McDermott Deserved Better — But the Bills Were Right to Move On
Sean McDermott turned the Buffalo Bills from a laughingstock into a perennial contender. He deserves to hear that plainly, without the qualifications that usually soften a firing. He also deserved a Super Bowl ring, and the fact that he never got one is precisely why he's no longer the head coach. Both things are true, and anyone pretending otherwise is doing the man a disservice.
Here is my declaration: the Bills made the correct call. Not a comfortable one, not a vindictive one — the correct one. The evidence has been accumulating for three seasons. Buffalo finished 12–5 in 2025, outscored opponents by nearly seven points a game, and lost to Denver in the wild card, 33–30. That final score is the whole indictment in three numbers. A team that dominant in the aggregate, undone again in the margins. The Bills won just 63% of their games decided by seven points or fewer — eight percentage points below their overall winning rate. That gap is not noise. It is a coaching fingerprint, and it showed up in January when it mattered most.
Look at the comparable cases and the pattern becomes impossible to dismiss. Mike Zimmer won consistently in Minnesota for years, posted winning records, never cracked the conference championship. Marvin Lewis made the playoffs repeatedly in Cincinnati without winning a single postseason game. Both were eventually shown the door not because they failed to build something, but because what they built had a ceiling baked into the architecture. McDermott's Bills, for all their regular-season excellence, began to feel like that. Three straight seasons of dominant point differentials. Three straight seasons of January heartbreak. At some point, the gap between what a team should be and what it becomes in the moments that define legacies stops being a sample-size argument and starts being a structural diagnosis.
And Josh Allen cannot wait forever. He put up 4,224 passing yards, 29 touchdowns, and added 678 yards and 16 more scores on the ground in 2025. He is the best quarterback in football — Madden's own 99 Club agrees — and he is in the window right now, the narrow corridor every franchise prays for and most never find. Squandering that window on a coaching staff that cannot close is not loyalty. It is negligence. The Bills owe Allen a different answer than the one McDermott kept giving him.
None of this erases what McDermott built. He arrived in Buffalo in 2017 and inherited a franchise that hadn't made the playoffs in nearly two decades. He ended that drought in his first season. He constructed a culture, a defensive identity, and a roster infrastructure that allowed Allen to become what he is. The years McDermott spent in Buffalo were, without question, the best years in Bills history since the early 1990s AFC Championship runs. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, everything — and it still wasn't enough.
The question now is whether whoever comes next can take the foundation McDermott poured and build the final floor. The offensive core is intact: Allen, James Cook III, Khalil Shakir, Dalton Kincaid, Dawson Knox. The bones are good. The depth at defensive end and linebacker is thin, the interior defensive line needs to be better than it was, and the receiving room spent most of 2025 held together with tape and practice-squad signings. A new coach inherits real problems alongside a generational quarterback. That is a job worth wanting.
McDermott leaves Buffalo with more wins than any coach in franchise history. He also leaves it without a conference title. History will be generous to him, and it should be. But history will also note that the Bills' window opened, stayed open longer than most windows do, and never produced the thing it was supposed to produce. That is the job of the next coach to fix — and the firing of this one was the only honest way to begin.