I called Cashell Durham, Rev. Earl Perrin and Veronica Borjon this week, after I learned the Buffalo Bills had fired head coach Sean McDermott. Based on many conversations over the years, I guessed they would have a few thoughts to provide before McDermott’s time with the Bills shifts into memory throughout this end of New York state.
They made it clear they share one central feeling.
“I’m just sad,” said Durham, who met McDermott during the most painful weeks of her entire life.
What she recalls, above all else, is how he showed up without fanfare or a spotlight at the funeral of her brother, Aaron Salter Jr., a retired Buffalo police lieutenant. Salter died while serving as a security guard at a Tops Markets in Buffalo on May 14, 2022 — which began for him as a gentle May Saturday on the job, before a racist murderer in body armor attacked the store.
Salter was one of 10 women and men killed that afternoon. Investigators said that unbearable death toll might have been even worse if Salter had not sacrificed his own life while exchanging gunfire with the killer — providing time for more staff and shoppers to hide or flee.
While her brother was a longtime Bills fan, Durham was surprised to see McDermott at the funeral. The coach told her “he wouldn’t be any place but there.”
Perrin met McDermott at that service for the first time, as well. A minister at Buffalo’s historic DeLaine-Waring AME Church, Perrin became a close friend of Salter’s while they were fellow officers. Perrin is also a key member of a group that started a scholarship fund in Salter’s name, after the bloodshed.
As for Borjon, she was the longtime companion of Ezra Castro, who became famous as “Pancho Billa” — a Texas-based Bills fan of extraordinary passion who rose into legend before dying of cancer, in 2019.
“His kindness radiated,” Borjon said of McDermott, whom she met multiple times. She recalled how the coach invited Castro, as his struggles grew more difficult, to address the entire Bills team at a New Jersey hotel on the weekend of a 2018 game against the Jets.
Borjon never forgets how much that meant to Castro — or how grateful she was for the warmth and welcome offered by McDermott and his wife Jamie in the months after Castro’s death.
“This wasn’t just about football,” Borjon said. “This was just a very kind human being.”
After nine seasons, McDermott was fired this week by team owner Terry Pegula following an overtime playoff loss to the Denver Broncos. Citing many near-miss postseason heartbreaks in recent years, Pegula said at a subsequent news conference that the Bills require a new coach because they have hit a “proverbial playoff wall” — meaning they keep falling short of the Super Bowl.
A famous quote in American sports goes like this: “There’s two kinds of coaches, them that’s fired and them that’s gonna be fired.” It is attributed to the late Bum Phillips, a coach whose son Wade followed the same profession and made the playoffs twice as a head coach in Buffalo — before, as if reinforcing his father’s words, he was fired.
Despite that harsh and oh-so-true reality, the McDermott decision has stirred up an unusually intense, introspective and often conflicting response among the Bills faithful. Joanie Podkowinski DeKoker — a Bills fan from Camillus who has attended 260 consecutive Bills games, home and away — thinks she understands why.
Her own sadness, she said, is based on the way McDermott helped to transform and elevate the way the team responded to its fans.
DeKoker was close with Castro, who called her “Mama J.” She was in the room on his invitation in 2018, when her friend addressed the Bills. She watched as McDermott embraced Castro, and she felt the electric attention in the room as Castro gave that talk
Whatever happens next, DeKoker said of McDermott, “what we’re losing is someone who truly loved the team and loved the fans and loved the community,” qualities that she said are impossible to fake and difficult to replicate.
She has loved the Bills since she witnessed her dad’s devotion to the team, during her Cheektowaga childhood. She and her sister already have their season tickets for seats in the new stadium that opens next season, and she hopes — of course she hopes — that somehow the trajectory of this team keeps rising with whomever the Bills choose as their coach.
But DeKoker’s life and perspective run closely parallel to the existence of the franchise, and she remembers the long and fraught and spiraling history of what has typically happened over the last 65 years after successful Bills coaches were fired or simply quit. She feels an imperative — amid that uncertainty — to offer thanks for the way McDermott carried himself in the community.
That reaction is shared, in a big way, by Perrin and Durham, Aaron Salter’s sister. They vividly recall meeting the coach for the first time after Salter’s emotional funeral on May 25, 2022. McDermott, joined by his players, had gone the week before to the Jefferson Avenue site of the mass murder to lay down flowers in a city doubled over by its grief.
