Sean McDermott
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Bills coach Sean McDermott may have his hands full with one divisional opponent this year.
The Buffalo Bills are the reigning AFC East champions, and have held that title for five straight seasons. They won 13 games in three of those season, 11 in the other two. Their starting quarterback is just 28 years old, a seven-year veteran, the 2024 NFL MVP, and under contract to the Bills at least through 2029.
Is there any other team who can threaten the Bills this year?
On the surface, it wouldn’t seem so. At 13-4 last year, the Bills finished five games ahead of their closest competitor, the Miami Dolphins. The Dolphins have done little to improve their roster in the offseason, and appear to be counting primarily on a return to full health for quarterback Tua Tagovailoa to have a chance at bettering their 8-9 record.
But an NFL scout with “ties to the AFC East” has identified one team as the most capable of threatening the Bills’ standing in the upcoming campaign. And it’s an unlikely candidate.
The New England Patriots.
Scout: Patriots Are Bills’ Biggest Threat
“This is the best offseason they’ve had in a while,” said the scout, who spoke anonymously to ESPN reporter Mike Reese. “I feel like they’re the Bills’ biggest threat.”
But the Patriots not only finished at a dismal 4-13 last season — that was the same disastrous record they compiled in 2023.
Long gone are the days when New England ruled the division, and in fact the whole NFL, winning six Super Bowls, nine AFC Championships and an incredible 17 AFC East titles behind the now-legendary quarterback-coach combo of Tom Brady and Bill Belichick.
The Patriots have scraped together only one winning season, and zero playoff game wins, in the five years since Brady departed for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers prior to the 2020 season.
So how does this team “threaten” the Bills?
A second NFL scout who spoke to Reese felt the key was new head coach Mike Vrabel, who not only played eight years at linebacker for the Patriots in the midst of the Belichick-Brady era, appearing in three Super Bowls and winning two of them, but went on to coach the Tennessee Titans for six seasons from 2018 through 2023, getting to the playoffs three times and as far as the AFC Championship Game in 2019.
Patriots Expert Tempers Expectations
“Look at the history of Vrabel’s teams,” the second scout told the ESPN reporter. “They’ll play hard and mirror his personality.”
But just because the Patriots may be a “threat” to the Bills, that doesn’t mean they can actually unseat Buffalo at the top of the division. At least not this year.
Discussing the NFL scout’s “biggest threat” comments, NFL expert Nick Cattles, host of the Locked on Patriots podcast tempered expectations about how much of a threat the Patriots pose in AFC East, really.
“Here’s the tough reality. Even though the Patriots have unequivocally closed that gap, they’re not necessarily close to the Buffalo Bills. They are the biggest threat to the Bills in the division, I believe that.” Cattles said of the Tuesday Locked on podcast.
“The Patriots have closed the gap but the Patriots are still behind the Buffalo Bills,” the podcast host continued. “They are going to need to do more work and continue to build this program with Vrabel to get to ‘contender’ — to get to ‘legitimate threat’ of taking the division away from the Bills.”