Pop quiz, hotshot: You’re in charge of an NFL team. Your team just lost an important Thursday night game to a division rival to fall to 0-2. Despite 393 yards of offence and 31 points, including two touchdowns of 50-plus yards, you fell six points short. Your defence allowed 493 yards, and your opponent converted eight of 13 third downs while only being sacked one lonely time by your overmatched defensive line.
So, what do you do? What do you do?!
Naturally, you fire your offensive coordinator. That’s just how football works in Buffalo, N.Y. Rex Ryan’s team bid a not-so-fond farewell to OC Greg Roman on Friday morning in a move that is both fairly stupid and utterly unsurprising. (Oh, and it replaced him with Anthony Lynn, the running backs coach, who becomes the team’s 11th offensive coordinator in 17 years. Sure, that’ll work.)
The move is fairly stupid because Roman oversaw a Bills offence that, in 2015, posted the team’s highest rankings in points (12th in the league) and yards (13th) since 2004, and huge jumps from 18th and 26th, respectively, the year before. It’s utterly unsurprising, though, because this is a front-office group that looked at New Orleans’s 31st-ranked defence and thought, “Let’s get the guy who made THAT!” and brought in their head coach’s brother, Rob Ryan, as an assistant head coach.
In other words, in a revelation that will shock nobody, the Bills still do not get how to build a winning football program. Roman, you may recall, was the one who embraced the home-run-hitting nature of his offensive skill players and built a scheme that took advantage of those talents. He turned Tyrod Taylor into a viable dual-threat quarterback last season. And as if the team needed a reminder of how far the young quarterback had come, he had just put up three touchdowns and nearly 400 yards of offence against a very good defence with his best playmaker hampered by a recurring foot problem that may require surgery.
Sure, you can poke holes in any theory that suggests Roman was a genius on his way to building a New Orleans Saints-esque offensive juggernaut—the Bills are very much a boom (last night) or bust (Week 1) unit, and a quick glance at any box score reveals underlying issues, like Thursday night’s three-for-10 third-down conversion or a mere 20 minutes of possession time in a 60-minute game. But anyone who believes Roman is anything but a fall guy for a floundering organization is kidding themselves.
The problem in Buffalo is the same as it’s been for more than a decade now: Lack of a cohesive, forward-thinking plan. A smart franchise doesn’t fire the OC the morning after having its defence humiliated. A smart franchise doesn’t look at a league that’s passing more than ever before and replace the guy they fired with their running backs coach. A smart franchise doesn’t draft and develop with an eye on the future, then bring in one of the league’s highest-paid veteran backs and expect him to lead the offence almost singlehandedly with an eye on winning immediately.
A smart franchise doesn’t… look, we could spend a long time listing the Bills’ failings in recent years. The question everyone should be asking is how do they actually improve? And the answer to that question is never, “Quickly, let’s overreact to keep the screaming fans from hating on us.”
Bills fans in Canada can ask their friendly neighbourhood Maple Leafs diehards about that one. It wasn’t until they accepted that immediate returns would not be apparent, nor should they even be expected, that the Leafs found the patience to finally, actually rebuild. The Bills need to do the same, but right now show no inclination to try.
A management group that is switching plans every two seasons will never find a reason to stay the course, unless they accidentally luck into something even they can’t screw up. As it stands now, the Bills are headed for another season in the basement, and they just axed the guy who was in charge of the brightest spot on their team.
This being the Bills, of course, “brightest spot” is a relative term, and looks like it will remain as such for the next, oh, decade or so.