Sean McDermott sat there frozen. He didn’t want to believe the words that were coming from then-Eagles’ coach Andy Reid. After what on paper looked like a productive defensive season for the Eagles, finishing 12th overall in defense after the 2010 season, Reid told McDermott he was fired as the Eagles’ defensive coordinator.
“How crazy this is going to sound, it was the best thing for my career,” said McDermott, a 1993 La Salle College High School graduate. “Sometimes you have to take some knocks, get some scars to learn and grow. I won’t forget what Coach Reid said to me point blank, ‘This will be the best thing for you.’ He was right. I didn’t want to believe it at the time, but he was right.
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Where the 46-year-old McDermott is today is the head coach of the AFC East Division-leading Buffalo Bills. The Bills are on the brink of breaking the New England Patriots’ 11-year AFC East title reign this season, and it’s a Philadelphia-area guy who’s doing it.
McDermott, in his fourth season as the Bills’ head coach, has directed Buffalo to the playoffs in two of his first three seasons. McDermott, a prep school national champion wrestler with the Explorers, could also become the first coach to lead the Bills to a division title in 25 years — since Bills’ Hall of Fame coach Marv Levy did it in 1995.
McDermott is also the head of a rare Philadelphia class — as the dean of a trio of Philadelphia-area NFL head coaches. Cleveland Browns’ head coach Kevin Stefanski, out of St. Joseph's Prep, and New York Giants’ head coach Joe Judge, from Lansdale Catholic, are in their rookie seasons.
All three come from Philadelphia Catholic League programs (though, technically, when Judge played for Lansdale Catholic the Crusaders were not in the Catholic League).
To anyone’s recollection or knowledge, it’s the first time in NFL history three head coaches from the same high school football league are head coaches at the same time in the modern area.
What is fact, is that for the first time three coaches from the Philadelphia area are NFL head coaches at the same time.
It started with McDermott, who had the unenviable task of following the legendary Jim Johnson as the Eagles’ defensive coordinator after Johnson had succumbed to melanoma in July 2009.
McDermott was 35, and literally climbed up the Eagles’ coaching ranks, starting as an intern with the Eagles as a scouting assistant.
“Jim was a legend and to this day, he means so much to me,” McDermott said. “He was light years ahead with defensive football, and he taught me how to turn the switch off after the season was over. He taught me balance.
“His attention to detail was his greatest asset. It’s what I’ll always take with me. We would run a blitz the first play of the spring and he was always firm how he ran it. He harped on those details, and that created a sense of urgency and how important those details were. That came out in how those defenses played with.”
In the two seasons McDermott was the Eagles’ DC, they finished a combined 21-11, making the playoffs each season. The 2010 Eagles won the NFC East and lost to eventual Super Bowl Green Bay Packers, 21-16, in the NFC Wildcard round.
John Steinmetz, the current La Salle coach, used to coach McDermott in high school. He’s not surprised by McDermott’s success, nor in his even demeanor. McDermott works in the Orchard Park, New York, area, but there is still a large piece of him that remains in Philadelphia.
When Steinmetz and the La Salle program underwent a tragedy on September 4 of Labor Day weekend with the death of Isaiah Turner, it was McDermott who took time out of a very busy schedule to check in with Steinmetz.
“The Bills were in the middle of camp, and Sean made sure to take the time to call me,” Steinmetz recalled. “I remember telling Sean, ‘Hey, Sean, you’re in the middle of camp.’ He said, ‘Coach, I’ll take as much as time as you need.’ He was so great, which is actually typical of who Sean is.
“That helped me to deal with a tragic situation.”
McDermott and Steinmetz wound up talking for 40 minutes. “Sean is just as humble now as he was when he played for La Salle,” Steinmetz said.
McDermott began something, it seems, that this area can produce quality football minds. They're around the same age with the same backgrounds: McDermott, 46, from La Salle, Stefanski, 38, out of St. Joseph’s Prep and Judge, 38, out of Lansdale Catholic.
Before McDermott landed the job in Buffalo, the last NFL head coach from the Philadelphia area was John Rauch, a Yeadon High grad who led the then-Oakland Raiders to Super Bowl II in 1967.
“I would say it is pretty rare to have three NFL head coaches from the same area, and very rare to have them from the same high school league,” said Hall of Famer Ray Didinger. “I can’t say that it never happened, because somewhere along the line in the 1950s and ’60s with all of those Ohio coaches, it may have happened, but definitely to have three head coaches from the same area, not since then.
“The only coach I can think of this area was Rauch, who was born in Philadelphia, but went to Yeadon High School. Rauch is the only one I can think of, and it’s safe to say that it’s the first time there were this many from the Philadelphia area as NFL head coaches—that’s really unusual.”
Why is this happening?
Much of it has to do with Reid’s coaching tree. McDermott came from that, and in a roundabout way, so did Stefanski, who interned the summer of 2005 for the Eagles under Reid (the Terrell Owens driveway sit-up summer). Judge came up under Bill Belichick, serving on the future Hall of Famer’s staff from 2012 to becoming his special teams coordinator in 2015 before taking the Giants’ job this year.
Some of it has to do with the quality of football rocketing at the grassroots level in the Philadelphia area. Gabe Infante made St. Joseph’s Prep a national program, and with many of the programs in the surrounding area trying to catch up, the overall quality of football has improved.
“For years and years, when people thought of high quality football in Pennsylvania, they tended to come to Western Pennsylvania, and now that’s not true,” Didinger said. “The football around here has been very good for a long time. Now, people are beginning to recognize that. The fact that you have three guys from this area, with similar backgrounds, and similar in age speaks to the fact that people do recognize it.
“There’s every reason to think that if there is three now, there will probably be more. That’s a really good thing. Sean was a really good coach, for a long time and there was no question he was on the track. He has Buffalo heading to the playoffs, and they’re going to be there for a while.”
Joseph Santoliquito is an award-winning sportswriter based in the Philadelphia area who has been writing for PhillyVoice since its inception in 2015 and is the president of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be followed on Twitter here: @JSantoliquito.