January in upstate New York is difficult enough to begin with. Take a gander at what it looks like this week, or merely fiddle with your Weather app to get a forecast. Several feet of snow and double digit negative degree wind chill factors. And we’re still weeks away from a damn groundhog, let alone a thaw. Four years of that was more than enough for me to last a lifetime and chase me clear to Los Angeles, and while I’m hardly singing its praises these days at least I don’t have to deal with this: 
Now add to that the additional variable of being a passionate sports fan, which a disproporionate amount of folks in that clime are, and the fact that there’s only two major league professional teams, and one of the is hockey’s Sabres, otherwise known as the New York Jets of the NHL. They’re in season 14 of a five-year rebuild for merely a playoff berth (in a league where more than half the teams qualify), and while in this year’s NHL East just about everyone still has a reasonable shot at the post-season nothing is guaranteed.
Then there are the Bills, who while they at least do make the playoffs these days (they went the first 17 years of the 21st century without an appearance of their own) have yet to win a Super Bowl, and haven’t returned since the four consecutive appearances at the outset of the ’90s, the last of which I got to see live and in person at the Rose Bowl where they were thoroughly overwhelmed by the Dallas Cowboys. (Come to think of it, we haven’t seen them in a title game in this century, either, but at least they don’t usually get lake effect snow).
And based upon the sh-t-storm that unfolded live and in person yesterday, the odds of them breaking that schneid in this century dropped sharply, courtesy of the puppeteers rather than the marionettes. THE SPORTING NEWS’ Jarrett Bailey was there for his own live and in person experience:
If you wanted to teach a class on poor leadership, passing blame, and backstabbing, you’d show the end of season press conference held by Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula and general manager Brandon Beane.
After Pegula made the decision to fire head coach Sean McDermott after nine seasons, he proceeded to put every organizational failure over the last half-decade on McDermott’s shoulders while simultaneously pointing at Beane for everything the organization got right. It was like at the end of Shrek when the guards have que cards telling the audience to cheer and laugh whenever Lord Farquaad spoke.
Pegula credited Beane with the Bills being able to make it as far as they did with practice squad players getting valuable reps… even though Beane isn’t the person coaching those practice squad players – that would be McDermott.
Pegula also says he fired McDermott based on the results in Denver… but then said that the officials made a bad call on the Brandin Cooks play that was ruled an interception. So you fired a coach for a loss you then openly said wasn’t his fault?
The cherry on top of this diarrhea sundae of a press conference was the burial of wide receiver Keon Coleman, a player still on the Bills’ roster. When Beane was asked about the shortcomings of Coleman, Pegula interrupted and said that the decision to draft Coleman came from the coaching staff, and that Beane was being a “team player” in drafting the Florida State product. Of course, that was easy to debunk, as Beane said on video Coleman was his guy after the draft.
It’s not like this consternation was limited merely to overly frustrated members of Bills Mafia, either. SYRACUSE.com’s Ryan Talbot compiled quite a number of revealing takes from national observers and some of them were even more shell-shocked:
Gregg Rosenthal, NFL Daily Podcast
(I)t’s one thing to make a bad pick. it’s another to manipulate your boss to make yourself look better and have it so public, which is the clear implication here…Brandon Beane fielded a question about not getting enough help at WR, including drafting Keon Coleman. Terry Pegula: “Can I interrupt? … The coaching staff pushed to draft Keon. … That was Brandon being a team player.”
Bill Barnwell, ESPN
Think you can give players and coaches some grace for saying things they might regret during emotional press conferences in the moments after a brutal loss. This is days later. An absolute meltdown in Buffalo.
Geoff Schwartz, FOX Sports
Disaster class press conference from the Bills owner. A few days to prepare and leaves you with zero confidence he knows what’s best for his team.
WHEC-TV Rochester’s KIley Wren filled in some details on exactly what apparently set Pegula to make his decision:
Pegula said his decision to bring in a new head coach was due to the results of the game in Denver, where the Bills lost in overtime to the Broncos. According to Pegula, he was in the locker room after the game in Denver, and he first noticed Josh Allen crying, and claims Allen “didn’t even acknowledge he was there,” and was sitting there sobbing.
