Uncertainty at One Bills Drive

The Buffalo Bills fired their head coach and fellow Tribesman Sean McDermott on Monday.  I don't love this move for several reasons.

First, McDermott is a good head coach.  But much like the practice of law, being an NFL head coach is all about "what have you done for me lately."  Here's how McDermott compares to the best coaches over the last four years and their career Super Bowl records with the best in yellow:

McDermott is no Andy Reid or Nick Sirianni, but he compares favorably with everyone else over the last four years.  He made the playoffs with Tyrod Taylor and Nathan Peterman as his starting QBs for god's sake!  It isn't clear that anyone could do much better.  

Second, as with anything in life, a change can make things better or worse.  It was pretty ugly before McDermott arrived at One Bills Drive going back 30 years:

That's 17 consecutive years without making the playoffs.  From an AFC East perspective they finished in last place 8 times, in the bottom two 16 times, and went 24 years without winning the division.  That was not fun.  You know what was more fun?  Ninety-eight wins, eight playoff appearances and five division titles over nine years.  Will they do as well with Brian Daboll or Mike McCarthy or Klint Kubiak or Joe Brady?  For every Marv Levy or Sean McDermott there's a Mike Mularkey or a Chan Gailey.

Third, a bunch of things outside of McDermott's control cost them this game.  

zdaughter really got into football this season and plays a lot of Madden (which involves drubbing me mercilessly and talking smack about it).  At the end of the first half with 22 seconds left she said "They should run four verticals" and I said "No, they will take a knee."  They did not take a knee, which is on McDermott, but what happened after the snap is not on McDermott.

Allen should've thrown this away, or slid, or really done anything other than carry the ball like a loaf of bread.  McDermott didn't cause that fumble, or fail to recover it, or kick the FG for Denver.

I know that zdaughter is a real Bills fan because she woke up on Sunday still pissed off about the Brandon Cooks play.

Even this guy in a Celtics shirt says the Bills got ripped off and he brings the receipts with the same fact pattern but a different outcome in the Rams/Bears game.

Real Bills fans know that it isn't fair to besmirch someone based on another person's failures.

Fourth, there's no clear choice to replace McDermott.  

The last time I did one of these posts I talked about coaches with rings, or CWR.  No coach ever won a Super Bowl with two different teams despite the fact that there have been LIX (that's 59 for you math majors) opportunities to do so.  As a result I don't want a CWR so that rules out John Harbaugh (who isn't available), Mike Tomlin (who wants to take the year off and would require sending draft picks to the Steelers), and Mike McCarthy (who doesn't get me excited and probably wants to go home to Pittsburgh anyway).

The Pegulas' goal appears to be getting to the Super Bowl ASAP.  Only seven coaches reached the Super Bowl in their first year with a team:

• Don McCafferty with the 1970 Colts.  They won.  McCafferty was the Colts' offensive backfield coach in 1969.
• Red Miller with the 1977 Broncos.  They lost.  Miller was the Patriots' OL coach in 1976 (that's a crazy career upgrade by the way).
• George Seifert with the 1989 49ers.  They won (for the second year in a row) with a stacked roster including six Pro Bowlers, three first team All Pros, and the league MVP (and at least five future Hall of Famers).  Seifert was the Niners' DC in 1988.
• Bill Callahan with the 2002 Raiders.  This team was stacked with Rich Gannon (league MVP), Jerry Rice and Tim Brown, two first team All Pros on the offensive line, Rod Woodson, Charles Woodson, Bill Romanowski, and Sam Adams (the DT not the brewer).  Callahan was the Raiders' OC in 2001 and they lost to ...
• John Gruden with the 2002 Bucs.  He was the Raiders' HC in 2001.  This defense was one of the best ever with Warren Sapp, Simeon Rice, Ronde Barber, John Lynch, Derrick Brooks, and Booger McFarland.  Sapp, Barber, Lynch and Brooks are HOFers.
• Jim Caldwell with the 2009 Colts.  They lost.  Like Seifert, he was on the team's staff the prior year (assistant HC/QB coach) and he took over a stacked roster that won it all a few years previously including seven Pro Bowlers, three first team All Pros, and the league MVP (and at least two future Hall of Famers).
• Gary Kubiak with the 2015 Broncos.  They won thanks to arguably the league's best defense featuring five Pro Bowlers and one first team All Pro.  Peyton Manning's withered husk started 9 games going 7-2, completing 59.8% of his passes for 9 TD and 17 INT.  Brock Ostweiler chipped in 5 wins, 10 TD and 6 INT along the way.  Kubiak was Baltimore's OC in 2014 and he had a history with Denver as their backup QB in the 1980s.

