Bills Explaination of Sean McDermott’s Firing Falls Flat

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In today’s SI:AM:

⛷️Alysa Liu’s return

🏀March Madness field

🏆NFL predictions

The Bills lose the press conference

The Bills’ season came to a sudden and, as some would argue, unfair endwith a loss to the Broncos in the AFC divisional round. On Monday, Buffalo announced that coach Sean McDermott, who had been with the team for nine seasons, was out, and General manager Brandon Beane would be retained as GM and promoted to president of football operations.

On Wednesday, Beane and team owner Terry Pegula spoke with reporters to address those questions. It did not go well.

When Beane was asked about second-year wide receiver Keon Coleman, who hasn’t panned out, and the lack of high-quality receivers around Allen, Pegula cut in and made everyone look worse in the process.

“The coaching staff pushed to draft Keon. I’m not saying Brandon wouldn’t have drafted him, but he wasn’t his next choice,” Pegula said. “That was Brandon being a team player and taking advice from his coaching staff, who felt strongly about the player. He’s taking, for some reason, heat over it, and not saying a word about it, but I’m here to tell you the true story.”

Seeing an owner throw a player under the bus like that was shocking enough on its own. Doing so because he thought it was a story that made the general manager he just promoted look good was doubly confounding.

Beane would later do his best to clarify the situation, insisting that, as general manager, he had as much responsibility for picking Coleman as anyone.

“Terry’s point was that we might have had it in a different order of personnel vs. coaching, and I went that way,” Beane said. “But ultimately I’m not turning in a pick for a player that I don’t think we can succeed with.”

It was a bizarre sequence, and it only got more bizarre when videos surfaced that appeared to show how Beane wanted to draft Coleman. Not only was Pegula’s interjection awkward from a team perspective and damaging from a trade-value perspective, but it also seemed factually wrong.

Despite how bad that scene went, it’s possible that Pegula and Beane are actually lucky that that’s the top headline coming out of the presser because Pegula’s explanation for firing McDermott was arguably worse.

Pegula first set the scene, recalling the mood of the locker room in Denver.

“I want to take you in the locker room after that game,” Pegula said. “I looked around. 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. The first thing I said to him was, ‘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.”

At first glance, this feels like an understandable course of action—Pegula felt like they needed a change, sure. But take the briefest step back and it is apparent that Pegula made a decision about the future of his multi-billion dollar franchise on the basis of vibes hours after an emotional loss. That doesn’t seem like best practices.

What does Allen’s lack of acknowledgement have to do with anything? The fact that Pegula brought it up twice is strange. If Allen had acknowledged him, would something be different? Would McDermott still have a job? By the sound of it, maybe.

Pegula would return to this scene several times as he and Beane spoke with the media. He simply felt the mood in the locker room and decided something had to change.

While he was quick to point out that he believed the refs got the controversial interception call that went against Buffalo wrong, Pegula insisted that he did not fire McDermott over an officiating mistake, saying “I felt like we hit the proverbial playoff wall year after year.”

“I just sensed in that locker room, where do we go from here, with what we have?” Pegula asked. “And that was the basis for my decision.”

Overall, the press conference sent a pretty clear message to whoever becomes the next coach of the Bills: Anything short of a Super Bowl is not enough, and for any success up until that point, you might not be the one to get the credit.

The expectations are high, sure, but hey, at least you get to spend the winter in Buffalo.

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The top five…

…things I saw last night:

5. This week, we already got a goalie fight, so how about a goalie goal?

4. Bryce Harper’s offseason hobbies are apparently getting more extreme.

3. Creighton’s Austin Swartz shows that nothing beats hustle when the game is on the line.

2. Paul Finebaum eats a whole plate of crow.

1. Fernando Mendoza updates his LinkedIn profile with some big professional news.