The 2023 season has played out like a nightmare for the Buffalo Bills. Despite an MVP-caliber campaign from Josh Allen, the Bills are just 6-6, sitting firmly on the outside of the AFC playoff picture. Every time the Bills take a step forward, they take three steps back.
The person at the center of their struggles is head coach Sean McDermott. He’s a “culture” defensive coach who is now seemingly at his wit’s end and has probably reached his end of the rope as Buffalo’s sideline leader. But football matters aside, McDermott also appears to be an awkward, cringy guy with no sense of appropriate timing to connect with his players. He is, in effect, pro football’s Michael Scott. In fact, McDermott could take his motivational speeches a bit too seriously. It’s like he hasn’t practiced them in a mirror before delivering them to people who are supposed to hang on his every word.
Knowing what we know now: oh, buddy, that’s a big mistake.
In a new feature from independent writer Ty Dunne, McDermott is largely painted as an overmatched doofus who is only letting the Bills organization down when it was finally prepared to level up. One of his worst-highlighted moments was what should’ve been an anodyne message to his team. Instead, McDermott turned it into praise of the terror group al-Qaeda for its coordination during the infamous 9/11 attacks in 2001. Group coordination which he said he wanted his players to channel.
Dearest readers, none of this is a typo or a misprint.
“At St. John Fisher College in Pittsford, N.Y., McDermott’s morning address began innocently enough. He told the entire team to come together. But then, sources on-hand say, he used a strange model: the terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. He cited the hijackers as a group of people who were all able to get on the same page to orchestrate attacks to perfection.”
After the NFL world understandably recoiled at a football coach drawing positive parallels to one of the worst tragedies in American history, McDermott addressed his ill-advised speech on Thursday. McDermott clarified that he almost instantaneously apologized to his team after the incident and sounded like a certain trash-posting Twitter account in the process.
I mean, I would’ve hoped he did!
That “Wint” (a.k.a. @dril) tweet is as follows. It almost follows the script of McDermott’s subsequent explanation to the letter:
issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"
— wint (@dril) February 15, 2017
Sean McDermott addressing media now: "My intent in the meeting that day was to discuss the importance of communication. … I regretted mentioned 9/11 in my message that day, and I immediately apologized to the team."
— katherine fitzgerald (@kfitz134) December 7, 2023
It’s not unprecedented for a football coach to be a tad out of touch with ordinary reality. They are often overworked maniacs who live, breathe, and sleep football — especially in the regular season. If you always have your nose to the grindstone, save for those few hours you doze off on the office couch, the outside world (and proper context) starts to seem like a fever dream.
But McDermott positively evoking 9/11 at first is just so on the nose for how the Bills’ 2023 season has gone. No wonder Western New York’s dreams of ending a Super Bowl drought are going down the drain.