Jerry Sullivan: For Wilson, it's cheaper to keep him
Evidently, Ralph Wilson has an infinite capacity for insulting the intelligence of Bills fans.
In the very first sentence of Tuesday's press release announcing that he was keeping Dick Jauron as head coach, the owner actually said that he "shares many of the fans' dissatisfaction with our offensive game management."
Wow. The man really has no clue. Wilson brings back a coach who might be the most unpopular in franchise history, and has the gall to say he understands your concerns. Yeah, Ralph is practically one of you. Maybe he paints his chest on game days, too!
I feel sorry for Bills fans. They deserve better. The community deserves better. They deserve better than Wilson, an owner who shoots for a low standard and finds inferior head coaches who live down to it.
Jauron was a cheap, uninspired choice from the start. But he gets to stay, because Wilson couldn't stomach the alternative. Content with three straight 7-9s, the owner wasn't ready for drastic change. And presumably, Wilson didn't want to pay the price of buying him out.
Wilson can't begin to grasp the disgust among the fans right now. His team is a joke. On Tuesday, Denver fired Mike Shanahan, who has two Super Bowl rings. Bill Cowher and Brian Billick are in the job market. They've both won Super Bowls. Marty Schottenheimer, who has won more than 60 percent of his games in the regular season, is available.
Wilson wouldn't pay half of what it cost for any of them. Wilson says he shares the fans' frustration. He has no idea. I'm not sure he cares. This is the same man who let the Miami game go to Toronto and laughed when the team played like a bunch of dogs.
He blames "offensive game management" for his team's failures. By singling out the offense, Wilson might be trying to distance Jauron, a defensive coach by trade, from his team's most glaring problem.
There were a lot of dubious offensive calls during the Bills' collapse. But Jauron was the guy doing most of the bumbling on game day, the man who couldn't get a challenge flag out of his pocket or make sensible use of timeouts. If he's such a defensive whiz, why can't the Bills stop people when it matters?
Generally, Wilson identifies a scapegoat to appease the masses. This time, he's not likely to fire any assistants. Extending Jauron's contract is a validation of what he's done here, a statement for continuity. How would it look if they sacrificed coaches?
Jauron is back. I can't say it's a surprise. Wilson didn't want to deal with another coaching change. That's why he put Russ Brandon in charge when Marv Levy left, rather than hire an outside guy who might have seen Jauron for the lightweight he was.
Once they agreed to the extension during the season, Jauron was safe. Going from 5-1 to 7-9 is one of the worst collapses in NFL history. Some coaches would have been fired for the Cleveland game alone, or the Jets game, or last Sunday's disaster. Jauron survived despite all of it. Now Wilson wants us to believe the team is headed in the right direction. Is that why he brought Tom Modrak into the "inner circle?" So Modrak, who has run the last eight drafts, could assure the owner that all his guys have great upside?
Modrak didn't want to run the show when Wilson fired Tom Donahoe a few years back. It's hard to blame him. Every general manager tires of Wilson's meddling. So Wilson got his old pal, Levy, who was unqualified to be a GM but made everyone feel better.
Levy brought in Jauron, a guy he knew in Chicago. Wilson's uninspired GM resulted in an uninspired coach.
When Levy left, again Wilson didn't hire a football guy, a fresh set of eyes. Brandon got promoted. Everyone got promoted.
They all huddled in Detroit this week and told Wilson what he wanted to hear. Jauron isn't the problem. When you get down to it, that's true. The real problem with the Bills is the same as it's been for many years. It's the guy at the top. Wilson.
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