The Man in the Blue Flannel Hot Dog Suit

We instinctively wish NFL football were an idealized meritocracy. Successes and failures are public and indisputable. Winners get rewarded. Losers do not. Everyone on each team, from the owner to the punter, shares the same objective, so everyone works together in the name of enlightened self-interest.

Sports are supposed to function the way we want the rest of the world to function. That’s part of their appeal.

In reality, NFL football is just a reflection of modern corporate culture, which itself is just a reflection of ancient power politics, which themselves were just a slight evolutionary step above chimpanzees flinging poop at each other in trees. Everyone seeks credit for success and is willing to stab a brother between the ribs to avoid blame. From a career advancement standpoint, it’s more advantageous to lose games while winning power struggles than the other way around.

Bills Fire Sean McDermott

You know what that intro was about. The Buffalo Bills fired Sean McDermott. Then promoted general manager Brandon Beane to President of Football Operations. They were so disappointed by their 2025 season that they had no choice but to reward the person most responsible for it.

In promoting Beane, the Bills did what crappy corporations do all the time. Fourth-quarter profits were low? Fire middle management, but give the board of directors bonuses! It’s a proven way to make everything worse for everyone but the top executives, who grow wealthier, more powerful and better-insulated from consequences. It’s an undeniably stupid way to run any institution, unless wealth, power and insulation for the folks at the top is the whole point. And buddy, have I got some bad news for you.

Sean McDermott did not “deserve” to get fired. It’s rare for a head coach who makes the playoffs to truly deserve a pink slip, rarer for one who wins a playoff game to deserve one, and still rarer for one who would be preparing for the AFC Championship game if not for a slew of turnovers by his All-Galaxy quarterback and a daisy chain of let’s-call-them-debatable overtime officiating decisions to deserve one.

The Bills fell short of expectations, but expectations were stratospheric, and holding coaches responsible for not living up to storyline beats (the Chiefs were eliminated, so no more excuses) is no way to run an organization.

Beane, meanwhile, neither deserved to be fired nor promoted.

It’s fashionable to blame Beane for this season’s disappointments, especially since he appears to have used his former BFF McDermott’s carcass as a stepping stool up the corporate ladder. Beane made some mistakes, but the whole reason why the Bills were considered such a disappointment was because most experts believed they had one of the NFL’s best rosters.

Per Ben Solak, only two players drafted by Beane since Josh Allen in 2018 have been voted to the Pro Bowl: James Cook and Dawson Knox. That sounds like a damning indictment, but it’s also a little misleading. Beane drafted Spencer Brown, O’Cyrus Torrence, Dalton Kincaid, Khalil Shakir, Greg Rousseau, Ed Oliver, Terrel Bernard and Christian Benford, all quality NFL starters. The 2018 draft also brought not just Allen, but Harrison Phillips and Taron Johnson, plus Tremaine Edmunds (two Pro Bowls when he was with the Bills) and Wyatt Teller (traded after his rookie season to the Browns). All of those players were drafted after Allen, making Solak’s post technically incorrect, but let’s not get pedantic. The point is: the Bills are a perennial playoff team built largely from homegrown talent.

Recent Beane drafts have indeed been rather fallow, but that’s partially a result of picking in the late-20s each year and already having a Super Bowl caliber lineup in place. Beane’s priority over the last few offseasons has been to prevent salary cap attrition, and he did a decent job keeping the Bills’ veteran nucleus in tact while fishing for missing-piece veterans like Von Miller and Joey Bosa.

Keeping an established roster together for six seasons is a tightrope walk in a gusty breeze. This was a wobbly year, made worse by Beane’s public obstinance about not seeking a WR1 type. Though again, in Beane’s defense: WR1 types don’t grow on trees. Ask the Packers how big a difference Matthew Golden made this season.

So Beane’s roster was full of fissures, which he tried to plug by bringing back old pals like Jordan Poyer and Gabe Davis. That roster still had no business losing to the Falcons or Dolphins in the regular season. Those losses were on McDermott and his coordinators.

Joe Brady and Bob Babich looked like sacrificial pawns after the Broncos loss, with McDermott forced to reach beyond his comfort zone for new lieutenants with bolder ideas. That’s how the Blame Game is traditionally played. Or the Pegulas could have decreed Off with their heads; a clean sweep, while perhaps premature and dictatorial, would at least have followed some inherent logic.

So why fire Tweedledee while promoting Tweedledum to the innermost circle of power?

Tim Graham of the Athletic answered that question succinctly near the beginning of his feature on the McDermott-Beane dismissal-promotion: “Beane and Pete Guelli watch the games with Pegula. Beane talks to Pegula about the team as the game transpires.” (Guelli is COO of both the Bills and Sabres.)

