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The next two months were always going to tell us a lot about this version of the Bills.
This aging roster has Von Miller, who is 34; Micah Hyde and Jordan Poyer are 33; Mitch Morse is 31, Stefon Diggs is 30; Dion Dawkins and Matt Milano are 29; and Tre’Davious White will be 29 on Jan. 16. Buffalo’s core—of this group, all but Miller have been around since 2019—will be broken up at some point, which could be soon.
And whether this Bills team makes the playoffs and advances if it gets there, for sure, will help to chart how GM Brandon Beane will build the roster for 2024 and beyond.
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Will the events of the past week affect all of that? Yes, they will. What happened Thursday and Friday in Orchard Park will only further clarify where the players stand in their careers, with one another and, yes, with their coach.
So far, so good for Sean McDermott’s crew.
Three days after Tyler Dunne’s extensive, three-part report on the McDermott era at Go Long, which included an anecdote about a 2019 training camp meeting during which the coach discussed “the importance of communication and being on the same page with the team,” in reference to the 9/11 terrorists, the Bills had their coach, and one another’s backs in a big way—and on national television for everyone to see.
Sunday’s 20–17 win tested the Bills in a lot of ways, football-wise. Buffalo blew leads of 14–0 and 17–7, had to survive what looked like a fourth-quarter meltdown, had to reset after a wild play seemed to put the Chiefs up in the final two minutes, and repeatedly had to stop Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce. They did all that at Arrowhead with even more than just their season on the line—and they did it with the intention of sending a message, too.
“We know who coach McDermott is,” second-year middle linebacker Terrel Bernard told me from the winning locker room. “There were no issues. No story. Nothing that got into the locker room that anybody wasn’t already aware of. We really came together this week. Coach McDermott addressed the issue. Like I said, everybody in the building knows who he is as a man, as a coach, as the leader of the team. We didn’t flinch.
“It was good to come out here and get this win.”
It was, more or less, necessary, given where the Bills are in a lot of different ways.
Well, that was a sloppy, wild and exciting Week 14. The football was far from perfect. But it did leave us with a lot to get to …
• The Jets, Browns and a bunch of other contenders without their starting quarterbacks in the Ten Takeaways.
• The unlikely rise of Jake Browning in Cincinnati.
• The NFL owners meeting, coming up later in the day in Dallas.
But we’re starting with the Bills in Kansas City, and what Sunday meant for their coach and the players he’s leading into the final month of the regular season.
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Of the 49 players the Bills had in uniform Sunday, and with White and Milano on injured reserve, 13 were in the room for McDermott’s ill-fated 9/11 metaphor.
Some of the 36 who weren’t may have heard the story, but Bernard wasn’t one of them.
“I wasn’t aware of anything that happened, what was said, anything like that,” he says.
So Sunday was the first real window into how those 36 players were receiving McDermott’s remarks—in a huge game, against a team that’s won two of the past four Super Bowls, in a hostile environment. And the Bills responded right out of the gate, picking Patrick Mahomes off on the game’s first possession, going on extended touchdown drives on their second and third possessions, then taking body blow after body blow as the Chiefs clawed back.
On the field, the seminal moment came after Kadarius Toney’s gaffe (you may have heard he lined up in the neutral zone to negate his own touchdown, scored on a wild, impromptu, across-the-field lateral from Travis Kelce), with the Chiefs in second-and-15 near midfield, down 20–17, and a gassed Bills defense trying to reset and throw the final punches.
“Whenever the ball’s put down, we’re ready to play,” Bernard says. “Obviously, it was a huge point in the game and got us back into another situation where we could go out there and try to win the game. After something like that happens, you got to reset your mind, refocus and go out there and play.”
The Bills’ defense did, with Von Miller pulling Mahomes to the turf to force a second-down incompletion on a near sack, Ed Oliver batting down Mahomes’s throw on third down and Leonard Floyd hitting his elbow to send the reigning Super Bowl MVP’s final pass harmlessly to the ground on fourth down.
“Those guys up front did a great job all game,” Bernard says. “Especially the last series, they got pressure. We didn’t really blitz them toward the end there.”
The emotion on the field only added to the emotion in the Bills’ locker room a half hour or so later.
Just as McDermott was addressing his players, calling them a “resilient damn football team right here—I’m so proud of you guys,” he was interrupted.
“Coach, we got your back!” yelled one player.
“We got your back!” yelled another.
Then Beane grabbed a game ball and held it up. “Hey, we got this man’s back, tough f---ing week,” Beane said, before handing it to McDermott and embracing the coach.
“Any time something like that happens, I feel like you can go one of two ways,” Bernard says. “You can come together. Or you can break apart. I feel like this group is tighter than we’ve ever been. Like I said, we’re all 1,000 percent behind coach McDermott and who he is and how he handles himself every day. I think we all came together and had one goal in mind. We were able to get the job done.”
And now we’ll see where they take it next.
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Bernard kept saying to me, in the short time that we were on the phone, how he and his teammates know McDermott, so I asked him to explain.
“He’s a tough, hard-working, loyal leader,” Bernard says. “Those are words that I don’t use lightly. I’ve only been here for two years now, but every single day he’s been the same man, the same person, the same coach. I have a lot of respect for him and how he handles his business. I don’t think I could be in a better situation.”
Bernard’s one of the dozens who McDermott and Beane have drafted and developed in turning the Bills from a two-decade doormat, one that forever struggled to conjure an encore to the glory days of the 1990s, back into an AFC powerhouse.
And a huge part of that is how McDermott has raised the level of expectation for everyone, having come from winning programs in Philadelphia and Carolina.
In this circumstance, on multiple occasions, he actually did hold himself to that standard. It first happened in 2019, when he quickly recognized his mistake and apologized to the team for his inappropriate remark. It happened again this week, when he apologized privately and publicly, to the team and the masses Thursday, before addressing it again Friday in a press conference and, finally, acknowledging it postgame with his players.
McDermott was, to borrow Bernard’s description, the same guy through the whole thing.
And that’s something that, having known him for more than a decade, I had a pretty good feeling that the Bills could expect from the coach himself—and I wouldn’t be surprised if he winds up, at some point, doing more to make up for all of this. Of course, the players who work for him know that better than I do.
And that, to me, was reflected in how they played Sunday.
Going forward, that effort simply gives this group of players, the core of it in particular, and McDermott, too, a chance to keep going. Which, with all that was on the line at Arrowhead, is all that they were looking for.
