COX,

Bills offensive co-ordinator makes case for head coach job

If some NFL team doesn’t hire Brian Daboll to be their head coach now, well, you surely have to wonder if someone ever will.

Actually, that’s not quite right. There are many variables. Specifically, the firing of Brian Flores in Miami and David Culley in Houston last week chopped the number of Black head coaches in the NFL down to one (Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin). Most reasonable people would agree that a league dominated by Black players (about 70 per cent) should have more Black head coaches, senior executives and owners. It’s an embarrassment, really.

The point is, the NFL desperately needs to prioritize the hiring of more Black head coaches, and that could mean some qualified white coaches — including Daboll — may not get a chance, at least not right away. Daboll’s colleague with the Buffalo Bills, defensive co-ordinator Leslie Frazier, is one of the Black NFL assistants who are being interviewed for head coaching positions. Daboll may have to bide his time a little longer if the NFL wants to begin to address this atrocious disparity.

Regardless of what happens, however, the 46-year-old Daboll can state with authority that nobody in the long history of professional football played at the highest level ever guided a team to a better offensive performance than the Canadian-born co-ordinator did with Josh Allen and the rest of the Bills on Saturday night against their archrivals from New England.

After all, it’s hard to be better than perfect.

Seven possessions. Seven touchdowns. No field goals. No turnovers. Yards gained on 49 of 51 plays, with the other two plays kneel-downs at the conclusion of a 47-17 blowout of the Patriots.

Allen averaged 12.3 yards per pass, and he was part of a Buffalo running attack that averaged six yards per carry. There just wasn’t anything Daboll’s offence didn’t do perfectly. Six for seven on third-down conversions? Nope. The only time the Bills didn’t convert was that final kneel-down.

It really was something to watch, and it came against Bill Belichick’s New England defence that was highly rated for most of the season. “They were too much for us tonight,” muttered Belichick, again left watching from the sidelines as his former quarterback, Tom Brady, progresses through the NFL post-season.

Allen was brilliant, and there aren’t many better in the NFL. Possibly Aaron Rodgers and probably Patrick Mahomes. Joe Burrow looked on Saturday like he will soon be one of the best after leading the Bengals to their first playoff win since before the World Wide Web was invented.

When you have a quarterback like Allen to work with, you have everything. But it’s not like he is surrounded by superstars.

Wideout Stefon Diggs is a Pro Bowler and left tackle Dion Dawkins is a standout, but the offensive line isn’t generally considered one of the top five in the game. Versatile backup Ryan Bates was inserted late in the season to get the line playing better as a group. The running backs are ordinary, and tight end Dawson Knox is improving but not yet elite.

It would be an intriguing statistical comparison to make, but most would agree that the Buffalo Super Bowl teams of the 1990s that featured quarterback Jim Kelly, wideout Andre Reid and running back Thurman Thomas behind a talented offensive line had more pure marquee offensive players than today’s Bills.

But as prolific as Kelly and his pals were in their heyday, they were never as perfect as Allen and Co. were on Saturday night. That’s because nobody has ever been.

It’s Daboll’s scheme and play-calling that makes Buffalo’s offence greater than the sum of its parts.

Well, that and Frazier’s stout defence, which helps with field position and takeaways. Daboll — born in Welland, Ont. but raised in the United States — has been guiding the Buffalo offence since 2018, and it just keeps getting better as Allen matures.

That plus the overall health of the roster is what has to have Bills fans pumped heading into next weekend.

Just one game over .500 after 13 games, Buffalo looks to be peaking at exactly the right time.

Even luck is on their side. Had their game against the Pats been 24 hours later, the game might have been slugged by one of those nasty Buffalo snowstorms, the kind of unusual weather that often produces unexpected results.

But other than being very cold, conditions were just fine in Orchard Park on Saturday and the Bills offence did whatever it wanted all night long before the usual passionate Bills Mafia gathering. Allen threw only four incompletions while passing for more than 300 yards. Devin Singletary had 81 rushing yards. Knox had five catches, two for touchdowns. Heck, even safety Micah Hyde’s interception on New England’s first possession was a thing of beauty: an over-theshoulder grab worthy of any NFL receiver.

It’s unlikely that the Bills will be able to repeat that kind of performance next weekend. But they can score with anyone, at a time when offensive football is more treasured than at any other point in league history.

Daboll, meanwhile, reportedly interviewed with the Dolphins and Chicago Bears on his day off Sunday. Both of those teams are offensively starved, and both have young quarterbacks in need of tutoring. It seems impossible to believe he won’t be running an NFL team next fall, but it’s possible.

For now, he’ll have to settle for guiding the Bills when they have the ball. Perfection won’t be easy to improve upon, but he’ll have to give it a shot.