Are Bills coach, GM truly secure?
The Bills this past week announced contract extensions for coach Sean McDermott and general manager Brandon Beane through the 2027 season. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they have ironclad job security. Just ask Kliff Kingsbury and
Steve Keim.
The Cardinals’ former head coach and GM signed contract extensions last year through 2027, and found themselves fired less than a year later. The reality is that coaching contracts are far different than player contracts, because there is no salary cap.
Bills owner Terry Pegula may have guaranteed McDermott and Beane five more years of salary — and it is not actually clear if all five years are fully guaranteed — but owners commonly buy coaches out of the remaining years of their contracts when they aren’t performing up to par. Think Matt Patricia and Joe Judge.
Plus, many coaching contracts have offset language that reduces the amount owed if the coach finds another job, and clauses that require coaches to give a good faith effort to find a suitable job. Finally, without seeing the details, we don’t know how much of the new contract extensions are fluff designed to make the situation appear more stable than it is.
The timing of the announcement was eye-raising — a week after the team had an internal dust-up with
Stefon Diggs that it tried to cover up. The quotes from Pegula in the press release also don’t directly address the idea of McDermott and Beane leading the team for the next five years.
There is no doubt that McDermott and Beane have done terrific jobs in building the Bills from losers into annual contenders. And maybe Pegula wants nothing more than to build a stable, consistent team. But the Bills have painfully underachieved the last two years, and McDermott has been in the middle of it.
We’ll see how committed Pegula is to McDermott and Beane if the Bills have another disappointing playoff loss. Contract extensions for coaches often are worth little more than the paper they are written on.
Extra points
Players and agents have been griping that the league didn’t explain its gambling policies properly last year, but it’s hard to have much sympathy for cornerback Isaiah Rodgers, one of two Colts to earn a season-long suspension this past week. Not only did Rodgers bet on the NFL, but according to ESPN he placed a $1,000 prop bet on the over/under rushing yards of one of his teammates, and won. It’s one thing to not understand that you can’t place a bet in the team facility. But anyone with a modicum of common sense knows that it is against the rules to bet on your own team, especially a prop bet in which Rodgers clearly had inside information. Rodgers’s suspension
(and subsequent release) will be costly — a former sixth-round pick who started nine games last year, Rodgers was set to make more this year ($2.743 million) than he had in his first three years combined ($2.45 million) . . . Only six teams will be going away for training camp in 2023. The Bills, Steelers, Cowboys, Chiefs, and Panthers are still doing the traditional getaway to a college campus, while the Colts are moving operations to a training facility about 30 minutes north of Indianapolis. The Jets are the earliest team to require veterans to report (July 19) because of playing in the Hall of Fame Game, while 27 teams report on July 25, and the Steelers on July 26 . . . If you’re trying to attend the Patriots’ game against the Colts in Germany this fall, prepare to buy tickets on the secondary market. Tickets for the ChiefsDolphins game in Frankfurt the week prior went on sale this past week and sold out in about 15 minutes, with more than 1.4 million people in the Ticketmaster queue. The capacity at Deutsche Bank Park is only 48,000 for NFL . . . The NFL still needs to pick a team for “Hard Knocks,” and as much as they don’t want to do it, the Jets need to accept the fact that they are going to be picked. Aaron Rodgers, who has not been shy about ingratiating himself into the New York scene, should be excited for the free publicity and the opportunity to smooth over his public persona . . . Add the city of Richmond to the list of parties feeling burned by outgoing Commanders owner Dan Snyder. The Commanders have no plans to return to the city for training camp, per the Richmond TimesDispatch, but the city will continue to pay $700,000 per year through 2033 for the training facility it built for the team.