Graham’s feature is full of juicy details; it’s a piece with the sort of spice that sneaks up on you. But the two sentences quoted above tell you all you need to know. While McDermott coached, Beane whispered into his lordship’s ear.

That arrangement was fine when things were going well. As Graham reminds us, McDermott and Beane reported separately to Pegula for many years, rather than McDermott reporting to Beane. It’s a system that ostensibly provides some checks and balances by creating a forum for mutual assured backstabbing. But McDermott was “reporting,” while Beane was whispering. When the going gets tough, always bet on the whisperer.

Beane will now select the next head coach, giving him tacit (if not explicit) authority over whoever he chooses. The Bills might also promote some suit-filler to “general manager” to run meetings, handle press conferences and take falls. Power consolidated! Mission accomplished!

Oh wait, this is supposed to be about making the Buffalo Bills football team better, not making an executive’s job more appealing.

On paper, the Bills are about $11 million over the salary cap. Josh Allen is about to turn 30; many other starters already have. Longtime Bills like Phillips, Matt Milano and Connor McGovern are free agents, as are on-and-off guys like Poyer, Davis and Tre’Davious White, as well as Beane rentals like Bosa and Brandin Cooks. Some sort of roster refresh is necessary. This was a good time to parachute to higher ground. Someone else can bear the brunt of the Bills’ midlife crisis.

Heck, maybe Beane did McDermott a favor by having him tossed off the deck of this listing ship.

That’s probably what corporate muckety-mucks always tell themselves when cashing their bonus checks after a payroll purge.

Dolphins Hire Jeff Hafley

In a stunning, unprecedented development, the Dolphins’ comprehensive coaching search ended when they hired the guy their new general manager has had on speed dial for two years.

The Dolphins announced former Packers defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley as their new head coach on Monday. Hafley arrives just a few days after longtime Packers administrator Jon-Eric Sullivan took over as the Dolphins general manager. But who are we to suggest that Hafley’s hiring process was a formality and the other Dolphins interviews were a sham?

You heard of speed dating? That was Speed Compliance: two minority candidates interviewed in four hours, with ample time left over to announce the winner. (One of the candidates, Patrick Graham, was the Dolphins defensive coordinator under Brian Flores.)

Back when I used to sit in on interviews for new math teachers, it was hard to cram two of them into a four-hour window, let alone making any snap decisions afterward. Unless we already knew who we were hiring, that is.

You would think that a franchise literally being taken to the Supreme Court over a discrimination lawsuit would try to keep up appearances. Ha! The Supreme Court isn’t even bothering to keep up appearances anymore. Who cares? (Deep, heavy sighs.) At least the Dolphins did not waste too much of the other interviewees’ time.

Anyway, Hafley definitely has head coaching hair, plus the mandatory reality-show heartthrob stubble. The Packers defense finished 18th in DVOA despite trading the farm for Wolverine at the start of the season, but injuries and such. The Packers defense finished 7th in DVOA in 2024, and Hafley briefly became a Cheesehead folk hero for building a defense that did not collapse in the playoffs; the Packers offense picked up the slack for a change.

Hafley was the head coach at Boston College during the height of COVID and the start of the NIL epoch. Boston College was not where you wanted to be when the NIL bucks started flying. Greg Auman wrote a fine profile last year in which Hafley laments that he “felt like I was doing some other job” at Boston College: recruiting players and then begging them not to run off to Clemson, rather than preparing them to play football. Hafley is part of the greater Shana-clan, so he left the college ranks to join Matt LaFleur’s staff in 2024.

Auman’s feature includes endorsements from Richard Sherman and Ronde Barber, both of whom played under Hafley in the NFL. “The biggest thing was his ability to relate to players and have an open ear,” Sherman said, per Auman. “He was always a guy who was open to alternative ways of getting the job done and being flexible, open to suggestions.”

Sullivan’s first act as a big-boy general manager was to fast-track the hiring of a loyalist. But I am willing to suspend more skepticism for a defensive coach known for listening and being flexible than for the typical stubblebeardo with a brilliant Cover-2-Invert-Cloud-Thumbs-Tums defense that only seems to work when there are two All Pros on the line and one at cornerback.

Sullivan and Hafley must now pick an offensive coordinator. It will probably be a Shana-dude to replace the Shana-dude the Dolphins just fired; though they may have to compete with Robert Saleh for available Shana-dudes. Then, the Tua situation. There may also be a Tyreek situation, or situations (financial, emotional, legal). There’s a lot of thorny work to be done in Miami.

