Reactions to Sean McDermott's Firing
My thoughts on the Buffalo Bills and their current situation
It’s been a crazy few days as a Bills fan. From the elation of beating a very good Jacksonville team on the road, to the dejection and anger following the loss in Denver, and the drama that has ensued with Sean McDermott’s firing and a wacky press conference.
If you have followed me on X, it’s not a great indication of how I feel about things, and that’s the impetus of this post - to try and zoom out and give a measured take. X is admittedly a place where I vent and dig into my deep seeded fandom and can frankly be a bit silly about all of this.
Do I really think the Brandin Cooks play should have been ruled a catch? I don’t know, but I’m definitely slamming repost on any replay that makes it look so! Sports are fun, and it can be appealing to lean into the circus on X, even if it’s not constructive.
Speaking of circuses, there’s so many angles to dive into with all that’s transpired (ahem, that press conference), but I’m going to stick to the main points here:
Why I would have been okay keeping Sean McDermott
Why I am okay that he got fired
Why I’m worried the team is optimizing for the wrong things
What I’d like to see from the team moving forward
The folks at WGR and The Athletic, as well as Tyler Dunne of Go Long, have done a great job covering everything that has transpired, and I suggest checking out all of their content from the past week. Here are a couple of good pieces for catching up on context:
Why I Would Have Been Okay Keeping Sean McDermott
A year or two into the Sean McDermott era, it would have been fair to describe me as a ‘Scrooge’ of a Bills fan. I did not trust the process, a phrase that was bandied about during Josh Allen’s rookie season as the team took its lumps. In fact, I didn’t want Josh Allen at all. To some, that may disqualify my opinion on anything Bills related, and it’s hard to blame you.
Needless to say, I was proven wrong. Allen made my doubts about him look foolish and alarmist. But I want to focus on McDermott here, who I had little faith in a couple of years into his tenure, despite being the coach that ended the drought.
There was a point early on in his tenure where McDermott said, “The culture to me trumps strategy”. At the time, I thought that was outrageous. To me, having the right culture was table stakes and what separated the best coaches from the mediocre and downright bad coaches was strategy.
So I was pretty pessimistic about this defensive minded coach who struck me as overly conservative on gameday. But a couple of things happened that changed my mind and paved the way for success.
First, the culture did matter. McDermott developed a program that seemed to get the most out of its players. The team always played hard for him, and Buffalo went from a laughingstock to a destination players actually wanted to go to. An environment was created holding players accountable and giving them the room and support to grow and thrive.
And while it was easy to perhaps diminish the importance of culture (which coach doesn’t say things like this?) early on, as you go through nine years of McDermott led stability while the New York Jets are navigating trainwrecks like Adam Gase, you start to respect the idea of a good culture as a bit more than table stakes at the NFL level, whether it should be or not.
Secondly, part of McDermott’s culture was to develop a “growth mindset”. He wanted everyone in the organization to learn from their experiences and become the best versions of themselves. It might sound corny, but McDermott himself became a shining example of this.
I had long believed NFL coaches were hard-wired and stubborn. What was in their DNA, was in their DNA. But McDermott evolved over the years from a conservative coach, both in terms of offensive strategy and gameday decision making, to a much more optimal coach. He relied on Josh Allen more and more, which can be seen in the team’s pass-run split under Brian Daboll. In the past couple of seasons, McDermott became much more aggressive on fourth downs and leaned into Josh Allen’s superpower as a short-yardage specialist.
Despite the stability McDermott’s culture brought and his evolution as a competent gameday coach, willing to rely on his superstar QB, he was ultimately fired because the team repeatedly fell short of making the Super Bowl.
Oftentimes in sports, results after the fact are treated as if they were always written in stone. Coaches or Star QBs who get over the proverbial hump were always destined to do so because of something innate within them. Those that failed - don’t have the “it” factor.
The truth is much more nuanced. People can call it a “loser mentality” or an excuse, but the fact of the matter is, the NFL playoffs are extremely high variance. Randomness plays a big role in deciding the outcomes of games whether people like it or not, something Brian Burke of ESPN discussed on X:
Sean McDermott is very clearly not without blame for the Bills playoff failures, but it’s inarguable that he’s been on the wrong side of some near coin flip games:
2021-22: 13 seconds (McDermott BUNGLED this, which I will talk about more later, but it still easily could have gone the Bills way - if KC doesn’t execute, Butker misses a FG, or the OT coin toss going the other way are all plausible outcomes)
2023-24: Tyler Bass’ missed FG
2024-25: Allen’s controversial failed fourth down conversion on a QB sneak in KC (and a final drive featuring a Kincaid drop and Amari Cooper stumbling on a perfectly designed WR screen)
2025-26: Uncharacteristic Allen turnovers and the now infamous Brandin Cooks catch/INT call
If you replay these games and the past 6 years of Bills playoff football, more times than not the Bills come out of that stretch with a SB appearance or two, if not a victory, even with Sean McDermott at the helm.
