Will firing Sean McDermott fix the Bills’ playoff woes?

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.

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.

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 were bad.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

It wasn’t just that they were losing, and it wasn’t just that they were losing to the same team. It was the scoreboard. The Bills — with a defensive-minded head coach — gave up 27-plus points in six consecutive postseason losses, including this year’s 33-30 defeat at the hands of the Broncos. And Denver is decisively not a Joe Burrow-led Bengals team or Mahomes-led Chiefs team.

The fact that it wasn’t Mahomes was almost worse for McDermott. Mahomes, along with Burrow and Ravens signal-caller Lamar Jackson, didn’t even make this postseason. For weeks we’ve heard the refrain: If Allen and the Bills can’t do it this season, in this weakened AFC playoff field … will they ever do it? Evidently not.

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.

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.

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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).

Nothing worked. There was bad luck — Miller tore an ACL halfway through his first season in Buffalo and never returned to form; Sanders and Jackson missed time because of knee injuries this season; and Oliver played only four games in 2025. But there has also been a clear disharmony between the coaching staff and the front office, especially along the defensive line. Leonard Floyd, signed to a one-year deal in 2023, hit with 10.5 sacks, but he was the only Bills player with double-digit sacks in the entire McDermott tenure. He left in free agency for the 49ers, and Epenesa was re-signed. Defensive tackle Poona Ford was signed to a one-year deal in 2023 and barely saw the field; he signed with the Chargers in 2024, became a key starter and got a big deal from the Rams in 2025. And defensive tackle Tim Settle Jr. has been a big part of the Texans’ defensive line rotation after leaving Buffalo, where he never shined.

The issues cascade across the defense. Safety has been a mess following the departures of Hyde and Poyer, whom McDermott handpicked way back in 2017, such that Poyer needed to come back in free agency to fill Taylor Rapp’s shoes. Shaq Thompson, an old flame from Carolina, has outperformed the recently extended Terrel Bernard and recently drafted Dorian Williams as the No. 2 linebacker to Milano. Cornerback Christian Benford, drafted in the sixth round in 2022, easily beat out Kaiir Elam, the first-rounder from the same draft. Tre’Davious White, another 2017 retread, manned the No. 2 corner spot opposite Benford.

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.

highlighted that the Bengals were «on the advantage of a rookie quarterback contract,» and that he didn’t «want to suck bad enough to have to get Ja’Marr Chase. I’d love to have him, but you got to go through some lean years to do that. I don’t remember where Chase was drafted, but it was pretty high.»

When asked about the pass rush last offseason, Beane made a similar comment. «I don’t know many teams that are going to hand you a Chris Jones or a game wrecker. … You look around the league, there’s not a lot of players that make 28 to 30 some million dollars a year, which I think is kind of what those high-end defensive players are making. We’re not ever picking in the top five, 10. … Would I love to add one of those guys? Heck yeah, I would. But we have a cap. We pick where we pick. You kind of got to make the best of what you got. Again, we would love to do that if that player’s out there.»

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 second-round pick to the Steelers for George Pickens. But it’s hard.

Even if we want to remove the exceptional deals from the equation, other teams are remarkably better at making moves on the margins than the Bills. Beane’s biggest swings at the helm have been the trade up for Allen (hit), the trade for Diggs (hit) and the contract for Miller (miss, though injuries made an impact). Below that are the midtier deals. In lieu of a big contract at edge rusher, the Bills signed Joey Bosa to be a playoff ringer this offseason. Against the Broncos, Bosa had two pressures on 41 rushes, was flagged for a roughing the passer penalty and blew a tackle for loss on the first drive.

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.

The argument that it’s difficult to build around a veteran quarterback contract and draft picks in the late-20s was thin at the time and has grown even more brittle with age. Pick a random Super Bowl champion since the 2011 collective bargaining agreement, and you’ll find a team that hit huge on a middle-round flier or nailed a free agency class. Think about what Puka Nacua is to the Rams or Nik Bonitto to the Broncos. Think about the DeMarcus Lawrence signing in Seattle and the Carlton Davis III deal in New England. Teams need moves like these to make it, and the Bills haven’t made them for eight years now, plain and simple.

Take a step back to view the whole picture of the McDermott-era Bills, and it’s easier to see just how many of these disappointments rest with Beane. Take a step closer, and it’s easier to see how many of them rest with Allen, who is at times a microcosm of the Bills as a whole. He is a tremendous talent, just like the Bills. He is also, when push comes to shove, second best to Mahomes over their respective careers. In the tiny margins of playoff football, that small difference is magnified.

The Bills got the ball second in overtime against the Broncos — a possession they were guaranteed in large part because Allen never got the ball in 2021 against Mahomes in the 42-36 game, and the overtime rules were changed accordingly. Any scoring drive would have won Saturday’s game. Allen and the Bills’ offense didn’t score.

Allen had a poor game against Denver and is rightfully owning that performance, tearfully admitting that he «let his teammates down» after the game. Again, there’s a failure in personnel to investigate here, as Cooks was the Bills’ best downfield option in large part because of the mismanagement of a wide receiver room Beane irately defended on Buffalo radio this past offseason. But Allen was careless with the football at the end of the first half, missed an open scoring opportunity late in regulation and even could have thrown a better ball to Cooks on the interception.

This is a continuation of a pattern for Allen. He’s now 0-7 in overtime — the most overtime games played without a win for a quarterback in NFL history. And it isn’t just the extra period; it’s the postseason overall. Down three points, Allen had the ball to end the AFC Championship Game against the Chiefs last season. But the Bills failed to get into field goal range, let alone put the game away with a touchdown. In 2023, the Chiefs took the lead with 14:20 remaining in the fourth quarter of the divisional round; Allen and the offense had three drives and got only a missed 44-yard field goal for their troubles.

There’s nothing to do about this, obviously. If we were ranking people to blame for the loss to the Broncos, Allen would be easily above McDermott and Beane. But in any given game, he has the capacity to be the best quarterback in football. He is clearly capable of winning a Super Bowl, and it is inexcusable for McDermott and Beane to not have even made the big game with him under center.

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But the years weigh on a man. One week after playing a pristine playoff game against the Jaguars, Allen unspooled against the Broncos. It is shallow, narrative-driven analysis to have called this The Year for Allen, with Mahomes, Burrow and Lamar Jackson all absent from the playoff field. It ignores the real and obvious weakness of the Bills’ roster, and the reality that football is a team sport. But that worm of doubt has certainly wiggled its way into Allen’s ear, no matter how elite of a noise-ignorer the star quarterback has become.

That, if anything, is the best justification for firing McDermott. At some point, you have to do something different to believe something different will happen. After seven years of failed postseason runs, it would be folly to face the eighth with the same head coach and same quarterback. The 2020-2025 Bills might be the second-best team by DVOA to not make a Super Bowl (behind the 2019-2024 Ravens, among six-year stretches), but spreadsheets are not reality. They don’t hang banners for DVOA. The Bills are a good team that simply hasn’t been good enough, for whatever reasons. So it’s time to start a new era, simply to let the wounds of the old era close and scar.

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 Joe Brady? Or — a far more likely outcome — the defense declines dramatically and the 2026 Bills fail to make the playoffs under 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 barrelling toward the ultimate finish line.

Good luck to the next guy, whomever it might be. I really mean it. As McDermott showed us, building a good team is not enough. Not nearly enough. To win a Super Bowl, you need all the luck you can get.