Joe Brady got promoted from offensive coordinator to head coach after the Bills fired Sean McDermott, but that doesn’t mean he was happy about it.
Brady said that when he learned McDermott had been fired after the Bills’ playoff loss five months ago, he was devastated, and thought his own time in Buffalo was coming to an end as well.
“I didn’t see that and think, ‘I want to be the head coach.’ I was broken,” Brady said on the Shout Buffalo Bills Podcast. “I was broken for a guy that I worked for. I was also broken for the rest of the coaching staff that is sitting there, like, we’re all out of jobs right now. There was a lot of emotion going on.”
Brady, whom McDermott hired as the Bills’ quarterbacks coach in 2022 and then promoted to offensive coordinator in 2023, credited McDermott for getting him where he is in his career.
“I’m only in Buffalo because of Sean and the opportunities that he gave me,” Brady said.
Brady says he will take a lot of the lessons that he learned from McDermott but will also be a different head coach.
“This organization is in a much better spot than when he took it over. I’m not walking into the same situation that he’s walking into, and there’s so much good that comes from that,” Brady said. “Sean was an extremely successful head football coach. I hope as I’m coaching I can accumulate the wins he had and the success he had. . . . I don’t want to be Coach McDermott — not in any negative way, but I want to be Joe Brady.”
