One of the things I’m most interested in seeing this Bills season is whether Joe Brady was actually Joe Brady the last couple of years.
Was Brady calling the offense he wanted to call or was there a governor on him courtesy of Sean McDermott?
I’m not here to dismiss the idea that McDermott had his fingerprints all over the offense. Of course he did….He was the head coach. But I also think we’re in danger of reaching the point where every single thing people didn’t like about Joe Brady’s offense gets blamed on McDermott, while everything they did like gets credited to Brady. That’s a pretty convenient arrangement for the guy who is still here.
And I say that as someone who had a very strange relationship with Sean McDermott. I went from not being a huge fan of the guy to genuinely starting to like him. I’m not even completely sure when that happened.
Maybe it was after the Ty Dunne story. At that point, I was pretty much ready to pull the trigger as the picture painted McDermott as a guy who was controlling, paranoid and maybe a little too obsessed with having everything done his way.
Then something weird happened.
He seemed to change.
Maybe I fell for the Rocky IV philosophy: If I can change, and you can change, everybody can change.
McDermott seemed looser, he seemed more willing to adapt, and he seemed a little more comfortable in his own skin. I genuinely started liking him more.
Was that authentic? Was it calculated? Who the hell knows. I imagine if you liked McDermott or the people around him who were a source for you…you’ll say it was genuine growth. If you couldn’t stand him and had sources who felt the same way, you’ll say it was an act designed to save his job.
Welcome to sports discourse and coverage in 2026.
Was there a governor on Brady?
There has been reporting and plenty of discussion that McDermott put something of a governor on Brady’s offense.
I can believe parts of it.
For starters, I absolutely believe McDermott didn’t want the Bills constantly chucking the football 30 yards downfield. The further you throw it, the lower the completion percentage gets and the greater the opportunities for bad things to happen. Turnovers, sacks and short drives…..Suddenly your defense is right back on the field.
And considering McDermott’s defense had its problems, particularly when it mattered most, I can understand why he’d prefer those long, death-by-paper-cut drives.
Run it, Short pass, and Josh scrambles. Move the chains. Eat seven minutes. Keep the other offense standing on the sideline.
Here’s where the circle jerk around this gets annoying to me:
I don’t necessarily have a giant problem with that philosophy.
Now, I’d just say fuck it..let’s score way more points, but football logically, if your defense is struggling, protecting it by possessing the football makes sense. Of course, then we arrive at the obvious question…
Whose fault was it that the defense needed protecting?
Oh.
Right.
That’s where the snake starts eating its own tail.
What did McDermott actually want?
The funny thing about trying to determine Sean McDermott’s offensive philosophy is that I can find quotes to support basically whatever argument you want to make.
Want to argue that he wanted to run the football?
Easy.
When McDermott arrived in 2017, he said:
“You start with the run game, and that’s a big part of who we’re going to be on offense.”
He also said:
“You’ve got to be able to run the football when the defense knows it is coming.”
After the 2020 season, he said:
“We’ve got to be able to run the football better.”
And I will always remember that ridiculous wind game against New England in 2021. Brian Daboll and McDermott looked like they were about five minutes away from settling their differences in the parking lot. McDermott was clearly pissed about Buffalo’s inability—or unwillingness—to consistently run the football.
That wasn’t something invented by people who disliked him, as there are quotes throughout his tenure supporting it.
But here’s the problem.
There are quotes saying almost the exact opposite.
“You throw to win”
I will always remember McDermott’s end-of-season press conference after the 2023 season. One of the first questions was about his offensive philosophy and passing the football. McDermott immediately went back to Andy Reid:
“I cut my teeth around Andy Reid who [is] a pass-first, you throw to win [coach]. And that has been my philosophy since pretty much day one here.”
That quote has always stuck with me. Maybe I’m cynical, but it felt rehearsed.
It felt like McDermott knew the question was coming as there was a perception that he was the defensive head coach who wanted his offense running the football, controlling the clock and protecting his defense.
And he was making something very clear:
Don’t put that label on me.
McDermott has other quotes supporting that position, too. He once talked about Buffalo spending around 70 percent of its spring work developing the passing game. In 2025, when Buffalo’s passing offense was struggling, he flat-out said:
“At the end of the day, we have to be able to throw the football.”
And later:
“We’ve got a great quarterback… we should be able to move the ball with Josh through the air.”
So which Sean McDermott was real?
The guy screaming about establishing the run or the guy saying you throw to win?
I think the boring answer might be both.
Maybe McDermott wasn’t Mr. Run The Damn Ball or Mike Martz reincarnated. Maybe he simply wanted a more balanced offense than the one Buffalo had under Daboll and Ken Dorsey, and Joe Brady was willing to give him that.
