Bills’ fiasco case of more heads better than one
MLSE model starting to pay dividends
Some years ago, I wrote a column pegged to the news that billionaire Terry Pegula intended to buy the Buffalo Sabres, at the same time that tele- conglomerate Rogers Communications was in talks to take a majority stake in MLSE, owners of the Maple Leafs and Raptors.
The thesis was that, as a fan, you’d much rather have a wealthy sole owner who would very much like to hoist a trophy than a faceless corporation with a primary focus on share value. It has not held up well. Rogers ended up splitting the acquisition cost of MLSE with blood rival Bell, and though it was — and still is — an odd partnership that has taken many wrong steps, its various teams are all now ticking along nicely, somewhat to the general bewilderment of the city’s tortured fan base(s).
A board of directors that hires smart people and then stays out of the way can, it would appear, produce good teams. So can a billionaire, of course. But for every Paul Allen in Seattle, there is a Dan Snyder in Washington. And for every Terry Pegula there can also be a Terry Pegula.
Pegula the hockey owner is just the kind of guy that Buffalo fans long wanted. He’s rich as a sheik, he loves sports, he didn’t want to move the team, and not long after he bought the Sabres, he approved the kind of teardown and rebuild under new GM Tim Murray that many owners would not have had the patience to accept. The Sabres now have a stock of 25- and- under talent, and they should grow into a playoff team.
Then there is Pegula the football owner. The same guy who saved the Sabres bought the Buffalo Bills just three years later, keeping the team out of the evil clutches of Jon Bon Jovi, among others.
At the time i t seemed like another bit of welcome news for Buffalo types and fans of the Bills in southern Ontario ( which, sadly, included me.)
The Bills were in t he middle of the longest playoff drought in the NFL and former owner Ralph Wilson had presided over a series of uninspiring hires of guys named, honestly, Dick and Buddy and Chan.
Wilson’s passing, l ong feared as the trigger to an eventual Bills relocation, instead brought Pegula, and his wealth, and presumably the same cool head that had seen him let Murray get to work with the Sabres.
Instead, Football Terry looks to be just the kind of owner that Hockey Terry has not been. It seemed bizarre when Doug Marrone in 2014 walked away from his job as head coach after a 9-7 season in his second year, just months after Pegula had taken over, but his decision looks prescient now.
The owner replaced Marrone with Rex Ryan, a much more player- friendly coach who had some decent success with the New York Jets, but whose reputation was made on the defensive side of the ball.
The Bills in 2014 had a very good defence, fourth out of 32 NFL teams in terms of points allowed. Ryan blew the defence up, changed the scheme and took it from effective to middling: two seasons in which the Bills finished 15th and 16th in points allowed.
Ryan was fired himself with a week left in the season just finished and, as it came to a close, the Bills front office was revealed to be dysfunctional.
General manager Doug Whaley told reporters in Buffalo that he wasn’t involved in the decision to fire Ryan and he didn’t know the reasons for it.
He also said it would be Pegula and his wife, Kim, who would decide on the next coach. SOUND THE MEDDLING OWNER KLAXON.
Pegula gave an interview to John Wawrow of The Associated Press, and essentially confirmed that Whaley was not aware of Ryan’s dismissal, saying it came about during a phone conversation when the coach asked him directly about his future in Buffalo.
Imagine the awkwardness! “Yes, about that, Rex, you … don’t … exactly … have one.” There have since been reports that the frontoffice decision to bench quarterback Tyrod Taylor in Week 17 was the spark for Ryan’s flame-out.
It’s hard to muster up much i ndignation about Ryan’s firing since he made a bad defence worse and kept his brother Rob as defensive coordinator even when he fired his offensive coordinator, Greg Roman, after an 0-2 start. ( The Bills scored 31 points in Week 2 and gave up 37.)
But at the moment Pegula looks desperately in need of a football front- office type who can tell him what he doesn’t know.
Instead he has as GM someone whose teams won 30 games in four seasons and whose counsel he didn’t even seek when he decided whether to fire the coach mid-season.
His president is Russ Brandon, who has been in the front office since 2008 and is the one constant in a position of authority with the team over a stretch in which they have gone 59-85.
This was good enough for Pegula to also make Brandon the president of the Sabres in the 2015 off- season, a development that really ought to have been announced with a t hunderclap and ominous organ music.
So, yes, boards of directors full of sober second thought often do not make for exciting sports owners.
But Pegula is another reminder that impulsive billionaires have their drawbacks, too. Even the smart ones aren’ t always t hat smart.