Two weeks ago, the Buffalo Bills were 4-0 and looked like the best team in the NFL. A Sunday night defeat by their AFC East rival, the New England Patriots, started the slide, and the Bills’ 24-14 Monday Night Football loss to the Atlanta Falcons pushed them further down the standings and the power rankings.
The Bills’ Week 6 L actually had a promising start, with the defense causing a Falcons fumble on the game’s opening play. However, an offside call—one they didn’t replay on the broadcast—gave the ball back to the home team, which proptly went down the field and scored a touchdown to take a 7-0 lead.
While Josh Allen and company would answer and tie the score on the next drive, the Falcons would never trail in the game after that opening score.
As Buffalo tries to pick up the pieces heading into their bye week and figure out what went so wrong the last two weeks, let’s look at the Bills most to blame for the stunning Week 6 MNF loss to the Falcons.
The Bills will never win a Super Bowl with Sean McDermott as head coach. Full stop.
McDermott and his cohort, general manager Brandon Beane, deserve a lot of praise for what they have done in Buffalo. They took a franchise mired in a 17-year playoff drought and built it into a perennial contender. That’s no small feat, and McDermott and Beane must get their flowers for that.
However, the founder of a company is not always the best CEO to lead said company when it hits a certain point. The skills required to build something from the ground up are not necessarily the same skills that it takes to make the leap from one level to another.
Bringing it back to the Bills-Falcons game, the reason Buffalo lost was that its offense was stuck in the mud, and Atlanta gashed the defense time and time again. Both these issues stem from having McDermott as head coach.
This is McDermott’s ninth year in charge of the Bills. He got the job in 2017 after making his name as the Philadelphia Eagles and then Carolina Panthers defensive coordinator. He’s a defensive guy, and this defense frankly stinks. And while announcers may talk about how the talent is lacking, the unit has plenty of high picks on it.
Ed Oliver, Gregory Rousseau, AJ Epenesa, Dorian Williams, Terrell Bernard, Cole Bishop, and Tre’Davious White (more on those last two below) were all picked by the team in the first three rounds of the NFL Draft. That’s over 60% of a starting defense that the team invested significant draft capital in, so it’s not like McDermott is working with 11 undrafted free agents every week.
A head coach needs to be able to scheme something up on one side of the ball or the other in a big spot to help his team win. McDermott can’t do that on offense and hasn’t done it...