So what's the best comp for this Bills team?  

The roster is not stacked--they do have three Pro Bowlers (Allen, James Cook, Dion Dawkins) but they have no speed at receiver, the defensive line has no one fearsome (despite spending lots of draft capital there), the defensive backs are shaky (despite spending lots of draft capital there) and always injured, two of their starting OL are free agents, and they will be more than $7.6m over the cap (due in not insignificant part to Allen's $56m cap hit, up from $36m this year).

The coaching staff has talent.  Bobby Babich put together the top pass defense (despite all the injuries) but the run defense was like a sieve.  Joe Brady would maintain Tribal continuity and he assembled a top five offense three years in a row.  But neither are as seasoned as Seifert or Callahan.

The closest match I can see is the 2002 Bucs--they were very good on one side of the ball--so I'm looking for a good head coach (or coordinator with head coaching experience) who didn't break through yet.   Looking closer at history, Gruden and Kubiak were offensive coaches who won Super Bowls as head coaches with dominant defenses so maybe the Bills need to hire someone who came up as a DC like Leslie Frazier (former Bills DC), Vic Fangio, or Steve Spagnuolo, but they're old as hell, so Vance Joseph, Robert Saleh, or Brian Flores.  For shits and giggles I'll give Anthony Campanile a shoutout because Fair Lawn and Don Bosco.

Ultimately though, they will probably hire Brian Daboll because Josh Allen loves him and that's as good a reason as any.  I don't love that hire (I watched him coach a lot of bad Giants losses) but I'll hope for the best.

Gheorghemas: Day Nine

On the Ninth Day of Gheorghemas, Big Gheorghe gave to me: 

Nine college coaching vacancies* 
Eight Films Explaining

Seven Books for Reading

Six random time-wasting recommendations

Five (Green and) Golden Things

Four songs by “the Chairman of the Board” on his birthday

Three Beauties

Two Types of Stories

A Bald Guy with two Pupp-ies

*There’s more than that, but we’re focusing on mid-season firings. Work with me here. 

The college football coaching carousel spun earlier and faster this season, thanks in no small part to the confluence of an expanded playoff format, increasing eight-figure payouts from television revenue, and administrators and fanbases with the patience and judgment of meth addicts. A handful of big names suddenly found themselves looking for their next gig before Halloween, while their former employers got a head start on searches and buyout clause structures for successors. 

The biggest names to get turfed early were James Franklin at Penn State and Brian Kelly at LSU, who were owed a combined $104 million in buyout settlements. Mike Gundy lasted only three games into his 21st season at Oklahoma State, where he was the school’s winningest coach. DeShaun Foster at UCLA and Brent Pry at Virginia Tech also were canned just three games into the season. Twenty-five percent of the Southeastern Conference had mid-season coach openings, with Billy Napier at Florida, Hugh Freeze at Auburn and Sam Pittman at Arkansas joining Kelly in the unemployment line. Alabama Birmingham demonstrated that lower tier D1 programs can be just as trigger happy, firing Trent Dilfer after a 9-21 record over just two-plus seasons. 

Now, that’s not to say that any of the pink slips were without merit. Several coaches underperformed relative to their surroundings. A couple reached their sell-by dates. Some were poor fits that weren’t evident until they were on the job. All tried to navigate a shifting landscape at schools whose aims rest somewhere between aspirational and delusional. 

