Ben SolakJan 20, 2026, 06:40 AM ETCloseBen Solak joined ESPN in 2024 as a national NFL analyst. He previously covered the NFL at The Ringer, Bleeding Green Nation and The Draft Network.
play1:15Stephen A.: Sean McDermott is being scapegoatedStephen A. Smith sounds off on why he doesn’t like the Bills firing Sean McDermott.
play1:12Swagu and RC agree Josh Allen ‘let his team down’Ryan Clark and Marcus Spears react to the Bills’ crushing loss to the Broncos.
Adam Schefter: Bills fire Sean McDermott (1:34)Adam Schefter reports on the Bills’ decision to fire Sean McDermott after nine seasons. (1:34)
Stephen A.: Sean McDermott is being scapegoatedStephen A. Smith sounds off on why he doesn’t like the Bills firing Sean McDermott.
Swagu and RC agree Josh Allen ‘let his team down’Ryan Clark and Marcus Spears react to the Bills’ crushing loss to the Broncos.
The point of NFL football is to win Super Bowls, and there is one path to winning them — fielding a good team. No bad team in NFL history has ever won the Super Bowl. Of course, there’s more than one good team in football every season, so luck and injuries and razor-thin edges get involved down the stretch. But in general, you have to field a good team to win a Super Bowl.
Those three franchises each won three Super Bowls apiece. The Bills didn’t even play in one. And on Monday morning, McDermott was fired.
McDermott entered the season as the fourth-longest-tenured head coach in the league, and the Bills have nothing to show for their patience. Despite how good the Bills have been for the better part of a decade — an enormously rare achievement of consistent excellence — the trophy case is just as bare as it would be if they had been bad.
Next year was different. The Bills didn’t win the AFC East in 2025, as the Patriots took the division title in Mike Vrabel’s first year as New England’s head coach.
Instead, the Bills spent their reprieve from Brady and Belichick falling just short, season after season. The Patriots stumbled, collapsed, recovered and rebuilt. And now Vrabel and Drake Maye — in their first season together — are one win away from the peak Josh Allen and McDermott never reached.
How could the Bills have possibly retained McDermott under these conditions? Even the best coaches get only so many bites at the apple. Early in the run of consecutive good seasons, the head coach gets credit for the ascension, but as the team plateaus, that credit mutates into blame. Why couldn’t the author of the big leap maintain the trajectory? Is this as far as this coach can take us?
It’s important to remember just how huge of a leap McDermott managed in his early Bills years. McDermott took the job in January 2017 with a lame-duck general manager (Doug Whaley) in charge of the roster. McDermott ran the 2017 draft that produced Tre’Davious White, Dion Dawkins and Matt Milano. The Bills signed Micah Hyde and Jordan Poyer in free agency, and they became cornerstones of McDermott’s defense for years to come.
Stephen A. Smith sounds off on why he doesn’t like the Bills firing Sean McDermott.
Meanwhile, the Bills were loading the roster with the cap space afforded by his rookie deal. They gave big deals to defensive tackle Star Lotulelei, center Mitch Morse, receivers John Brown and Cole Beasley, and defensive end Mario Addison. In 2020, they traded a future first-round pick for wideout Stefon Diggs. Not at all coincidentally, that’s when Allen’s improvement really took off.
But they never could. The Bills had a 20% pressure rate against Bo Nix on Saturday, their lowest of the 15 playoff games McDermott has coached over the past seven seasons. It’s just below the 23.1% pressure rate they had in the 2020 loss to the Chiefs, the 25.6% in the 2022 loss to the Bengals, the 26.5% in the 2024 loss to the Chiefs and the 28.0% in the 2023 loss to the Chiefs.
If we’re looking for the one failure that explains McDermott’s fall, it’s this. The Bills simply never figured out the pass rush.
And it wasn’t for a lack of trying. The Bills drafted defensive tackle Ed Oliver with the ninth pick in 2019, defensive end AJ Epenesa with the 54th pick in 2020, defensive end Greg Rousseau with the 30th pick in 2021 and defensive end Boogie Basham with the 61st pick in 2021. They added defenders in free agency, including Addison, Vernon Butler, Quinton Jefferson and DaQuan Jones. They signed Super Bowl champion Von Miller to a six-year, $120 million deal in the 2022 offseason.
Again and again they went back to the well. In 2025, they added Michael Hoecht and Joey Bosa on veteran deals. In the draft, they used the 41st pick on another defensive tackle (T.J. Sanders), the 72nd pick on another edge rusher (Landon Jackson) and the 109th pick on another another defensive tackle (Deone Walker).
As much as defensive failures in the postseason could be the story of the McDermott-era Bills, so could the personnel errors that precipitated them. Beane has drafted plenty of viable players to the Bills’ roster over the past seven years but few truly impactful ones. From 2019 to 2025, Beane has selected 56 players, and only two (James Cook III and Dawson Knox) have made a Pro Bowl.
