Sean McDermott wins Earle ‘Greasy’ Neal Coach of the Year Award

On January 20, 2025By Littum

ORCHARD PARK – Buffalo Bills coach Sean McDermott hasn’t generally fared well when it comes to NFL coaching awards, but that changed Thursday when the prestigious Maxwell Football Club announced him as the winner of the 36th Earle “Greasy” Neale Award as the most outstanding coach in professional football.

This is separate from the Associated Press Coach of the Year award, which has already been voted on by a panel of media members and will be announced at the NFL Honors show during Super Bowl week.

McDermott finished as the runner-up for the AP award in 2020, the year he led the Bills to the first of their five straight AFC East titles and their only appearance to date in the AFC Championship Game.

Chuck Knox (1980) is the only Bills coach in the NFL to win the AP award, although Lou Saban won the AFL version of the AP award in 1965. Marv Levy won the 1988 Sporting News Coach of the Year award , and he won the United Press International Award in 1988 and 1993, although it has been defunct since 1996.

Established in 1989, the Neale Award is voted on by a different panel and recognizes exceptional leadership, strategic innovation and significant impact on the game. It’s the first time McDermott has won it, and he’s also the first Bills coach to win it.

He joins other big names such as four-time winner Andy Reid, two-time winners Tony Dungy, Sean Payton and Dick Vermeil, Chuck Noll, Bill Parcells, Bill Belichick and his counterpart in Sunday’s AFC divisional round playoff game, John Harbaugh .

This season, McDermott became the fifth coach in NFL history with five consecutive 11-win seasons, joining Belichick, Reid, Dungy and Tom Landry.

En route to a 13-4 record and fifth straight AFC East titles, the Bills became the first team since 2009 and one of eight teams all-time to win a division title with five weeks left in the season. They also became the first team to ever defeat two 15-plus games in a single season (Chiefs and Lions).

For his career, McDermott ranks second all-time in regular season wins (86) in a head coach’s first eight NFL seasons.

Who is Earle “Greasy” Neale?

The award is named in tribute to Earle “Greasy” Neale, who played professionally for three seasons before the NFL actually became the NFL from 1917-19, then began a coaching career that included several collegiate programs and 10 years as head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, where he won the NFL Championship in both 1948 and 1949.

Early in his off-season life, he played parts of eight years in Major League Baseball (1916-24), mostly with the Cincinnati Reds, finishing with a career average of .259 in 768 games.

He was on the 1919 team that won the World Series, which later turned out to have been thrown by the Chicago White Sox, the infamous Black Sox. In that World Series, the outfielder hit .357.

Sal Maiorana has covered Buffalo Bills for four decades, including 35 years as a full-time beat writer for D&C, and he has written several books on the team’s history. He can be reached at [email protected] and you can follow him on X @salmaiorana and on Bluesky @salmaiorana.bsky.social. Sign up for his Bills Blast newsletter here: