The Rookies

This is a picture of Dick Jauron when he was hired to coach the Buffalo Bills in 2006.

Partial hair loss.

This is a photo of him during their 2009 season opener at New England.

...more partial hair loss.

Normally, it takes four years in the White House for someone to age that fast, not three and a half in Orchard Park, but that pretty much sums up the Dick Jauron Era for you. The frustrating thing about his time with the Bills (alright, a frustrating thing, since it would take another Jauron Era to get through a full list of all the frustrating things) is that even though he’s been coach of the Bills for most of the time I’ve lived in Buffalo, he still never really did enough to prove himself a spectacularly good or spectacularly bad coach. That’s not to say that he didn’t have countless coaching blunders. He just wasn’t capable of consistently producing trainwrecks the way Herman Edwards, Romeo Crennel, or Rod Marinelli can any more than he was capable of consistently producing 10+ win seasons like Tony Dungy or fellow facial expression-challenged AFC East coach Bill Belichick.

At some point the frustration of losing when you expect to win and winning when you’re this close to being able to walk away from following a team for the rest of the season combined with an uncanny inability to so much as draw up the energy for a Herm Edwards/Jim Mora/Denny Green style meltdown just gets to a fanbase and by the Bills’ bye week, the public and media backlash against Jauron resembled a miniature version of the Knicks at the height of the Fire Isaiah movement.

Was that fully warranted? Probably not but after 10 years of missing the playoffs, it’s not like that reaction wasn’t going to happen the instant that the Bills had their first losing streak. With two excellent RBs, a great starting WR in Lee Evans and two promising DBs in Leodis McKelvin and Jairus Byrd, the Bills had to win at least 8 games this year for Jauron to keep his job. Everything had to right and when instead, everything went wrong, it became actually sort of cruel to keep Jauron around.

Now that he’s actually gone, I can’t say that I actually have any really strong emotions, which is really fairly fitting for a coach who never really showed any, apart from his sarcastic claps every time the OL got called on a false start penalty. More than anything else, I just feel a vague sense of relief that the whole thing’s over. I imagine Dick Jauron feels the same way.