The Buffalo Bills just completed a doozy of a press conference in Orchard Park. Owner Terry Pegula and general manager Brandon Beane spoke with reporters for about an hour, even arriving five minutes before
the scheduled start time.
What resulted was messy, and they are rightfully getting some heat.
Terry Pegula throws Sean McDermott under the bus regarding Keon Coleman
The biggest misstep of the entire press conference was when Beane was asked about drafting Keon Coleman. He began his response but Pegula stepped in, dropping not only a surprising bombshell but also undermining a whole bunch of people at the exact same time.
“Can I interrupt? I’ll address the Keon situation,” Pegula said. “The coaching staff pushed to draft Keon. I’m not saying Brandon wouldn’t have drafted him, but he wasn’t his next choice. That was Brandon being a team player and taking advice of this coaching staff who felt strongly about the player. He’s taken, for some reason, heat over it and not saying a word about it, but I’m here to tell you the true story.”
To his credit, Beane later reiterated he is the one who picked Coleman and it was his decision. Meanwhile, Pegula has no problem throwing McDermott and his staff under the bus. To make matters worse, the Bills are interviewing the team’s offensive coordinator who was on the offensive coaching staff pushing to draft Coleman. What kind of message does that send about Joe Brady?
Terry Pegula fired Sean McDermott over one game, but the Bills were also screwed out of that win
Another big moment in the press conference came when Pegula described why he fired McDermott after the Broncos game. Josh Allen was crying, the locker room looked dejected, he said “Where do we go from here?” He said he didn’t consider firing McDermott until that moment.
But also, the first thing he said to Allen when he entered the locker room was “That was a catch.” That catch by Brandin Cooks would have put the Bills into field goal range in overtime with a chance to win the game. So if the Bills win that game on that catch, McDermott would obviously still be employed today prepping for the AFC Championship Game.
It seems incongruous that he hadn’t thought of firing McDermott yet but also fired him over a bad call. Sure, he cited the previous playoff failures with 13 seconds, Tyler Bass’s missed field goal a couple seasons ago, and now what he called “the catch” and the collective hit to the psyche of the team.
It’s been years since Terry Pegula took reporters’ questions
The owner of the Bills and Buffalo Sabres hasn’t taken questions from reporters since the 2019 owners meetings. I think we saw a huge part of why in this press conference. He certainly laid a lot of blame at the feet of Sean McDermott without assigning much if any to Brandon Beane, leading some to say he stabbed his former coach in the back. He gave away vital information from inside the draft process and alienated a player still on their roster in doing so.
Pegula did bring up the main reason he hasn’t taken media questions recently was the medical situation with his wife. That is completely understandable. Kim Pegula suffered cardiac arrest in June 2022 and as a result will never be the same cognitively. Caring for her has sapped his time, he says, including prohibiting him from traveling to watch their daughter’s tennis matches.
But he was at press events for the groundbreaking at the new stadium and plenty of other opportunities with both the Sabres and Bills. The $850 million in taxpayer money he received for building the new stadium wasn’t enough. He felt like firing McDermott was a big enough moment to answer.
