So the Bills fired Dick Jauron.
Allow me to sum up the prevailing logic among Bills fans, myself included: It’s about time.
Buffalo is at its core, a hopeful city when it comes to its sports teams. Perhaps one might even say a naive city.
We got excited when we traded for Drew Bledsoe. We got excited when we drafted J.P. Losman. We got excited when we drafted Trent Edwards. We got excited when we signed T.O.
It’s easy to get us excited.
More than anything, Dick Jauron had come to embody — fairly, I would say — the ultimate hopelessness of the franchise.
He was a mediocre coach. He was a weak personality and a gameday disaster. He was well-liked by his players, but I always got the impression that the players liked him in the same way that students like the teachers who let them slide when they blow off their homework.
Owens said as much when asked recently whether or not he’s considering returning to the team after his initial one-year contract. He talked about how Jauron rarely runs physical practices and allows players plenty of time off when they want it. Why wouldn’t he like that?
In a lunchbox town like Buffalo, we don’t like thinking that our athletes are lazy. It was another nail in Jauron’s coffin.
That and the fact that we haven’t made the playoffs in a decade.
Ralph Wilson has been accused of being tone-deaf when it comes to the fans. He’s been called cheap. Those two things might be true, but I think the cagey owner realized one thing: that if the fans truly lost hope, as they were every day under Jauron, the whole organization was in trouble.
So here we are again, faced with a hopeful decision. It appears as though the team’s defensive coordinator, Perry Fewell, will serve out the season as the interim coach to run out the clock before Wilson and his braintrust huddle to plot their offseason moves.
Several things come to mind. Edwards, the team’s embattled quarterback, should be nervous. When a new coach comes in, he usually wants people in the key positions who he actually picked.
With a new coach, Bills fans can bank on a new quarterback under center next season. The Edwards era could end as early as next week if Fewell opts for backup Ryan Fitzpatrick.
This is a team that has a long way to go before it becomes a legitimate contender. It is also a team that doesn’t have very far to go to make the playoffs.
Think about it: Even in the lowly Jauron era, we were two wins away from a longshot wildcard berth for three seasons running.
There aren’t very many good teams in the NFL anymore. There are a handful of great teams and a handful of woefully bad ones, and the other 20 are grinding out a middling, mediocre season.
What angers Bills fans isn’t any single season of mediocrity. It’s the decade’s worth of humiliating losses on the national stage and the ultimate futility in spending hard-earned money and remaining dedicated to Wilson’s team.
Of course Jauron should have been fired at the end of last season. He should have been fired going into the bye-week, so at least the interim coach would have more than a few days to gather his thoughts and put together a gameplan.
But at least it’s done now and we can start to move on.
I’m struggling with my emotions as a fan. My immediate reaction was to wonder whether or not we’d throw a parade to celebrate the news. But the more I think about it, the less I actually care that Jauron is gone.
He was a huge part of the problem, but firing him hardly solves any of the other problems with the team.
Ralph Wilson has time and again defended against charges he’s not willing to pay the big bucks for an elite coach, that the fault doesn’t lay with him for setting a losing tone that has filtered down to the team on the field.
There are a bunch of game-changing coaches out there, waiting to be wooed away from their studio analysts jobs by a lucrative offer to rebuild a once-proud franchise. Bill Cowher and Tony Dungy come to mind as personal favorites. Of course, Bills fans don’t really believe the likes of a Cowher or Dungy will be patrolling our sidelines come next season.
But we can hope.
Eric DuVall is the managing
editor of the Tonawanda News.
His column appears Wednesdays
and Sundays. Contact him at eric.duvall@tonawanda-news.com.