Brady in Carolina
It’s worth wondering whether Joe Brady has been down this road before. In his first season as Carolina’s offensive coordinator in 2020, the Panthers ranked just 21st in the NFL with 407 rushing attempts, compared to 550 pass attempts. The following season, Matt Rhule began publicly demanding that Brady run the football more, even putting a target of roughly 30-plus carries per game on the offense. Brady was eventually fired, with Rhule explaining afterward that his vision was for Carolina to be a team that could run the football. I decided to try and find old quotes from both the HC and the OC about their view on attacking offenses. And once again it goes kind of both ways and maybe resembles the falling out with McDermott and Dorsey.
So was Brady simply failing in Carolina, or was a head coach increasingly dictating how he wanted Brady to call his offense?
Now Brady gets to show us
That’s what makes this season fascinating that there is no Sean McDermott anymore.
There is no governor.
There is no muzzle.
There is no blame game towards him.
Joe Brady is the head coach.
So what does Joe Brady’s offense actually look like when Joe Brady is ultimately responsible for it? If Buffalo suddenly starts attacking vertically considerably more often, everybody who believed McDermott was holding Brady back is going to take a victory lap.
And maybe they’ll be right.
But there’s another pretty gigantic variable here.
DJ Moore.
If Brady suddenly throws downfield more with Moore, a healthy Josh Palmer and a different collection of receiving weapons, am I supposed to automatically conclude McDermott was preventing him from doing it before or does Brady simply have better personnel to do it now?
That’s why I’m hesitant to decide the answer before watching the experiment.
If you’re going from a receiving corps that had limitations to one featuring DJ Moore, I would certainly hope your passing offense changes. Otherwise, why the hell did you get DJ Moore?
What I want to watch isn’t simply whether Buffalo passes more. I want to see how they pass.
Are there more deep shots, more throws outside the numbers, and More aggressive early-down passing? Does Josh Allen get more freedom to attack a matchup instead of taking the underneath completion? When it’s third-and-2, does Brady automatically think run? When Buffalo gets a lead, does the offense stay aggressive or immediately start trying to bleed the clock?
Those things will tell us considerably more than raw pass attempts.
Brady is also attempting something pretty rare
There’s another part of this that isn’t getting enough attention. Promoting your own coordinator to replace your head coach isn’t something NFL teams do all the time.
Since 2000, by my count, 16 coordinators have been promoted to permanent head coach by the same organization, including Brady.
Only five of the previous 15 reached the playoffs with that franchise as head coach: Mike Martz, Bill Callahan, Leslie Frazier, Jason Garrett and Todd Bowles.
That’s 30% percent.
Only four won a playoff game: Martz, Callahan, Garrett and Bowles.
That’s 28.1 percent.
And none won a Super Bowl. Martz and Callahan are the only ones who even reached one. Now if you don’t give a shit about this century and are a 20th century fan or want to impress boomers, the numbers including last century aren’t sexy by any means unless you are a 49ers and Giants fan.
That doesn’t mean Brady is doomed or crowned as historical trivia doesn’t determine whether somebody can coach. But it does show that the whole keep continuity by promoting the successful coordinator thing doesn’t automatically work. When these coordinators became head coaches, the unit that got them promoted didn’t necessarily improve.
Sometimes it actually got worse.
That makes sense as being an offensive coordinator and being a head coach aren’t the same job. Brady now has to worry about the defense, special teams, game management, personnel, his coaching staff and 500 other things McDermott used to worry about while Brady was designing third-down plays.
Now the entire thing belongs to him.
So was he muzzled?
I don’t know.
And I think anybody declaring with absolute certainty that they know is probably starting with the conclusion they want and working backward.
I believe McDermott influenced Brady.
I believe McDermott wanted balance.
I believe he valued protecting the football.
I believe he understood that long offensive possessions helped his defense.
And I absolutely believe there were moments where McDermott would’ve preferred Brady run the football rather than have Josh Allen fling it around the stadium.
But that’s different from saying Joe Brady spent two years desperately wanting to run some wide-open vertical offense while Sean McDermott stood behind him with a shock collar.
We don’t know that.
The good news is we’re finally going to find out what Joe Brady looks like without Sean McDermott standing over the operation. If Josh Allen suddenly starts launching bombs to DJ Moore every Sunday, the McDermott Muzzled Brady crowd is going to have a hell of a lot of ammunition.
But if the Bills are still running the football, taking the underneath stuff, putting together 12-play drives and preaching balance? Well, maybe the governor wasn’t Sean McDermott.
Maybe that was Joe Brady all along.
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