ORCHARD PARK — Let’s pick up where we left off last week.

To be sure, dismissing a nine-year, grade-A head coach because one wants to do even better has its risks.

On Jan. 21, Buffalo Bills’ owner Terry Pegula acknowledged as much.

The Bills’ most important task this off season is to make this decision work.

The team took the first step in that direction on Jan. 27 by promoting its offensive coordinator to head coach.

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Joe Brady, a Hollywood, Fla., native, grew up in Pembroke Pines, Fla.; spent his undergraduate years at the College of William & Mary, where he was a wide receiver for the William & Mary Tribe; and has a master’s degree in education from Penn State University.

In 2017, Brady became an offensive assistant for the New Orleans Saints.

In 2019, he became the passing-game coordinator and the wide-receivers coach for the Louisiana State University Tigers in Baton Rouge.

The Carolina Panthers made him their offensive coordinator in 2020.

The Bills named him their quarterbacks coach in 2022, their interim offensive coordinator in 2023, and their offensive coordinator in 2024.

In effect implementing longtime Bills’ head coach Marv Levy’s admonition to “run and stop the run,” Brady in 2023 shifted the offense’s focus toward a greater running game.

Partly as a result of that shift, the Bills, who were 5-5 when he became offensive coordinator, finished the regular season at 11-6, and won the American Football Conference’s eastern division for the fourth consecutive time.

The 2024 season saw him further diversify the offense with his “Everybody Eats” approach, which enabled a league-record 13 offensive players to score touchdowns. The Bills went 13-4 and lost the AFC championship game, as you read here last week, to the Kansas City Chief-Referees.

Toward the end of the 2025 season, some teams expressed interest in naming the 36-year-old Brady as their head coach.

But guess what? Events quickly unfolded.

On Jan. 17, the Bills lost their divisional-round-playoff game to the Denver Bronco-Referees, as you also read here last week.

The Bills dismissed head coach Sean McDermott on Jan. 19.

Brandon Beane, Bills’ president of football operations and general manager, said at a Jan. 21 press conference with Pegula that the search for the next head coach was wide open.

According to press reports, Brady was the first of nine candidates to interview to fill the position most successfully held by Lou Saban, Chuck Knox, Levy, and McDermott.

The husband and father of a toddler son and infant daughter became the Bills’ head coach on Jan. 27.

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Looking at the Bills’ seasons since their inception in 1960, the Bills — thanks most recently to Pegula, Beane, McDermott & Co. — are on the verge of having an overall winning record for the first time in a long time.

That’s good.

Yet Pegula, Beane, Brady, the entire Bills organization, and the fans’ overarching goal far exceeds–and rightly so–having an overall winning record.

The overarching goal is to build a sustained championship team.

The first big goal is to win one Super Bowl.

Please notice the word “win.” Not “go to.” Not “play in.”

You, faithful reader of this column, know it has no interest in the Bills’ merely “going to” or “playing in” a Super Bowl.

Like the Minnesota Vikings, we’ve been there and done that four times. That’s quite enough, thank you very much.

Do we have to go and play to win? Of course. Yet winning a first Super Bowl is a first big goal in building a sustained championship team.

Pegula, Beane, Brady, the entire Bills’ organization, and the fans can do this.

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Many fans are displeased that McDermott is gone. Regardless of whether they’re right or wrong, we can both appreciate the tremendous success McDermott has helped bring to the Bills and understand Pegula’s decision was a done deal from the moment he made it.

The advantage of hiring an internal person such as Brady to succeed McDermott is that it accomplishes Pegula’s goal of making a change. In so doing, however, it doesn’t shake things up too much.

We don’t need rebuilding. Rather, we need to continue building on the excellent team we already have.

When we do that, we can have a sustained championship team.

To that end, Brady is an excellent choice for the Bills.

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The only sports-fan letter Randy Elf has ever written was to Marv Levy, who wrote back to express his thanks and to say that he liked the enclosed Winston Churchill poster so much that he had it framed and mounted on his office wall at the stadium.

COPYRIGHT 2026 BY RANDY ELF