Bills owner Terry Pegula met with the media on Wednesday to discuss the recent decision to fire coach Sean McDermott, after seven straight playoff appearances and eight in nine years.
It was, per Pegula, the latest playoff game that supposedly sparked the move.
“My decision to bring in a new coach was based on the results of our game in Denver,” Pegula told reporters.
“I want to take you in the locker room after that game,” Pegula said. “I looked around. The first thing I noticed was our quarterback with his head down, crying. I looked at all the other players. I looked at their faces, and our coaches. I walked over to Josh. He didn’t even acknowledge I was there.
“First thing I said to him, I said, ‘That was a catch.’ We all know what I’m talking about. He didn’t acknowledge me. He just sat there sobbing. He was listless. He had given everything he had to try to win that game. And, looking around, so did all the other players on the team. I saw the pain in Josh’s face at his presser, and I felt his pain. I know we can do better, and I know we will get better.”
Implicit in Pegula’s explanation is the belief that McDermott bears the blame. Even though, in Pegula’s view, “That was a catch.”
Pegula insisted he wasn’t firing McDermott because of a bad call. But if Pegula thinks it was a bad call, and if he thinks the Bills would have won the game if the right call had been made, wouldn’t McDermott still be there?
Indeed, at one point, a reporter asked G.M. Brandon Beane why the Bills (which he said have a championship roster) didn’t make it to the Super Bowl this year.
Pegula interrupted: “A bad call.”
A bad call. Not a bad coach.
As to Allen, he surely wasn’t distraught in the locker room because he believed the coach had failed the team. Allen believed he had failed the team. Keenly aware of the ticking of the clock on his career, Allen was dealing with the fact that the curtain fell abruptly on perhaps his best chance to get to a Super Bowl.
It’s also possible Allen was upset because he sensed that McDermott would take the fall for the failure of the team to advance.
Pegula later explained that he concluded the Bills had “hit the proverbial playoff wall,” based on the collection of annual failures to get to the Super Bowl. (Pegula specifically mentioned the “13 seconds” game from 2021).
“Where does the leadership of the team on the field and in the locker room — where [do] we go from that moment?” Pegula said. “Which, you know, another playoff failure. And that’s when I decided that Sean had to leave.”
Pegula said he wasn’t thinking about the possibility of a change until feeling the moment in the locker room after the playoff game.
If that’s true, it’s an irresponsible way to run a pro football team. Pegula gave no thought whatsoever to changing coaches until trying to discern the root cause of the vibe in the locker room after a disappointing overtime loss that turned on a “bad call”? How could anyone in that moment determine — after supposedly giving no prior consideration whatsoever to making a coaching change — that the right answer was to fire the coach?
Regardless, if it wasn’t already clear from the decision to fire McDermott and to promote Beane, Pegula’s opinion is clear. He thinks the talent is good enough. And he decided, with no prior deliberation and based solely on reading the complicated tea leaves of a collective (and justifiable) pity party that the coach had to go.
And that the General Manager deserved to get the keys to the entire football operation.