It brings to mind a line from former Florida athletic director Jeremy Foley – he cribbed it from Secretary of State and President Whisperer Henry Kissinger – about the proper time to fire a coach: What must be done eventually should be done immediately. 

The culprits, in many ways, were money and opportunity. The money that schools receive from massive TV and media rights deals, along with out-in-the-open salaries and expenditures for players and roster makeup, and the exposure and accompanying riches from a playoff format that’s 12 teams on its way to 16, have accelerated the demand for immediate results. Even schools that don’t have access to Power 4 Conference resources get swept up in the wave. Factor in what might be called The Cignetti Effect and here we are. 

It’s simplistic to say that Curt Cignetti ruined coaching hires for everybody else, but it’s not entirely inaccurate. He immediately transformed Indiana from one of the dispirited programs in the history of college football to national relevance and back-to-back playoff appearances. Every other administration and fanbase with an itch says, “Why can’t we have that?” and now grades on an even more demanding curve. 

The current cycle also further deepens the fiction of major college football as amateur undertaking, where plenty still argue that players should not be compensated beyond scholarships and meager stipends. Hundreds of millions of dollars are part of the equation, however, for facilities, salaries, players and sometimes for coaches given the heave-ho. When the Darjalians from the nearby Canis Major galaxy take over our decaying planet, they’ll look at American sports and emit a series of grunts and squeals that roughly translate to: “Christ on a bike, your species can be astonishingly shallow and petty. You devoted more time and resources to *that* shit than taking care of fellow humans? It’s a miracle you ever climbed out of caves and trees.” 

This year’s coaching churn swept up both well known and more obscure figures. Franklin is viewed by many of his peers, according to acquaintances in the coaching profession, a bit like a cryptocurrency hawker. He’s an able recruiter who would have trouble constructing a ham-and-cheese sandwich while standing behind a deli counter. He was successful by many metrics, going 104-45 with major bowl appearances and helped lift the Nittany Lions program from the hangover of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, as well as a near miraculous stint at Vanderbilt where he made the Commodores competitive. Coming off a semifinal appearance in last year’s playoff, they began the season 3-0 and ranked No. 2, with national championship aspirations. But a double-overtime loss to No. 6 Oregon dropped Franklin’s record to 4-21 vs. top-10 teams, and successive losses to UCLA and its own interim head coach and Northwestern prompted the Big Hats to pull the plug. Penn State brass decided that a $48-million buyout and a search for the Next Guy was preferable to the status quo (Franklin and the school negotiated a buyout settlement of $9 million, just before he was hired at Virginia Tech). 

Kelly was shown the door after a 49-25 dump trucking at home to Texas A&M dropped the Tigers’ record to 5-3 and concluded a four-year mismatch of coach and program. When he bolted Notre Dame, he was lured by a program that he believed had a better path toward a national championship, while LSU was attracted by a guy who succeeded at another blue blood program. But Kelly was a poor fit from the start, witness the Massachusetts native and career Midwesterner affecting a Southern accent in one of his first public appearances that matched Kevin Costner’s English accent in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” on the cringe-o-meter. After losing three of four, culminating with the A&M beatdown, his overall record of 34-14, 19-10 in the SEC, wasn’t good enough for a program that believes, justifiably, that it should compete for nattys. 

Napier never gained traction at another program with championship pedigree in one of the most fertile recruiting areas in the country. Likewise Pry, who was unable to approach the success of Hokies’ icon Frank Beamer’s heyday. Auburn overlooked Freeze’s sketchy past as it attempted to keep up with Alabama and the SEC’s expanded upper tier. He and Pittman and Foster were in over their heads. UCLA’s athletic director even admitted that Foster, a former Bruins star, was in an untenable position with the school’s entry into the Big Ten Conference, yet wasn’t even given two full seasons. It's all confirmation that choosing a coach is at best inexact. Sometimes you get a Kiffin, sometimes you get a Charlie Weis, and once in a blue moon you get a Cignetti. As schools chase success, expect the present rate of turnover to continue, if not accelerate. After all, you can’t get to the next mistake without moving on from the current one.