That’s not sour grapes. That’s not whining. It’s reality.
So I reject the premise that there’s something innate in Sean McDermott as a coach, even if he did have his flaws.
Blowhards like former Buffalo New Columnist Jerry Sullivan will hit you with catchy X posts like “McDermott would have been fired before this in cities with a higher standard. The “but who do we get to replace him?” argument is typical small-time Buffalo thinking.”
Ironically, what Sullivan is engaging in is “small-time thinking”, and I urge anyone reading this, McDermott believer or not, to do your best to refrain from being so reductionist.
Why I’m Okay Firing Sean McDermott
The above doesn’t absolve Sean McDermott of blame.
Perhaps the Bills’ best chance to win a Super Bowl came in the 2021-22 season, when Josh Allen averaged these statistics over a 2-game stretch:
24/31 comp/att (77.4%)
318.5 passing yards
4.5 passing TDs
8.5 rush att for 67 rush yards
1 sack
0 turnovers
It’s quite possibly the best 2-game stretch played by a QB in the playoffs in NFL history. And it ended primarily because the head coach mishandled the final 13 seconds of the game in epic fashion. We don’t need to relitigate the entire sequence, but McDermott made catastrophic error after catastrophic error, starting with failing to kick off short of the endzone and ending in a soft defense that made odd choices in quantity of pass rushers given the time situation.
At the end of the day, you have to decide if McDermott is ill equipped to handle another such situation. You don’t fire someone solely as a punitive measure for past actions; you evaluate how they’ll handle them next time. Still, it’s hard to get past this one, which brings me to my point.
Playoff variance aside, the results are what they are. As much as any sharp organization wants to preach “process over results”, at some point the results matter. I don’t know if there’s a hidden signal in the results that point towards McDermott being less likely than someone else to get the team to the next level. It’s possible, though. It’s also possible that something akin to the Observer Effect takes place, in terms of the psyche of the players and coaches being impacted by the same playoff failures over and over.
And those results include defensive failings, which is McDermott’s side of the ball. In the Bills last 5 playoff losses, they’ve given up 38, 42, 27, 27, 32, and 33 points.
At a certain point, it’s hard to fault an organization for trying something else, and in this specific instance, the window to win a Super Bowl under Josh Allen is already past the halfway point. The proverbial clock is ticking.
My Issue With The Team’s Strategy: Selecting The Right Target Variable
I work in predictive sports analytics (despite my Josh Allen draft takes, I have found someone willing to pay me to do this). One aspect of the job that often gets overlooked or taken for granted when building a predictive model is selecting the right target variable. It doesn’t matter how good your model is if you aren’t optimizing for the right thing. Here’s an excerpt from the linked article:
Forgive the perhaps force fitted analogy, but I don’t believe the Bills have selected the right target variable.
If I’m reading between the lines and working backwards on decisions the Bills have made, it strikes me that their key target variable is balance.
The Bills believe they need balance to win games, and this rears its head in a few ways, beginning with balance between offense and defense.
Brandon Beane’s infamous WGR appearance following last year’s draft is often maligned for its arrogance and lack of prescience, as Beane condescendingly dismissed concerns over the team’s WR room. However, if you move past the initial shock value, here’s what Brandon Beane says:
“No one scored more points than the Buffalo Bills, including the Super Bowl champions”
“Where do we need to get better? Defense”
Beane is telling us that the offense and defense should be on a similar level, and he’s complacent with the level the offense is at.
Look, I understand a team wants to address its weaknesses and rely on its strengths. But you don’t earn extra points for winning in a well-rounded fashion. And you don’t hit some arbitrary offensive threshold and say “good enough” and stop there. It doesn’t matter how many points you give up or score, it just matters that you score more than your opponents.
And the self-imposed pressure to build up a defense, whether it came from Beane or McDermott (it’s tough to disentangle the responsibilities here) has hurt the Bills.
Offense is more predictable year over year than defense. This is a known fact in the NFL, and going back to the notes on target variables, you’re better off optimizing for what’s “sticky”. This doesn’t mean you ignore the defense, but acknowledging that you can exert more control over the offense being good than the defense may lead to better spending your resources.
