Another season for the Buffalo Bills ended in frustration on Saturday when the Denver Broncos got an overtime field goal to win their Divisional Round game, advance to the AFC Championship, and leave future Hall of Fame quarterback Josh Allen without a Super Bowl appearance in his eight-year career â despite seven straight trips to the playoffs.
The head coach throughout the Bills’ current run was Sean McDermott. But McDermott will never lead the Bills to the Super Bowl, because on Tuesday, Bills owner Terry Pegula fired him.
The loss to Denver made the Bills the first team in the NFL’s 60-year Super Bowl era to win at least one playoff game for six straight seasons without winning a single Super Bowl. In the Bills’ case, they never even got there â and have not since the 1993 season.
Heartbreak Takes Toll on QB
The repeated disappointments have clearly taken their toll on the 29-year-old Allen, who openly wept during his postgame press conference and was described by Pegula as “listless” in the Bills locker room following the defeat.
Now, according to one Bills correspondent, Pegula is predicted to hire a coach whom Allen has described as someone who has “meant so much to me in my football career and my life” to be McDermott’s replacement.
Billsâ Next Coach Is Ex-OC: Prediction
McDermott was hired after two years as defensive coordinator for the Philadelphia Eagles followed by six in the same role for the Carolina Panthers. In the 2015 campaign, the Panthers reached the Super Bowl and under McDermott had the league’s sixth-stingiest defense in terms of points allowed.
In nine years at the Bills’ helm, the team experienced only one losing season under McDermott, Allen’s rookie year of 2018. The now 51-year-old coach then led the Bills to seven straight seasons of at least 10 wins, only the sixth team in the Super Bowl era to put together such a streak.
But in the end, with Allen now turning 30, Pegula said that the inability to get to the NFL’s championship game was what prompted him to move on from McDermott.
âIt was one year after another. I just couldnât see us doing that with Sean,â Pegula said at a press conference Wednesday, as quoted by the Post-Journal newspaper. âItâs not an easy decision, trust me, with that success. But what is success? Is it being in the playoffs seven years in a row with no Super Bowl.â
The job of getting the Bills there, according to a prediction by Brandon Ray of the BuffaLowDown Bills news site, will fall to McDermott’s own former offensive coordinator â who was himself fired this season as New York Giants head coach â Brian Daboll.
Daboll and Allen Have Close Relationship
Pegula said at his press conference that Allen â though he had no role, according to the owner, in McDermott’s firing â would play an active part in selecting the Bills’ new head coach. If that proves true, Daboll would certainly place high on Allen’s list.
“In terms of my path of my career and getting better, he was probably the most influential one,” Allen has said of Daboll, as quoted by Alaina Getzenberg of ESPN.com. “He’s a guy that I [would] talk to each and every day.”
Daboll in turn told Getzenberg that Allen was his “great friend.”
“While (general manager Brandon) Beane has said that this search is a â100 percent open search,â wrote Ray, âit would not be surprising at all if Daboll is named as McDermottâs replacement as head coach in Buffalo.â
The Bills held a job interview for the coaching position with Daboll on Thursday.
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