Super Bowl-winning coach rips Bills for firing Sean McDermott and promoting general manager Brandon Beane

If Bruce Arians was the owner of the Buffalo Bills, it's pretty safe to say that Sean McDermott would definitely still have a job with the team. 

During Tuesday's episode of "The Pat McAfee Show," the two-time NFL Coach of the Year was asked about the surprise firing of McDermott in Buffalo and the former NFL head coach didn't hold back. Not only did Arians disagree with the decision, but he also took an unsolicited shot at Bills general manager Brandon Beane, who actually got promoted on the day McDermott was fired. 

"This one baffles me," Arians said of the McDermott firing. "How Brandon Beane got elevated and Sean McDermott got fired, that just blows my mind, because they didn't have any damn players."

Beane is the one in charge of building the roster so if the Bills' didn't have any "damn players," that would be his fault. The Bills had plenty of holes on their roster going into the 2025 season and you could easily argue that McDermott actually had one of his most impressive coaching years, leading his team to a 12-5 finish.

"[McDermott] is one of the best coaches in the league, a great leader of men, he's taken that team as close as you can get," Arians said. "He didn't throw any damn interceptions and the referees screwed him bad and he gets fired. And Brandon Beane gets a f--king raise? I don't get that one. That one blows my mind." 

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Arians knows what it takes to win a Super Bowl and that's because he won one as the head coach of the Buccaneers in 2020, and based on his comments, it doesn't seem like he thinks the Bills will be winning one any time soon with Beane running the show. 

In the hours after McDermott was fired on Monday, CBS Sports NFL writer Zach Pereles broke down why most of the blame for Buffalo's failure to win a Super Bowl should probably be placed on Beane (You can check out his story here). 

If it's obvious to Arians, Pereles and most outsiders that Beane was the bigger issue for Buffalo's failures, then you might be wondering why Bills owner Terry Pegula kept Beane and fired McDermott. During a press conference on Wednesday, Pegula was asked if Beane had made some sort of "power play."

"I'm the kind of guy, if I sense you're on a power play, you're out," Pegula said, via NYup.com."I don't like power play people. We have an organization that we work together, but any sense at all that he was on a power play, [Beane] would have been gone because that's not my type of person."

With the success of Beane and McDermott being so intertwined together over the past nine years, Pegula was asked how he came to the conclusion that one guy deserved a promotion while the other guy deserved to be fired. 

"That was my decision," Pegula said. "I could be wrong, but it was success with the players. I don't know if anybody knows it in this room, but Josh Allen wouldn't be here if it wasn't for [Beane] pushing and pushing and pulling a Houdini in that draft to get to a position where we could pick him. So that was my decision [to keep Beane]."

McDermott wasn't able to get the Bills over the hump to the Super Bowl, but he did win 98 games during his nine seasons in Buffalo, which is the second-most in NFL history for a coach in his first nine years. If the Bills struggle at all under their next coach due to the holes on their roster, Pegula may come to realize that he ended up getting rid of the wrong guy when he fired McDermott.