year they arrive in the postseason with McDermott making the most out of a talent-poor defense with a patchwork secondary and Josh Allen throwing endless passes to tight ends and running backs because his wide receivers simply cannot get any separation. There is no doubt in my mind that Beane deserves the lion’s share of blame and, if anyone had to be fired, he should have gone first.

But. Right now, Buffalo fans are in a mourning period, and they’re understating McDermott’s flaws. That’s emotionally understandable but not analytically helpful. The simple reality is this: McDermott had nine years in Buffalo, eight of them with a once-in-a-lifetime talent at quarterback. He consistently produced winners and won playoff games, but he couldn’t get over the hump, in a league notoriously invested in one and only one goal, a Super Bowl victory. And the way the Bills keep losing in the playoffs is the biggest problem of all: McDermott is a defensive guru whose defense collapsed every single year. That’s just a fact. For that reason, I’m sorry, the idea that his firing was some sort of terrible betrayal of the team or the fanbase or the local media is absurd.

First, let’s get an idea of the kind of attitude I’m reacting against here. Here’s the local radio show the Jeremy and Joe Show on Buffalo’s WGR 550:

OK… hold on.

Joe DiBiase here is trying to shift the blame for Bills playoff failures onto the offense and quarterback. This has been a common tactic among Bills fans and media in the last few days. And, again, it’s emotionally understandable. But it just doesn’t fit the facts. However you want to assign blame for Saturday’s loss, the reality is that it’s the defense that has fallen down time and again in the postseason. I say this with the context that I think the Jeremy and Joe Show (and its afternoon counterpart, Schopp and Bulldog) is about as good as it gets in local sports media, which is notoriously a cesspool. They’re smart and self-critical and, appropriately for Bills media, they have a certain kind of tragic sense of humor about themselves and the team. But I do think they’ve been among the many who have minimized the failures of the Bills defense, out of a sense of respect for McDermott that I sympathize with. Look, the offense has been fine; I would remind you that they just put up 30 on a Broncos defense widely regarded as one of the three or four best in the league. Of course you can poke holes at them for not doing more, but in the history of the NFL, teams that score 30 points have won at an enormous rate. Why haven’t the Bills succeeded in the playoffs, then? Here’s the fact that I can’t get out of my brain. If you look at lists of the worst NFL defenses of all time, the 2020 Detroit Lions are often listed as the very worst, or certainly one of the three or so worst. That team gave up 32.5 points a game. In the Josh Allen era, in playoff losses the Bills have given up 33.16 points a game.

This is important enough that I’m going to repeat it as a pull quote.

Former Bills head coach Sean McDermott was hired to be a defensive guru, but in playoff losses in the Josh Allen era his defenses have given up more points per game than the single worst defense in NFL history.

Of course there’s all sorts of missing context and caveats there. This isn’t perfectly apples to apples. You’d expect playoff teams to have better offenses than all teams in a regular season. The offense has at times put the defense in harm’s way by giving up turnovers in bad field positions. And most importantly, yes, you can make a very strong argument that this is a roster construction problem more than a coaching problem - these are results that include teams that had to rely on players like Mecole Hardman and AJ Klein and Darnell Savage and Dane Jackson and Mack Hollins in playoff games. Again, my own preference, by far, would be to fire Brandon Beane before firing Sean McDermott. No failure of Beane’s is more acute than his inability to bring in a single player at the trade deadline this year, despite the reported availability of impact wide receiver Jaylen Waddle and much cheaper options like Rasheed Shahid, who is currently tearing it up for the Seattle Seahawks. I’m with you on that. But look: a defensive head coach whose defense collapses year after year after year in the postseason is just not going to remain a head coach forever in this league. Sorry. I know it’s a huge cliché, but the NFL is a results business, and Sean McDermott didn’t get it done. How many more years was he supposed to be given with the exact same outcome? And let me leave you with this: if they kept McDermott and the Bills flamed out in the postseason next year, they fanbase would be demanding to know why McDermott was allowed to remain in charge of the team. I’m sorry, but this firing was justified.

I think Jeremy and Joe are more right than wrong on the state of the team; this point about Allen’s contract being a blessing rather than a curse, in direct contradiction of Beane’s complaints, is particularly important. I get why the fanbase is so upset. Terry Pegula comes across as an idiot who cares about nothing other than the fact that Beane chose Allen with the seventh overall pick in 2018, which is less impressive when you consider that at one point he was being widely mocked as the first overall pick with the Cleveland Browns. Beane has failed this team again and again. They remain desperately in need of an X receiver, and their many, many, many attempts at getting an impact pass rusher have failed. All of that is true. But we’ve officially entered into a period where the Bills fanbase and local media are ignoring the glaring failures of the McDermott era, and all of the very justified respect for the man can’t paper over those failures. Maybe Albert Breer is right and McDermott will prove to be Tony Dungy to the next coach’s Jon Gruden. But I do think, whether Pegula got it right or wrong, whether Beane is the snake he seems to be or not, something had to change. You can only run it back so many times.

Who would I hire? I dunno. It better be an impact name, after all of this agita. I know people will call me crazy, but my first call would be to Bill Belichick. I know that his reputation is at low ebb after all the weirdness with his girlfriend and a bad season at UNC, but go watch this video breaking down Belichick’s last Super Bowl win, against a Sean McVay-coached Rams team that had crushed most of the league. Whatever else you want to say about Belichick’s post-Tom Brady career, the man is a defensive genius for all time. So back up the Brinks truck, pay what you need to in order to hire Belichick (including paying his UNC buyout), and bring in rising offensive star Davis Webb as offensive coordinator with the promise that he’ll be able to take over the team in the next two or three years after Belichick retires. Belichick is both a defensive schemer and the ultimate CEO-style head coach, and he has the clout and confidence to go toe-to-toe with Beane in the event of a dispute. I know some people will scoff at this plan, and I know it’s risky. But when you’re replacing a coach of Sean McDermott’s accomplishments, you have no choice but to think big.