The Buffalo Bills are certainly in an unusual situation with their new coaching regime under Joe Brady. It’s not often a Super Bowl contender fires its head coach with the full expectation of not only remaining a contender, but getting over the postseason hump the previous staff couldn’t.
One of the most popular initial reactions to the Bills promoting Brady from offensive coordinator to head coach was simply trying to gauge what the Bills’ 2026 expectations should be. After all, it’s not often a first-time head coach takes his team to the Super Bowl. Still, it’s happened twice, and both times those coaches took home the Lombardi Trophy after taking over for successful regimes via an in-house promotion.
Bills Mafia is trying to temper expectations for the 36-year-old coach, but they know it sure would be sweet for him to become the third coach to pull it off.
As for the man himself, Brady addressed how he’s managing his first-year expectations as the leading voice in Buffalo at the NFL Combine on Tuesday.
Bills HC Joe Brady stresses importance of building forward, not living in the past
“Look, this is Year 1. It’s not Year 10, right? There’s been a foundation that’s been set here, and it might be a little different in a sense of we understand the expectations and everything that comes with it, right," Brady said. "But this isn’t just, ‘Hey, you know, Joe Brady’s in and everything’s just business as usual,’ right? So, it’s important that everyone in the organization knows it, because if we continue to speak about how things used to be, then we’ll never continue to go forward. So, I have so much respect for the past, but it’s Year 1 in the organization right now.”
To Brady’s point, the Bills have plenty to be proud of over the past decade. After snuffing out a 17-year playoff drought, Sean McDermott and Josh Allen lifted the Bills into one of the league’s most successful teams over the past decade. In fact, the Bills were the winningest team of the past six seasons.
But the Super Bowl is what has eluded Buffalo for decades, and the long wait is getting any more comfortable for Bills Mafia.
But that’s where Brady’s effort to reset the playing field with the understanding that this is Year 1 of building something new with an incredible foundation. He recognizes that he isn’t starting from ground zero, but that he also isn’t lapping it up in the penthouse just yet. The Bills still have layers of their roster to build before they can reach those heights under Brady.
The defense will look different with a new scheme and surely new personnel. The offense has to take a step forward in the passing game by adding legitimate threats outside. Those are the barriers to entry for Brady and the Bills, and expecting all of that to go perfectly in one offseason is a tall task.
But as the Super Bowl LX participants showed, it takes a string of successful offseasons to build the product, but one strong decision in the offseason can change a franchise’s fortunes in an instant. For the Seahawks, it was signing Sam Darnold and trading away DK Metcalf. For the Patriots, it was hiring Mike Vrabel.
Bills Mafia is just hoping that for the Bills in 2026, it was hiring Joe Brady.