The Pro Bowl is admittedly a shaky metric, though. Let’s look at All-Pro nominations. Thirteen Bills have received All-Pro nods on offense or defense across McDermott’s tenure. Seven of those seasons belonged to players Beane acquired. Six of them belonged to players McDermott acquired in the lone 2017 offseason before Beane was hired as general manager.
Of course, the responsibility ultimately falls on McDermott, who has been the head coach on the sideline for all these late-season collapses. But he cannot shoulder 100 percent of the blame despite shouldering 100 percent of the firing. After he was let go, the Bills announced that Beane would run the search for the next head coach with a new, promoted title: president of football operations.
There’s truth to this. It’s hard to get great players without being a bad team — a team that uses a bad record to print high draft capital and extra cap space. This, of course, did not stop the Packers from sending two first-round picks to the Cowboys for Micah Parsons. Nor did it stop the Cowboys from sending a third-round pick to the Steelers for George Pickens. But it’s hard.
At receiver, the Bills added Amari Cooper at last season’s trade deadline to no effect, then passed on the available options at this season’s deadline in favor of signing Brandin Cooks and Gabe Davis. Jakobi Meyers resurrected the Jaguars’ offense; Rashid Shaheed scored an opening kickoff return touchdown for the Seahawks on Saturday night. Cooks, meanwhile, failed to secure what ended up as a game-ending pick in overtime.
Ryan Clark and Marcus Spears react to the Bills’ crushing loss to the Broncos.
On the other hand, what a preposterously high bar the new Bills head coach must now clear. The last guy made six consecutive divisional rounds, and that was deemed insufficient. How will the Bills faithful react if the 2026 Bills lose to the Chiefs in the divisional round in their first year under, say, Joe Brady? Or — a far more likely outcome — the defense declines dramatically and the 2026 Bills fail to make the playoffs under someone like Brian Daboll?
Success for every NFL head coaching hire looks the same — win a Super Bowl — but for Buffalo’s incoming head coach, there is no gray area between success and failure. There’s no teardown and rebuild, no learning curve. Hit the ground barreling toward the ultimate finish line.
For the past seven seasons as the head coach of the Buffalo Bills, Sean McDermott fielded a good team. The Bills won at least 10 games in all seven of those seasons, making them only the sixth team in the Super Bowl era to string together seven-plus seasons of double-digit wins. The Bills also made the playoffs in all seven of those seasons, and in the past six, they won at least one playoff game. They are only the fourth team in the Super Bowl era to string together six consecutive seasons with a playoff win, joining the 1990s Cowboys, 2010s Patriots and 2020s Chiefs.
Of course it was the Patriots, the Bills’ big brother of the past two decades, when Tom Brady and Bill Belichick sat atop the AFC East and refused to get off the top bunk. New England accumulated 16 division titles, nine conference championships and six Super Bowls. Watching from below and hating every moment of it, the Bills’ faithful could draw only one reasonable conclusion: If a franchise got an elite quarterback and a great head coach, it would print Super Bowl success. That’s how it worked for the Patriots, and eventually, that’s how it would work for the Bills, too.
General manager Brandon Beane, whom McDermott knew from his days in Carolina as the Panthers’ defensive coordinator, was hired in summer 2017 to replace Whaley as the head of the roster. In lockstep with Beane, the Bills turned the team over fast. McDermott was quick to admit his mistakes — the Bills fired offensive coordinator Rick Dennison after just one season and replaced him with Brian Daboll. And Beane traded 2017 starting quarterback Tyrod Taylor to the Browns in March 2018, committing to drafting a QB of the future for Daboll to develop. That quarterback ended up being Allen.
The Bills made the conference championship game that season — their first one since the four straight they won from 1990 to 1993 with Jim Kelly under center — and lost 38-24 to the Chiefs. And it wasn’t even as good as that margin implies; Kansas City was up 38-15 with seven minutes left in the game. This game began a worrying pattern. The Bills were booted from the 2021 playoffs by the Chiefs again in the infamous 42-36 game. They left the 2022 playoffs in an emotional 27-10 loss to the Bengals following the traumatic Damar Hamlin injury in Week 17 of the regular season. They lost to the Chiefs again in the 2023 postseason 27-24. And then they lost to the Chiefs yet again in the 2024 playoffs 32-29.
McDermott’s defenses have run into the same issues for years now. The Bills — who play two-high, zone coverage and live in nickel personnel packages — have been happy to give up some ground in the running game to field an elite pass defense. The format worked well in the regular season. But the Bills would invariably run into an elite quarterback in the playoffs — one not so easily stymied by disciplined zone drops, or one capable of creating outside of structure late in the down. And they would flounder against those quarterbacks unless they could heat him up.