That Will Solve All Your Problems

Yesterday, the Bills got absolutely shredded by noted Hall of Fame candidate Ryan Fitzpatrick (who has two excellent receivers and a good running back to work with, but still) at home, perhaps the most embarrassing instance of Rex Ryan’s disastrous underachievement as a defensive coach in Buffalo. Their response to this was…to fire the offensive coordinator? The oddness of the move is manifest:

Rex took over a team which ranked 26th in offensive DVOA and 2nd in defensive DVOA. 9th on offense, 24th in defense last year. Fire the OC!

— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) September 16, 2016

And Roman accomplished this turnaround with a rookie 4th-round pick at QB and a stars-and-scrubs receiving corps whose star is basically never close to 100% (plus his track record involves taking Colin Kaepernick to a conference championship and a Super Bowl — with Harbaugh, admittedly, but he presumably deserves some credit.) As Cosentino says, this year you can make excuses because of the injuries and suspensions to the front 7, but that doesn’t explain the massive decline last year.

I wonder if the impetus for this was the disastrous 4th quarter sequence last night that pretty much sealed the game. Manuel came in under center, was stuffed on 3rd-and-short, and then they tried the hard count that had drawn the Jets offside last year. It didn’t work, of course, and rather than run the play they decided to waste a timeout. Did they need this timeout to put an exotic play into place? Nope — they came out of the timeout to…put Manuel under center and run into the line, which the Jets stuffed almost as if they knew exactly what was coming. This timeout turned out to be crucial, because it allowed the Jets to run the clock down to under 20 seconds after the Bills got a TD. Here’s what Ryan said after the game:

No, we tried to hard count them because we went in the other time on a five and we never got the first down. It was something that Greg (Roman) was going to go no-snap and then we figured we’d try to draw them on it and if not, we’d use a timeout and that’s what we did.

Maybe Ryan was upset because it was entirely Roman’s stupid idea to decide ex ante to waste a timeout in the extremely likely event that the well-coached Jets defense didn’t fall for a trick they had already seen before. I doubt it — unimaginative, repetitive GROUND AND POUND seems more Rex than Roman, and I’m not sure that Ryan has had three timeouts left at the two-minute warning once in his NFL career — but who knows. Even if that was Roman’s decision it’s hard to justify the decision to fire the coach who would appear to be the best-performing on the staff.

And, of course, this smells all the worse because Rex brought in his brother, whose most recent coaching gig involved coordinating a defense that was the worst in the league by 15 points of DVOA. (For the uninitiated, 15 points is yooge, the difference between the Denver and St. Louis defenses last year.) And that was hardly the first terrible defense he had presided over. Can you imagine Belichick (or Carroll or Tomlin or Arians or the Harbaughs) making someone with that track record their assistant head coach just because they were related? I talked earlier in the week about Casey Stengel’s definition of loyalty. Bringing in a bad coach to assuage your brother’s ego is the opposite of that.

I do have one piece of good news for Bills fans: at least when Rex gets fired after the year he apparently won’t be replaced by Jeff Fisher.