Whatever their flaws, the Packers were a highly stable organization. Sullivan and Hafley will have to be flexible if they hope to bring similar stability to the chaotic Dolphins.

Falcons Hire Kevin Stefanski

To touch on the Stefanski hire as briefly as possible.

• I think Stefanski is a shrewd offensive system-designer and adequate “leader of men,” whatever that means.
• A small percentage of my social media feed thinks he’s an irredeemable scoundrel because of his association with the Deshaun Watson trade.
• Another small percentage of my social media feed thinks he’s a racist because he purposely held Shedeur Sanders back from instantaneous superstardom for #reasons.

I shouldn’t address such underbelly-of-the-subreddit crackpot theories. But they keep bubbling up, so I will: Stefanski does not deserve to be smeared as a scoundrel nor a racist.

Jimmy Haslam is a documented scoundrel, and Paul DePodesta is a conniving snake-oil peddler: they traded for Descuzzball, saddling Stefanski with a quarterback who was not just an execrable human being but also injury-prone and not very good. Stefanski may have “signed off” on the decision, but he wasn’t given any other choice.

Sanders would be as irrelevant as Stetson Bennett — who also arrived in the NFL with collegiate success, middling traits, some bad on-field habits and dubious workplace readiness — if not for his famous, powerful and ever-so-slightly egotistical father. Coach Prime relied upon media surrogates to bash Stefanski in an effort to further his son’s career.

Stefanski – whose past Browns quarterbacks included Watson, Jacoby Brissett, Jameis Winston, P.J. Walker and Dorian Thompson-Robinson – probably made Sanders look as good as he could possibly look late in the year. Influential Prime-era, Atlanta-based cultural figures like Isaac Hayes (the son of my era’s Isaac Hayes, apparently) and Killer Mike apparently see the situation differently:

The Stefanski strangeness escalated when friend-of-the-Zone D. Orlando Ledbetter of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution posted the following on social media: “#Falcons’ Kevin Stefanski had a dumpster fire at quarterback in Cleveland -- Baker Mayfield and Deshaun Watson failed, which started a chain reaction to 11 other starters. QB Shedeur Sanders closed out last season with seven starts.”

Mayfield, whose Buccaneers missed the playoffs because he spent the second half of the regular season playing Lone Ranger Hero Ball, took time off from his busy schedule of filming insurance commercials to respond: “Failed is quite the reach pal. Still waiting on a text/call from him after I got shipped off like a piece of garbage. Can’t wait to see you twice a year, Coach.”

I am sure Ledbetter wasn’t taking any potshots, just erring due to brevity. But even the mention of “Shedeur Sanders” continues to make people stupid. And the one person with a clear grudge against Stefanski turns out to be a white dude.

Anyway, if you care about sexism, racism or any other form of institutionalized oppression, there are about 9,999,999 better things to do with your energy right now than throwing shade at Kevin Freakin’ Stefanski.

Titans to Hire Robert Saleh

Aaron Glenn must be smiling right now.

Saleh was the 49ers defensive coordinator from 2017 to 2020. He then endured four seasons of emotional torture as the head coach of the Jets. Having somehow not succumbed to gibbering madness, despite being beset on all sides by Aaron Rodgers and a bunch of Johnsons, Saleh retreated back to the 49ers, just in time for the team’s 2025 defensive injury crisis, the unwanted sequel to the team’s 2024 offensive injury crisis.

Saleh’s defense ranked 27th in DVOA last year. The 49ers may have ranked 49th by the end of the season under a lesser coach. Did you see who was on the field during the playoffs? Eric Kendricks. Clelin Ferrell. Garret Wallow. Who on earth is Garret Wallow? Just about the entire 49ers rookie class was starting on defense by the playoffs; all except first-round pick Mykel Williams, who got injured in November.

Saleh cobbled together a defense adequate to the task of shutting down the Browns and Panthers, curtailing the Colts, holding off the Bears and then stopping the Eagles (stop snickering) in the playoffs. It only cracked against the Seahawks last Saturday night after the special teams allowed a touchdown and the offense handed the Seahawks the ball near midfield twice. It was a tremendous coaching effort which plopped Saleh right back on the head-coaching shortlist. The Titans need someone who can teach their young roster the secrets of cobbled-together adequacy.

