{"id":696661,"date":"2026-01-22T16:11:18","date_gmt":"2026-01-22T16:11:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/696661\/"},"modified":"2026-01-22T16:11:18","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T16:11:18","slug":"bills-explaination-of-sean-mcdermotts-firing-falls-flat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/696661\/","title":{"rendered":"Bills Explaination of Sean McDermott\u2019s Firing Falls Flat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good morning, I\u2019m Tyler Lauletta, filling in for Dan Gartland, who has graciously given me the keys to this newsletter Ferrari. While you\u2019re here, give us a follow at our other morning newsletter, SI:CYMI<\/a>. If you like it here, I\u2019m very confident that you\u2019ll like it over there too. Who doesn\u2019t love a guaranteed morning email that you\u2019ll actually want to open? Alright, let\u2019s get to it. <\/p>\n

In today\u2019s SI:AM:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u26f7\ufe0fAlysa Liu\u2019s return<\/a><\/p>\n

\ud83c\udfc0March Madness field<\/a><\/p>\n

\ud83c\udfc6NFL predictions<\/a><\/p>\n

The Bills lose the press conference<\/p>\n

The Bills\u2019 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<\/a>, and General manager Brandon Beane would be retained as GM and promoted to president of football operations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, Beane and team owner Terry Pegula spoke with reporters<\/a> to address those questions. It did not go well<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When Beane was asked about second-year wide receiver Keon Coleman, who hasn\u2019t panned out, and the lack of high-quality receivers around Allen, Pegula cut in and made everyone look worse in the process.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe coaching staff pushed to draft Keon. I\u2019m not saying Brandon wouldn\u2019t have drafted him, but he wasn\u2019t his next choice,\u201d Pegula said. \u201cThat was Brandon being a team player and taking advice from his coaching staff, who felt strongly about the player. He\u2019s taking, for some reason, heat over it, and not saying a word about it, but I\u2019m here to tell you the true story.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Beane would later do his best to clarify the situation<\/a>, insisting that, as general manager, he had as much responsibility for picking Coleman as anyone.<\/p>\n

\u201cTerry\u2019s point was that we might have had it in a different order of personnel vs. coaching, and I went that way,\u201d Beane said. \u201cBut ultimately I\u2019m not turning in a pick for a player that I don\u2019t think we can succeed with.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a bizarre sequence, and it only got more bizarre when videos surfaced that appeared to show how Beane wanted to draft Coleman<\/a>. Not only was Pegula\u2019s interjection awkward from a team perspective and damaging from a trade-value perspective, but it also seemed factually wrong.<\/p>\n

Despite how bad that scene went, it\u2019s possible that Pegula and Beane are actually lucky that that\u2019s the top headline coming out of the presser because Pegula\u2019s explanation for firing McDermott was arguably worse.<\/p>\n

Pegula first set the scene, recalling the mood of the locker room in Denver.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to take you in the locker room after that game,\u201d Pegula said. \u201cI 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI walked over to Josh, he didn\u2019t even acknowledge I was there. The first thing I said to him was, \u2018That was a catch.\u2019 We all know what I\u2019m talking about. He didn\u2019t acknowledge me. He just sat there sobbing<\/a>. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

At first glance, this feels like an understandable course of action\u2014Pegula 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\u2019t seem like best practices.<\/p>\n

What does Allen\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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

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 \u201cI felt like we hit the proverbial playoff wall year after year.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI just sensed in that locker room, where do we go from here, with what we have?\u201d Pegula asked. \u201cAnd that was the basis for my decision.\u201d<\/p>\n

Overall, the press conference sent a pretty clear message to whoever becomes the next coach of the Bills<\/a>: 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.<\/p>\n

The expectations are high, sure, but hey, at least you get to spend the winter in Buffalo.<\/p>\n

The best of Sports IllustratedAfter retiring at 16, a casual ski trip reignited Alysa Liu\u2019s passion for skating. Now, the 20-year-old star is back with a refreshed outlook to make a run at the Milan Cortina Games,<\/a> writes Stephanie Apstein.With less than two months until Selection Sunday, Arizona, Duke, Michigan and UConn have a hold on the No. 1 seeds in the men\u2019s NCAA tournament in Kevin Sweeney\u2019s first look at the field.<\/a>The MMQB staff picks who will win both conference championship games<\/a> and head to Super Bowl LX.Daniel Flick unveils his post-College Football Playoff mock draft, and it includes only two first-round quarterbacks.<\/a>Albert Breer dives into potential candidates for the Dolphins\u2019 offensive coordinator opening, the Falcons\u2019 plans and the quarterback draft class in his latest mailbag<\/a>.Vijay Singh, 62, explains the reasoning behind his controversial decision to play the Sony Open<\/a> with Max Schreiber and how much he\u2019ll tee it up away from the senior tour in 2026.The top five\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026things I saw last night:<\/p>\n

5. This week, we already got a goalie fight, so how about a goalie goal<\/a>?<\/p>\n

4. Bryce Harper\u2019s offseason hobbies are apparently getting more extreme<\/a>.<\/p>\n

3. Creighton\u2019s Austin Swartz shows that nothing beats hustle<\/a> when the game is on the line.<\/p>\n

2. Paul Finebaum eats a whole plate of crow<\/a>.<\/p>\n

1. Fernando Mendoza updates his LinkedIn profile with some big professional news<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Good morning, I\u2019m Tyler Lauletta, filling in for Dan Gartland, who has graciously given me the keys to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":696662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2048],"tags":[215,214,53,2086,7,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-696661","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-buffalo-bills","8":"tag-bills","9":"tag-buffalo","10":"tag-buffalo-bills","11":"tag-buffalobills","12":"tag-football","13":"tag-nfl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115939632412226505","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=696661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/696662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=696661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=696661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=696661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}