Joe Brady is either too young to understand — after all, he is the youngest head coach in the NFL — or he has done an outstanding job of compartmentalizing the pressure everyone else believes he should be feeling.
Brady has stepped into a unique situation with the Buffalo Bills because it’s not too often that a first-time head coach takes over a team that, according to most analysts, is ready to contend for a Super Bowl.
Usually when a team fires its head coach, it’s because things have gone haywire and the new man is brought in to turn things around and the owner will essentially say, “Hey, if you can get us back to .500 or even into a wild-card berth, great.”
That’s not Brady’s charge in Buffalo; he was promoted from being Sean McDermott’s offensive
coordinator to, as owner Terry Pegula said back in late January, get the Bills over the “proverbial playoff wall.” Sorry, but nothing short of that will suffice.
Pegula clearly stated the standard he’s demanding from Brady: Win now, and that doesn’t simply mean wrest back control of the AFC East from the New England Patriots, or get to the AFC Championship Game. It means, at the very least, get to the Super Bowl and if you win it and end the Bills’ forever championship drought, even better.
When Brady met with reporters on the first day of training camp at St. John Fisher University Wednesday, he was asked about the pressure that we all believe he should be feeling.
“I like to think there’s not a head coach in the league that buys into a grace period,” Brady said. “I know I can’t speak for everybody, but that’s not how my brain is wired. I understand what comes with this job, but that’s what I wanted. I want the guys to understand what comes with that. I have no pressure. I don’t feel any pressure, and that’s not in a negative way, but I wake up, I work, I try to do the best job I can do and get my guys in the best position to have success, and they go from there.”
That’s a commendable approach for him to take, but he can deny it all he wants in the middle of the summer when everyone is happy and the Bills are 0-0. But deep down he must know the expectations are immense if not urgent, especially since his superstar quarterback, Josh Allen, is entering his ninth season and just turned 30 years old, meaning, to use a golf analogy, he is about to grab a drink at the snack bar and head off to begin the back nine of his spectacular career.
Allen was asked about the pressure facing the Bills but he quickly turned the question back by saying, “Expectations from who?”
The point he was trying to make is that the Bills don’t pay attention to what media or fans are saying on this topic of win now; the team is only concerned about its next practice.
“We’re not really focused on trying to match those from the outside world,” he said. “Internally, we have our own expectations. We talk inside that locker room of the team we want to be, but you have to go out and earn it each and every single day. And that’s what we plan on doing when we are here at camp and throughout the season.”
Running back James Cook is quiet by nature and he generally says nothing interesting to reporters, but when he was asked Thursday about the Bills scaling that playoff wall, he opined, “It’s on us. The ball is in our hands. We control our own destiny. So whatever we do is on us. Eventually, it’s going to happen.”
If Brady and Allen aren’t under the brightest spotlight as 2026 kicks into gear, then president of football operations Brandon Beane certainly is.
Pegula fired McDermott following the gut-wrenching 33-30 overtime playoff loss at Denver, but he retained Beane and bestowed on him a fancy new title. I’ll never believe there was a power struggle between McDermott and Beane that was won by the front office man. Pegula felt he needed to do something to shake up the stagnated organization and he obviously felt Beane gave McDermott a team that was good enough to win it all and McDermott didn’t win.
But now that the coaching move has been made and Brady and several new assistant coaches with new ideas are in place, the heat is on Beane because the roster he has provided better come through.
“My expectations are it truly is one day at a time,” Beane said blandly when he spoke on Wednesday. “But we’ve got to do it.”
It’s way too early in training camp to make judgments about anything, but this is what we know:
Offensively, there’s no reason to believe the Bills will take a step back this year because they have Allen who now has a true No. 1-type wide receiver in DJ Moore; possibly a fully healthy and ready to break out tight end in Dalton Kincaid; reliable wideout Khalil Shakir; four-fifths of the offensive line that performed so well the previous two years intact; and Cook, the 2025 NFL rushing champion. This group is perfectly capable of averaging 30 points per game again.
Defensively, it’s another story. That’s where the big changes have occurred as new coordinator Jim Leonhard is installing a new scheme and trying to make sense of a complicated personnel puzzle as players learn new roles and responsibilities, also with a few new players added to the mix.
Brady has to find a way to bring it all together, and his message to the team has been to forget about the past, even though the past sure wasn’t bad with eight playoff appearances in the last nine years. It’s all about what happens from today forward.
“All I focus on right now is today. I know it's the coach and the cliche, it's coach speak, but let's go dominate today,” Brady said. “We can talk about what we want to do and the expectation of our football team, but we haven't done a damn thing. We don't know anything; we haven't earned a damn thing. And so we can say, ‘Hey, we need to go win a Super Bowl this year.’ But what does this practice look like today? What is our mentality today? Because it has to be just as important.”
Sal Maiorana has covered the Buffalo Bills for more than four decades including 37 years as the full-time beat writer/columnist for the D&C. He has written numerous books about the history of the team, and he is also co-host of the BLEAV in Bills podcast/YouTube show. He can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com, and you can follow him on X @salmaiorana and on Bluesky @salmaiorana.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Joe Brady can deny the pressure. The Bills can't escape it.
