After the Bills capped quarterback Josh Allen’s seventh season with yet another failure to get to the Super Bowl, Bills general manager Brandon Beane was defiant about the challenge the team faces.
“Keep hitting the door, keep hitting the door and you’re going to knock it down,” Beane said during his end-of-season 2024 press conference.This is my mentality.”
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With the Bills playing two complete games and a tiebreaker behind the Patriots in the AFC East — and Buffalo facing the distinct possibility of closing its current stadium with not only no home playoff games but no playoff games at all — only one person’s mentality matters.
What does owner Terry Pegula think of the current situation? What, if anything, will he want to change for 2026?
On the one hand, it is possible that the first season of a new stadium with $245 million in PSL already sold will be a celebration, not a new beginning. Who gets divorced right before moving into a brand new house?
On the other hand, Allen’s bounty is being wasted. After owning the AFC East for each of the first five post-Brady seasons, the Bills saw the Patriots develop a new franchise quarterback in Drake Maye, and Buffalo’s stranglehold on the division ended.
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The deeper question is whether this is a talent question (which points to general manager Brandon Beane) or a coaching question (which points to coach Sean McDermott). Well-functioning NFL franchises don’t treat it as an either/or proposition, because that opens the door to finger-pointing and blame-shifting.
Consider the status of 2024 second-round receiver Keon Coleman. Inactive for two straight games, is his current status the product of a poor draft pick by Beane, or a failure to properly develop Coleman by McDermott?
Either way, only Pegula knows what he will do after the season. And the season is far from over. Bills can still get hot. Tyler Dunne can still post another article that lights the fire under the locker room. They can still win the division. They can still get to the Super Bowl. They can still win it.
Or they can continue to struggle. They can hand the AFC East to the Patriots. They can go it alone as a wild card on the road team. They may miss the playoffs entirely, even though they have the 2024 NFL MVP as the team’s centerpiece.
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These are legitimate questions to ask. The invoices are one of 15 hotspots identified a week ago today. And that’s the company they chose.
Yes, the job is in many ways easier with a franchise quarterback. It is also, in many ways, more difficult, because the bar is always higher. So far this season, after starting 4-0 and dropping to 3-4 since then, the Bills haven’t lived up to the bar set by Josh Allen.