“But this dude, man,” as Perrin put it of McDermott, four emphatic words of admiration at the way the coach did even more. Perrin spoke with McDermott at the funeral, after McDermott stopped to comfort Durham and her family. He learned about the scholarship fund during the service, and McDermott told Perrin he would do what he could to honor Salter’s memory.
“He came and spoke to us and said he was so sorry about what happened,” Durham said. Perrin said McDermott kept his vow, a commitment I witnessed on a quiet spring morning in 2024, when the Legacy 5.14 Scholarship Fund hosted a Delaware Park 5k run in Salter’s memory.
McDermott showed up to serve as both an early morning speaker and as the official starter at the run, before he hurried back to a Bills rookie minicamp.
What mattered, Durham and Perrin both say, is that he was willing to go out of his way to offer his presence and his time — when no one would have thought twice if he said he was simply too busy.
“This is why so many people are upset,” Perrin said. Sports hirings and firings are typically just a part of business in any big-league town — but Perrin described McDermott as “a man of high character, a man of his word,” who had an unusual understanding and empathy for Buffalo and its struggles.
For her part, Borjon witnessed the entire arc of the “Pancho Billa” legend. She remembers the feeling of joyous disbelief in the early 2010s as her partner, Castro — a seemingly typical person who worked by day as a mortician in Dallas — became a central figure in the football mythos of a faraway Northern city, within this 21st century wave of Bills fans who call themselves “Bills Mafia.”
He embraced the team as a little boy, he often said, because he thought the Bills colors resembled the Mexican flag. Castro created a masked costume for himself based on the luchadores — his beloved Mexican pro wrestlers. He was an in-it-all-the-way Bills fan who didn’t smoke or drink, even as he became a fabled and charismatic regular while traveling to many Bills games, around the country.
In 2018, after noticing what seemed like a routine pain in his arm, the doctors told him he was facing the fast-moving cancer that would take his life, less than two years later.
McDermott, general manager Brandon Beane and other Bills officials responded with some extraordinary steps. In 2018, in Dallas, Castro was called up on stage by Bills legends Andre Reed and Fred Jackson to announce the team had selected defensive lineman Harrison Phillips in the third round of the National Football League draft.
Instantly, for Castro and Borjon, Phillips became a family friend.
In October of that same year, the Bills played the Texans in Houston. Castro and Borjon made sure to be there, with their kids. Katie O’Brien, a Buffalo native and a Houston neuropsychologist, is a fellow cancer survivor who was a confidant and friend to Castro and Borjon during the hardest times.
She snapped some photographs as McDermott went out of his way before that game to greet Castro and his family on the sidelines. The coach offered the same warmth and humanity, O’Brien said, that she sensed in the way he responded after the killings at Tops, or after a blizzard in 2022 claimed 49 lives in greater Buffalo, or after the sickening moment early in 2023 when Bills safety Damar Hamlin went into full cardiac arrest on the field in Cincinnati.
“He embraced Buffalo and became Buffalo,” she said of the coach — an unusual understanding that she said elevates the stakes as the Bills look for his successor.
In November of 2018, in New Jersey, McDermott asked Castro to address the full team at their hotel. Castro showed up masked, in full costume. He explained to the intent and silent players that he was dealing with stage four cancer, that his last scan “didn’t look too good.”
In a profound moment, he quietly took off his mask. Without it, in a way he compared to the feeling for all the players once they took off their helmets, he described himself as a “regular guy on the street.”
But when he wears it?
“It’s on, baby,” Castro told this team he revered.
That opportunity, Borjon said, was “one of the most important and memorable parts of Ezra’s life.”
He died in May of 2019 — only weeks after Beane called him in the hospital during the NFL draft, to tell him the Bills had taken Ed Oliver with their first pick. The following September, the Bills honored Castro’s memory at their home opener. Borjon and her children had a chance to see McDermott and many of the players. She and her kids spent some time in a stadium suite with McDermott’s wife Jamie and their family.
“They just cared so deeply for people,” Borjon said of the McDermotts.
Football, then, is really the last thing on her mind, and has little to do with the message she wants to send. Like Cashell Durham, like Earl Perrin, Borjon simply wants to make sure — as McDermott leaves — that he understands some of his most important work here will endure.
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