Super Bowl Expectations Are Real In Buffalo, But New Bills HC Joe Brady Is Ready

Highmark Stadium (Orchard Park, New York) — Joe Brady’s predecessor took the Buffalo Bills to the playoffs and won at least 10 games in each of the last seven seasons. He won a playoff game in each of the last six years. He won 66% of his games overall. And yet he was fired because, in the words of Bills owner Terry Pegula, “I felt like we hit the proverbial playoff wall, year after year.” In other words, all those wins didn’t matter in the end, since he couldn’t get the Bills to the Super Bowl for the first time since 1993. So no pressure, Joe Brady. All you have to do to be considered a success in your first year as the head coach of the Bills — and your head-coaching job at 36 years old — is win as much as Sean McDermott did, and then, when it really matters, win some more. You have been handed a championship-caliber team and you will be judged on that scale. In other words, fix what’s broken in Buffalo without breaking what’s already been fixed. No pressure at all. “I never felt pressure because I’m ready for this,” Brady told me before practice on Tuesday morning at the Bills’ new home, Highmark Stadium. “I don’t think about the Super Bowl, but no one has higher expectations than myself. I knew why I took this job and I knew what came with it. That doesn’t mean I am talking about it every single day or that I can’t handle all that comes with it. But I’ll just be myself and everything will go from there.” Brady may be young, but he’s obviously not naïve. He knows exactly what the expectations are in Buffalo. They are a loaded team, with a Hall-of-Fame-bound quarterback, good enough to be the class of the AFC. And they are an organization with a fan base that has been absolutely tortured by shocking playoff losses over the last seven seasons, which compounded the original sin of the Bills’ teams of the early 1990s that lost four straight Super Bowls and then never went back. They are starving for their first Super Bowl in 33 years, and they feel like the team is more than ready. So there will be no honeymoon for this first-year coach. The only way he’ll be viewed as a success is if he leads his team to Super Bowl LXI in Los Angeles in February. To his bosses and probably to most of Western New York, absolutely nothing else will do. “I hope the city wants that. I hope the players want that,” Brady told me. “But I don’t listen to it. I don’t feel any more pressure because I have high expectations for myself.” Maybe he really is “Joe Cool” and doesn’t feel the weight of the expectations. But that doesn’t necessarily make the job any easier. Brady was on McDermott’s staff for the last four years, serving as his offensive coordinator for the last two. So in a way, that makes him both part of the problems of the past, and part of the hoped-for solutions of the future. That’s a tough line to straddle, simultaneously selling himself as something old and something new and improved. “I don’t think it’s a tough balance for me, and I think it’s a natural transition for the rest of the organization and building,” Brady told me. “There’s a component of ‘Hey, we’ve known him.’ Sometimes there’s a comfort level. But it was also important to me to come in and say, ‘Hey, we’ve never worked together. This is Year 1 with everything. Let’s figure it out together and not assume that it’s business as usual.” That’s important, because “business as usual” in Buffalo has been good, but not good enough. This city and region are desperate for a championship. Really, at this point, they’d take one in any sport. But a Bills championship would just hit different here, especially for anyone old enough to remember Scott Norwood’s wide right kick in 1991 — a mere 16 months after Brady was born. “The fact that I’ve been here, you do envision it,” Brady told me. “But I’ve never envisioned it for myself. Everything I do is because I want to see a guy like Josh Allen hold the trophy. I want to see Dion Dawkins, guys that have been here for a while, and knowing what it means for the city. It has nothing to do with me.” The 5-foot-11, 190-pounder announced his presence last season as one of the best backs in the NFL when he led the league with 1,621 rushing yards and ran for 12 touchdowns, too. And since his offensive line returns intact after a dominant season last year, there’s absolutely no reason to think Cook can’t do it again. Cook and Josh Allen really are a perfect 1-2 punch. They combined for 2,200 rushing yards and 16 rushing touchdowns last season, and they play off each other perfectly. It’s impossible at times for a defense to guess which one is going to run. And because they’re both seemingly unstoppable at times, they have to be ready on all downs for both. And that’s even more important late in the year when the weather starts to turn, especially in Buffalo. That’s why getting home-field advantage in the playoffs is so important for them. They don’t just get an advantage from the crowd. They get an advantage from their style and from the power of Cook, too. “The grass is definitely soft. It breaks up a little bit. But it feels amazing. It feels like your body is running in clouds.” — Bills wide receiver Joshua Palmer on the grass field at Highmark Stadium, which in one recent report was described as “ass.” Yes, this really could be their year! The biggest shame about the Bills’ failure last season was that their white whale was finally beaten. The Kansas City Chiefs didn’t make the playoffs. The Bills’ path to the Super Bowl was clear. So when they went down to the Denver Broncos, 33-30, in the divisional round of the playoffs, it was one of the most disappointing defeats in the Bills’ storied history of disappointing defeats. So why should anyone believe this year should be any different? Because the Bills are better, for one thing. They still have Josh Allen and  James Cook, which is mostly enough. They added the best receiver they’ve had in years, even if D.J. Moore is fading a bit at 29. And they added Bradley Chubb to boost their pass rush. And a healthy Ed Oliver will help, too. That’s tinkering, more than splashing. The splash was firing Sean McDermott and promoting offensive coordinator Joe Brady to head coach. Given his relationship with Allen, and how stale the Bills often seemed under McDermott, there’s a good chance that gives Buffalo a boost. And if they get that … well, the Chiefs are still down (though not for long once Patrick Mahomes returns to full strength), and the New England Patriots are about to get a smack in the face with a much harder schedule. There are challenges from teams like the Ravens and the Broncos, but the Bills could make a case that they are the class of the AFC. Whether they get to Super Bowl LXI is probably a matter of fate, which rarely seems to be on the Bills’ side. But things do seem to be teed up for them this year. Of course, it looked that way last year, too. One last six-hour drive through the beautiful Finger Lakes, past Mirabito Stadium (home of the Binghamton Rumble Ponies), by the Dunder-Mifflin Paper Company, through the Poconos, and home. By the time I get there on Wednesday morning, I’ll have traveled a little more than 1,900 miles over 10 days, making stops in seven football towns while visiting with nine teams and watching about 15 hours of football practices. I’ll have stepped onto a real-life holodeck in Berea, Ohio, learned that there is no more picturesque setting for a training camp than Latrobe, Pennsylvania, sat down for interviews with four head coaches, consumed immeasurable amounts of coffee, and became as convinced as ever that the Miami Dolphins are going to be terrible this year (I probably didn’t need to travel to Ashburn, Virginia, to learn that last part). Then, once I’m home, the three-week countdown begins to Opening Day.