Making sense of Terry Pegula, Sean McDermott, Josh Allen and the Bills’ fallout
Pegula did not inspire confidence with some aspects of his news conference, but that doesn't mean firing McDermott was the wrong move.
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Bills owner Terry Pegula (left) fired coach Sean McDermott (not pictured) and promoted general manager Brandon Beane (right).
Jeffrey T. Barnes / Associated Press
(Editor’s note: This is excerpted from Mike Sando’s Pick Six of Jan. 26, 2026.)
3. If Sean McDermott was going to become John Madden, it needed to happen this season. Too bad John Matuszak was not available.
One year ago, we compared the Sean McDermott-era Bills to the John Madden-coached Oakland Raiders of the early 1970s. Both teams won at a high rate during the regular season, only to fall short of the Super Bowl when facing the dynasties of their era.“All season, there has been speculation that Al Davis would fire John Madden if the Raiders did not get to the Super Bowl,” Glenn Dickey wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle after Madden’s Raiders fell short, again, in the 1975 season’s playoffs.
Madden returned for a seventh season and won the Super Bowl for two main reasons: Davis added 6-foot-8, 272-pound defensive end John Matuszak during the season, and the AFC hierarchy unexpectedly collapsed, just as it did for McDermott’s Bills this season.
The difference was that Madden won it all when Don Shula’s Dolphins fell apart, Chuck Noll’s Steelers lost their top two running backs and the Paul Brown-built Bengals missed the playoffs despite a 10-4 record.
McDermott ran out of chances when his Bills could not prevail from an AFC field missing Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson and Joe Burrow, leaving Allen as the only Tier 1 quarterback in the AFC playoffs.
Five other observations on the Bills:
• Sensitive ownership (but solid instincts): Owner Terry Pegula did not inspire confidence with some aspects of his news conference, especially when he defended general manager Brandon Beane by blaming coaches for drafting receiver Keon Coleman. That seemed impulsive, unnecessary and damaging.
But Pegula was doing his job when he surveyed the devastation in the Bills’ postgame locker room at Denver and decided enough was enough. Hard to argue with him in that regard. Whether McDermott “deserved” to be fired wasn’t the issue. Whether the team needed new leadership was the key.
• Good personnel (but no big move): Davis and Madden had clashed over personnel to the point that the coach resisted playing some key Davis acquisitions, including Bubba Smith and Ted Hendricks. McDermott, meanwhile, sent subtler messages during the season by lauding opponents for strengthening areas where Buffalo needed help, especially at receiver. There was obviously frustration in both cases.
Unlike Davis, whose Raiders went 8-1 in the playoffs with Matuszak, Beane largely stood pat last offseason. The team focused more on rewarding its own veterans than adding new ones.
“You’re never one player away,” Beane said one year ago. “That is a dangerous mindset to get into.”
Was there a Matuszak for the Bills to add last offseason? They reportedly tried to acquire Jaylen Waddle and Quinnen Williams at the deadline in November. They added neither, instead using waivers to pick up receiver Brandin Cooks, whose inability to secure Allen’s final pass at Denver resulted in the game-turning interception.
• Good (but not elite) coaching: McDermott was the driving force behind an impressive franchise reversal (eight playoff appearances in nine seasons, after a 17-year franchise playoff absence). He also showed growth, improving as a situational game manager. He is better now than he’s ever been.
But for a few reasons, McDermott probably got the Bills as far as he was going to get them.
McDermott’s 8-8 postseason record wasn’t bad, but how teams lose matters. The Bills under McDermott have been much better on offense in the playoffs, but much worse on defense, the side of the ball where McDermott built his pedigree.
Per TruMedia, the difference between the McDermott-era Bills’ defensive EPA per play during the regular season (+0.06) and in the postseason (-0.06) represents the largest drop for any of the 35 coaches with more than five playoff games since divisional realignment in 2002.
The defense, though solid at its best, did not present schematic challenges the way better ones do.
The McDermott-era Bills offense improved by the fifth-largest margin in the playoffs relative to the regular season.
That reflects a team that lost playoff shootouts with a turbocharged quarterback able to reach great speeds, but also prone to skidding off the road in the absence of guardrails.
Which brings us to our final bullet point.
• QB guardrails: Allen is one of 13 quarterbacks with more than five postseason starts since 2018, his rookie season. He ranks third among them, behind only Patrick Mahomes and Matthew Stafford, in EPA per pass play over that span.
So, let's not pretend Allen has been holding back the Bills, even if he gets sympathetic treatment.
Allen is a Tier 1 quarterback through the power of his athleticism, not through his expert handling of situations.
Two end-of-half situations come to mind from the divisional round.
In Denver, the Bills had first-and-10 from their own 30 with 16 seconds left in the second quarter and no timeouts. Allen scrambled up the middle and lost a fumble, leading to a Broncos field goal in a game decided by three.
In Chicago, the other Tier 1 quarterback in these playoffs, Matthew Stafford, faced first-and-10 from the Bears' 14 with 18 seconds left in the half and no timeouts. He threw incomplete three times, never putting the ball at risk, before his team kicked a field goal.
McDermott's halftime comments to CBS's Tracy Wolfson were revealing.
"Trying to be aggressive, get one shot, possibly a layered shot, out of bounds," McDermott said. "If it wasn't there, throw it out of bounds. We gotta take care of the ball."
• Optics be damned: Firing McDermott while promoting Beane produced terrible optics. I'm not sure why the promotion was necessary. As Beane himself said, he's not blameless here. But if the team was going to make that move, this was the time to do it, before the next coach takes over. Surprising the next coach by changing the power structure would create issues.