“He had given everything he had to try and win that game,” said Pegula. “And looking around, so did the other players on that team.” After being in the locker room, Pegula says he felt the team “had hit the proverbial playoff wall year after year.” “I just sensed in that locker room, where do we go from here with what we have, and that was the basis of my decision,” said Pegula.
Bear in mind Pegula lives these days in Boca Raton, Florida and therefore can avoid both the actual and football climates that the natives are stuck with dealing with. It sure appears he’s taking some cues from his neighbor a few miles north in Mar-A-Lago for how he deals with both the truth and his subordinates. Bailey picked up the mantle of said natives with his bottom line assessment:
Not only was it a bold-faced lie at worst from Pegula and a way to try and take some heat off Beane at best, it was Pegula very publicly bashing a player for whom he still employs. It’s one thing for fans to (rightfully) belly-ache about Coleman’s shortcomings as a player and to question how bought in he is – it’s completely different for the team owner to throw him under the bus and, for all intents and purposes, call him a bust when – and this cannot be stated enough – he is still on the team.
And as to the potential replacements for McDermott now being rumored–all the more urgent given the fact that John Harbaugh and Kevin Stefanski are now off the market–a homecoming with disgraced Giants’ honcho Brian Daboli is gathering steam. Bills Mafia at least had a playoff win in Jacksonville this year. Giants fans are in the ballpark with Sabres fans for evem that.
Granted Pegula’s got bigger things on his mind, such as finding new and imaginative ways to buttress his investment in a monolith that is rising like a phoenix literally across the street from the one the team just closed down after a 55-year-run that included those four AFC titles. And Pegula chose to set some additional guardrails of his own on the upside, as FRONT OFFICE SPORTS’
The new Highmark Stadium embodies all the questions and potential that the market carries. There is no roof, owing in part to owner Terry Pegula’s belief that football is played outdoors, but also the conclusion that a covered stadium’s cost would produce limited upside for additional events, while simultaneously stripping the Bills of one of their most meaningful postseason advantages.
Others would ask whether spending more than $2 billion, including $850 million of public funding, on a football stadium in a region that seemingly can’t attract those events is justifiable. And there was skepticism about the market’s reaction to the permanent seat license model and soaring season-ticket prices.
The piece, which notably was written before Pegula and Beane dropped their own dimes, seemed to reinforce how masochistic Bills Mafia has been all along, which I suppose if you’re committed to enduring winters in upstate New York goes hand in hand. It also detailed their goals to expand that footprint into Canada, where Toronto lies a mere 81 miles away and instantly augments Buffalo far above its #54 Nielsen DMA status and the fact its actual population is equivalent to Fort Wayne, Indianapolis. It’s a similar strategy to what the similarly handicapped San Diego Padres have attempted to employ in baseball by attempting to become Mexico’s team. At least the Bills have a stronger SES base and a rising tide that is tiring of the oddities of the CFL (three downs, a “centre field” 55 yard line and 20-yard wide end zones) and the relative obscurities that a nine-team league that now all but avoids Sundays provides.
Maybe Pegula is hoping for greater patience and an appetite from folks somewhat less familiar with the details of Sean McDermott’s Bills career–98 wins in nine years–and who are enduring an exasperating NHL franchise of their own–one that hasn’t touched a Stanley Cup since the league was 20 per cent of its current size. On the other hand, texpecting Canadians to disproportionately American sh-t shows couldn’t have been more ill-timed. Just yesterday, TRAVELMOLE anonymously posted this update:
(T)rips from by automobile from Canadian residents are collapsing. In December, trips plunged 30.7% to 1.3 million—marking the 12th consecutive month of decline in that category.
Then again, Pegula can thank his South Florida neighbor for that. And I have a hunch with the temperature both literally and figuratively his emotional meltdown has produced he’s probably going to be spending more time in that neighborhood for a while.
Courage…