Sean McDermott doesn’t coach the Buffalo Bills anymore — he was fired in January after nine seasons, two AFC Championship Game appearances, and zero Super Bowls — and this week, with nobody left to answer to, he predicted the Bills are Super Bowl-bound anyway.
That firing came after a 33-30 overtime collapse to the Broncos in the divisional round, a loss ESPN’s report on the move walked through in detail. Joe Brady has the job now. Brandon Beane still runs the front office. The 2026 season hasn’t played a single down, and somehow the loudest McDermott quote of the week is coming from a coach with no players to coach. Whatever Super Bowl odds the Bills carry into the fall belong to Brady and that roster, not to the guy sitting across from Rich Eisen saying it out loud.
“I think if you’re betting on a Super Bowl contender, they are certainly one of them,” McDermott said, crediting Beane’s offseason work and pitching a Bills-Rams matchup like a man still filling out a game plan. He said it with the same certainty that got him nine years on the job and zero rings to show for it.
https://twitter.com/ESPNNFL/status/2095937272835141994
Two AFC Championship Game trips in nine years. An 8-8 playoff record. Zero Super Bowls, ever. Heavy.com’s breakdown of his tenure ran the same week as the prediction, and Buffalo missed the conference title game in six of his final seven seasons on the sideline. That’s the record behind the guy telling you to trust the vision.
He got personal about it too. Asked if he still pulls for the Bills, McDermott said, “Why wouldn’t I? Of course I do. The impact that that team, that building, and that community had on me and my family, we will remember that for the rest of our lives.” My brother still texts me Suns highlights like our family never stopped bleeding purple, even through years of front-office purges, so I get the impulse. Loyalty doesn’t clock out the day the badge gets taken away.
Josh Allen apparently carries a version of that same weight. He’s said he still feels guilty about McDermott’s firing, which tracks for a quarterback who spent eight years watching his coach patrol the sideline at Highmark Stadium before getting walked out of the building in January. Allen’s the one who still has to show up to that building every day, guilt or not.
None of that changes what McDermott actually is right now: a guy with a prediction and no job riding on it. Brady inherits the pressure, the actual roster, and the beat writers who’ll ask what happens if it goes wrong again in January. McDermott just gets to be right or wrong from Rich Eisen’s studio, nowhere near the building he says he’ll never forget.
Nine years, two title games, zero rings — and he never had to explain why.