So yes, Glenn must be smiling. He saw Todd Bowles go from hot coordinator to Jets head coach for four years, then back to coordinator of a Super Bowl team, then back to head coach. Herm Edwards used four mematic years with the Jets as a stepping stone to a better gig with the Chiefs before becoming an NCAA potentate. The best-blazed career path for minority NFL coaches (Saleh is Lebanese) now goes like this:

• Defensive Coordinator
• Jets Head Coach
• Defensive Coordinator Again
• Real Team Head Coach

I don’t pretend to understand the psychology and biases behind this pattern, nor do I want to interrogate them too hard. I’m just pointing out the trend. The Jets are the NFL’s thankless job. Coaches who do it almost always get another chance, even if they fail spectacularly. And boy, does Glenn look poised to fail spectacularly.

Anyway, I am happy to see Saleh get another chance. But it’s also surprising to see both the Titans and Dolphins rush to announce Hafley and Saleh hours after Sean McDermott hit the job market. Shouldn’t the possible availability of an ultra-qualified candidate prompt organizations to push pause and make some phone calls?

If you read this far, you know that it just doesn’t work that way. The Dolphins and Titans engaged their hiring hyperdrive because they didn’t want to shift any paradigms, reset any timetables, hire anyone who threatened established power dynamics, answer anything more than token press-conference questions about McDermott or do any additional work. Sullivan, certainly, wanted loyal Hafley signed/sealed/delivered before Stephen Ross’ Tuesday morning edition of the Miami Herald arrived.

A bad process sometimes results in a decent hire. If it didn’t, the entire NFL would have accidentally suffocated in its own garage by now.

The King’s Summer Cottage

Medieval monarchs rarely ruled from their castles. Projection of power across long distances was just too difficult in olden times. The archduke over the next hill could be amassing a private army unnoticed if the king didn’t personally poke his royal nose into things now and then. So whole European royal courts often hit the road for months at a time. They would set up shop in some duchy, spend gobs of a minor aristocrat’s resources, and hold official audiences with local VIPs to ensure that everyone remembered who was really in charge.

Tom Brady attended the College Football Championship on Monday night. Majordomo John Spytek and puppet ruler Mark Davis were also in attendance. The Raiders royals were unofficially there to watch Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza, the Raiders’ likely top pick and designated quarterback of the future. They were really there to project power, as were the various celebrities and political figures in attendance.

Per Dianna Russini, Mike McDaniel was scheduled to meet the Raiders braintrust on Monday. Panthers defensive coordinator Ejiro Evero and Chargers defensive coordinator Jesse Minter were also on the royal dance card. The Raiders did what they could to turn college football’s crown jewel into a job expo. Brady was in Miami, at a time when the Dolphins had not yet officially selected a head coach (they pried Hafley off the Raiders’ schedule), to mark territory.

There is nothing weird about a big NFL entourage attending a major college football game, or in scheduling a bunch of interviews in rapid succession (see the Dolphins), especially when (ugh, sigh) the rapid-fire interviews include many Rooney Rule-compliant subjects.

What’s weird is how quickly we all got used to the concept of Brady pulling the strings for the Raiders.

Brady officially bought a 5% stake in the Raiders in October of 2024, though the plan spent over a year going through legal and backroom-political sausage grinders. That was 16 months ago. Brady went from 5% owner – Fergie’s role with the Dolphins or Magic Johnson’s stake in the Commanders, give-or-take some percentage points – to Cardinal Richelieu in a little over a year.

Brady still has no official role within the organization, no President or COO title that I could find in writing anywhere. Spytek is running football operations, per team messaging, “in close collaboration with Tom Brady,” just as Sal Tessio once ran the Brooklyn mob in close collaboration with Don Corleone. Last year at this time, I was making jokes about Brady running the Raiders from behind the curtain. Now, Adam Schefter-types report that Brady is the boss the way Chicago newspapers used to write openly about Al Capone as if he were the mayor.

Davis, as I have noted before, has the kind of submissive streak that inspires naughty fanfic. And it’s Davis’ franchise to do with as he wishes. If he wants to crown Brady king without crowning him king, then Brady is king.

Brady cannot be fired, because he doesn’t have a title. He cannot be held accountable, because he does not have an official role. He can’t conveniently be bought out, because Davis wouldn’t have taken his money in the first place if he had enough of his own. If Davis ever balks at Brady’s de facto leadership, there will be a power struggle which both sides, at some primal level, want Brady to win.

Brady is probably better than Davis at just about everything, particularly anything football-related, so maybe the Raiders are better off with this arrangement. Again: terrible processes can lead to favorable results. But never forget that NFL teams are operated like lemonade stands by rich doofuses who love to play elaborate games of king of the hill.

Which means, to bring things back to the prologue, that they are an all-too-accurate reflection of most of our other cultural institutions.