The focus on balance between both sides of the balls is particularly ironic given the team, despite some woeful postseason defensive performances, has had opportunity after opportunity to win postseason games and failed:
We are on three straight postseason losses and counting where the Buffalo offense has had the ball down 3 or tied at the end of games and failed to win it.
I am overusing the word irony today, but there is more of it in the Bills recognizing that as good as Sean McDermott has been in the regular season (dominant), he hasn’t been able to get them over the hump. Yet, the man who got promoted (Brandon Beane), seems to be content where his offense is based on regular season statistics, when we can point towards its postseason failings in the highest of leverage situations as evidence that it’s not good enough, or at least not as good as it could be.
A big reason for those failings, aside from a lack of investment in the WR room, which I’ll get to, is that misguided target variable rearing its ugly head again: balance.
The Bills have boasted about their ability to spread out pass catcher production since the departure of Stefon Diggs. ‘Everybody Eats’ is a great mantra in the regular season when Josh Allen is cruising. It loses its luster when Brandin Cooks is called on to make big plays in the most important games of the year, or an injured Dalton Kincaid is the target of season ending play because the team is so devoid of other weapons.
The focus on balance extends beyond spreading out the pass catcher production. This team has morphed into a run-heavy team the past couple of seasons. And very successfully so! James Cook is coming off the rushing title and has run for an astounding 28 TDs the past two seasons.
This isn’t something the Bills should abandon. They have a talented back and one of the best offensive lines in football. But this offense needs to run through Josh Allen.
If you ranked all 64 teams over the last two seasons in offensive EPA per play, the 2024 Bills rank 2nd and 2025 Bills rank 4th. Specifically in terms of rush EPA per play, the Bills are third and seventh. But passing trumps running. Both this year (+0.18 EPA per pass, +0.08 per rush) and last year (+0.25 epa per pass, +0.10 epa per rush) the EPA per pass more than doubled the EPA per rush.
The Bills should not abandon what’s a clear advantage for them, to be clear. But they should have more recognition that the passing game is the trump card and more robust. There needs to be a willingness to adapt more quickly and starkly when the run game isn’t on, even if it costs the team some perceived balance.
As an example, in their overtime possession against the Broncos, the Bills had three 1st and 10 situations. Here are those plays:
James Cook 1-yard run
James Cook 3-yard run
James Cook -1-yard run
A successful running game can take pressure off a QB. But a stubborn, unsuccessful running game does the opposite, putting the team behind the sticks, with less margin for error, and in more predictable passing situations.
Where I Hope Things Go From Here
I’m hopeful that whoever the next hire is, the target variable is giving Josh Allen the support he needs for this offense to be as successful as possible. The offense needs to run through Allen first. He needs weapons that can carry him at times, rather than Allen succeeding in spite of his WR room.
In my job at Establish the Run, I’ve been projecting game stat outcomes for every NFL player in every NFL game since 2020. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a WR room on a competitive team like the Buffalo Bills ever. In an important stretch of games, we’re internally debating which November signing is going to have the highest target share for the team. We’re trying to decide if the only highly drafted WR on the team (Keon Coleman) is even going to be active or not for meaningful games.
The Bills WR room this year has featured:
Khalil Shakir (solid but unspectacular, 2022 5th rounder)
Keon Coleman (2024 2nd rounder, bust)
Josh Palmer (bust free agent signing)
Curtis Samuel (bust free agent signing)
Brandin Cooks (released by the Saints, signed end of November)
Gabe Davis (signed to practice squad at end of November)
Elijah Moore (signed in May, released in November)
Tyrell Shavers (2023 UDFA, 1 career NFL catch prior to 2025)
Mecole Hardman (signed to the practice squad mid-November)
It’s insane. It got so bad that Brandin Cooks was not only the team’s number 2 WR in both playoff games; he was the undisputed number 2 WR.
This is malpractice, and this needs to be course corrected moving forward.
It’s not lost on me that Beane aided Josh Allen’s leap from fun, toolsy prospect to bonafide superstar by giving him help in this regard. Cole Beasley and John Brown were solid signings, and the trade for Stefon Diggs was a home run. Gabe Davis was a solid hit over the course of his rookie contract.
We should all be sick of seeing how current Josh Allen can survive with a subpar (to put it mildly) WR room and eager to find out just how much he can thrive with the WR room he deserves. This team is going to live and die by Allen; you might as well lean into it.
Despite all the craziness of the past week and how poorly the Bills have handled the Sean McDermott firing, I remain surprisingly optimistic about the team moving forwards. Having Josh Allen is more than half the battle, and hiring the right coach to maximize his talents could take them to the next level and quickly put the noise of the past week in the rear view (just keep the mic away from Terry, please).