00:00Has Brandon Bean done a good job building this roster this year
00:03and getting his team ready for the upcoming season?
00:05Yeah, I like the way he's built it.
00:08If you look back at the – even the last – since he's been here, 2019, I believe,
00:13Brandon Bean's done a really nice job of building the roster.
00:16You don't put together the kind of success they have put together
00:20and have it end year after year after year the way it has ended
00:24and say it's a talent issue, in my opinion.
00:28I mean, they seem like they have had the horses to get there
00:31and as something has gone awry, I don't know if you –
00:37I don't think you can point that at the talent.
00:40And that's part of why they made the head coaching change,
00:43but it's also part of the reason why they kept going back and running it back
00:47and they didn't make any changes.
00:48They felt like they were good enough, and I felt like they were too,
00:52to go ahead and win the whole thing and then they could never even get to the game.
00:56And that was really frustrating and finally forced to change.
01:00Steve, do you think they underachieved then with Sean McDermott?
01:04It's hard to say that.
01:07I mean, you go back and look at the games they lost.
01:09They had a bad spot on a fourth-down quarterback sneak.
01:12They had a drop pass slash interception in last year's Chiefs game.
01:17They had a drop pass against the Chiefs in 2023, I believe it was.
01:22I mean, you go back and look at how – and you expect those games to be close.
01:27You don't think the Bills are so good that they're going to go in there
01:30and win in a blowout in the divisional round of the NFL championship.
01:34That just doesn't happen very often.
01:36So you look back at the way they lost those games, and they're forever that close.
01:45They're banging their own head on the ceiling that they create.
01:48So it doesn't seem like they're underachieving so much as it just always seemed like a bad stroke of luck
01:55or a bad official's call or a questionable call or whatever, whatever.
01:58And so you never really – the blame never seemed to be in the building.
02:03And ultimately, they had to make a change to make sure that that was the case, and they did.
02:08The defensive side of the football, I mean, this is going to be really –
02:11where it's going to really tell us if this Bills team was going to go on
02:14and win a Super Bowl this year.
02:16You got Josh Allen, and I call him Superman.
02:19He's my favorite football player in the league right now, Steve.
02:22But that defense has got to be elite.
02:24Do you think it has to be elite for them to win the Super Bowl?
02:27No, it doesn't have to be – the defense doesn't have to be elite.
02:30Is that your question?
02:32Yeah.
02:33No, I don't think the defense has to be elite.
02:36The best-case scenario for this defense this year, in my opinion,
02:39would be to be a playmaking defense that forces a lot of turnovers.
02:44Their pass rush should be upgraded from where it was.
02:47They've got to be better against the run.
02:49They were 29th to 30th against the run in 2025.
02:52If they can get in the top half of the league against the run,
02:55if they can get in the top half of the league on third down conversions
02:58and if they can be a good red zone defense, that's all they really need to be.
03:02The situational football is what crushed them last year.
03:05They were the seventh best defense overall in the league by yardage last year.
03:10And so everybody says they were the seventh best overall defense in the league.
03:13It didn't feel like that to Bills fans or the club.
03:16It felt like they couldn't get off the field on third down.
03:19They couldn't stop people in the red zone, and they couldn't stop the run.
03:24It was a problem, and that's where really job one was this offseason for the Bills defense.
03:30They said, we're going to stop the run first and then do what we can with the rest.
03:34And thus far, they've made some headway, but even against the Houston Texans,
03:39they got over 100 yards rushing and felt like, man, they had some work to do.
03:43But they do feel like their defense has a high ceiling,
03:47but they've got to climb a ladder to get to it.
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