Buffalo Authority

The Buffalo Bills wrapped up their coaching search on Tuesday with it culminating in the promotion of offensive coordinator Joe Brady. The move, much like McDermott’s firing last week, was met with mostly displeasure from the fan base, who seem to be increasingly hard to please. I can understand the frustration from fans, but I can also see why Brady was the logical choice to lead the Bills into this next era. Let’s dive into the different paths Terry Pegula could have taken and why he ultimately chose what he did.

The Case for Continuity

Let’s take a step back and address why so many Bills fans are upset overall and why a petition to reinstate Sean McDermott has over 80,000 signatures – more than the seating capacity of New Highmark Stadium. The public perception of McDermott has changed over the past few years and fans wanted him to stay on as coach after what many believe was a masterful job with a flawed roster this year. I think the anger of McDermott’s firing is amplified with the retention, and promotion, of General Manager Brandon Beane, which many blame for the team’s shortcomings this year. Terry Pegula does not agree. If both men were fired at the same time I do not think we would see the displeasure from the fan base. The case for continuity is what we have heard at the end of the year for almost a decade now: keep knocking on the door in the playoffs and eventually they’ll break through. We can argue whether or not that is a good idea, but it would have been a way forward if Pegula chose that. A missed kick, drops from Diggs, Kincaid, Cooks, etc. are all plays that could have gone the other way over the years and we would not be having this discussion today. With such small miscues making the difference, the Bills could have stayed the course and continued their really successful decade while hoping they would eventually brake through with the crew that got them there.

The Case for Minor Change

This is where Pegula and Beane ended up – minor change. Let’s pretend you didn’t know anything about the Bills leadership structure and you saw the playoffs play out the way they have over the years. This is what you would see: the best statistical quarterback the playoffs have ever seen, an offense who regularly put up 30 points in the playoffs, an offense who has had 4th quarter leads in the AFC Championship game and two different AFC Divisional games. On the other side of a ball, you have a defense that has been unable to get to the opposing quarterback in any of their defeats and one that has given up multiple 4th quarter leads. Resource after resource has been poured into that side of the ball, while the offense has been neglected. Despite the draft picks and free agent acquisitions the defense has been an issue for the majority of the past decade in their playoff defeats. Seeing that scenario out of context would result in 10 out of 10 fans saying the same thing – change the defensive coordinator and keep the offensive coordinator. That is exactly what the Bills opted to do – what complicated things was that the DC was also the Head Coach.

The Case for Complete Change

There is a line of thought that if you were going to fire the most successful (in terms of win percentage) coach in franchise history, then you are really going to think outside of the box for a replacement and a full organizational reset. Some thought that Pegula would think to be so close to the ultimate goal and throw it away means he was not afraid to swing for the fences. While the offense has consistently been top of the league under Joe Brady, they don’t always pass the eye-test. Some of Brady’s play calls are head scratching given the moment in the game and his desire to have a WR-by-committee approach instead of a true WR1 featured in this offense has been problematic in their losses. The Bills offense has been good, if not great, under Brady, but that doesn’t mean they could not have gotten even better with a new guy calling the plays.

What It Means

What the Bills did in promoting Brady was take the path of least change, and hopefully least turmoil, in their franchise. They kept what they do great and are seeking to improve what has caused them to fall short over the past decade. It is messy because the Head Coach was in charge of the defense and it is not an easy swap out, even if the Bills are trying to make it such. It is also messy because of Terry Pegula’s inability to articulate himself clearly and pick a single point of blame when he spoke to the media last week. When he talks about the “proverbial playoff wall” being an issue, then it doesn’t make sense to promote two men who share some of that blame. When he talks about how the coaching staff was responsible for pushing to draft Keon Coleman, and then he later clarifies that “coaching staff” didn’t mean Sean McDermott, the only thing one can assume is that OC Joe Brady was one of the men pushing. If Pegula views the pick as such an issue that he has to publicly defend Beane about it, then why promote the man who was pushing for it? The whole thing is messy because the messaging was messy. Words cannot be unsaid but if I was Terry Pegula’s PR guy I would tell him to stick to this: We have a quarterback and offense that has been Super Bowl caliber for the better part of the last five seasons. When the moments get the biggest our defense has come up empty, so I am firing the man responsible for the defense while keeping the Super Bowl caliber offense in place.

Many don’t believe the Bills were serious about a full search, as Brandon Beane suggested. But I do. I believe they went into this open to anything, but over the past week they realized that they were better to keep the good in place and change the bad instead of change both the good and the bad. Heck, maybe the fan outcry over the firing of McDermott convinced Pegula that some version of continuity was best. The process of how this decision came about might be honest, but the result of the decision will leave people skeptical. There will be a large number of people who will believe that this was just a purging of Sean McDermott, a McDermott-ectomy, as WGR host Jeremy White called it. And while that is what this ended up being, it doesn’t mean that it was wrong to do. After all, he was in charge of their biggest problem.

It is a juicy twist on this story: the man who many believe to be most responsible for the resurgence of this franchise is also the man who might have been holding them back. It’s a reminder that very rarely are things nice and clean, black and white. Life is lived in the gray, and maybe there was more gray to McDermott’s tenure than we all knew.

Only time will tell.