Bills' Sean McDermott given worrying comparison to famous head coach trade

Have the Buffalo Bills reached their ceiling under head coach Sean McDermott?

That's the question they'll potentially see answered in the upcoming playoffs.

The AFC is wide open. Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs will be at home. So too will be Joe Burrow and the Cincinnati Bengals.

The Bills are just a wild card team, but they can have legitimate hopes about making it to the Super Bowl.

So if they don't, is McDermott in trouble?

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Sports Illustrated's Albert Breer laid out a fascinating comparison in a new article this week:

If there’s a comp for this sort of thing, I’d say it’d be those great Buccaneer teams of a generation ago. In the mid-to-late 1980s and early 90s, there was no bigger laughingstock in professional sports than the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. From 1983 to ’95, they failed to win more than seven games in a single year. Then, in 1996, Tony Dungy arrived. He went 6–10 in his first year, then made the playoffs in four of the next five years.

The Bucs had made the playoffs just three times in franchise history before that (in 1979, ’81 and ’82), so Dungy was a real change agent. But by 2001, the clock was ticking on a generational collection of defensive talent, with future Hall of Famers Warren Sapp, Ronde Barber, John Lynch and Derrick Brooks on the roster. And urgency ticked up. So as the Bucs were eliminated in the wild-card round for a second consecutive year, the franchise was making a run at Bill Parcells. When that failed, the team traded for Jon Gruden. And won a Super Bowl.

Do the Bills eventually get to the point where they feel they need to act with urgency, with a generational talent at quarterback? 

Head coaching trades are rare, of course, but the Gruden example above is about a larger point.

Sometimes, a team needs a jolt to reach the next level.

The Bills have done amazing things under McDermott and general manager Brandon Beane.

But are they the path to the mountaintop? That decision might be coming if this season doesn't end in glory.

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