Buffalo Bills head coach Joe Brady is 36 years old, the youngest man holding one of these 32 jobs, and the reporting out of western New York this morning is essentially that he is running on a caffeine level that would concern a hummingbird. Cute story. Better than it looks.
Because the energy is not the interesting part. The path is. Brady was the 29-year-old passing game coordinator on the 2019 LSU offense, the one that made Joe Burrow look like he was playing a different sport, and he walked off with the Broyles Award as the best assistant in college football. Carolina hired him as coordinator at 30. Carolina fired him in the middle of the 2021 season. That is usually where the meteor story ends, filed under "promoted too fast," and the guy spends four years as a quarterbacks coach somewhere quiet.
Instead he took the quarterbacks room in Buffalo, inherited the offense on an interim basis in November of 2023 when the job came open mid-season, kept it, and then handed Josh Allen the most efficient stretch of his career. Allen won MVP for the 2024 season running Brady's offense. You can argue about how much credit a play caller deserves when a generational quarterback is the one making the throws. Fine. But there is no version of that argument where the coordinator gets blamed for it either.
checked the almanac: sean mcvay was 30 when the rams handed him the keys in 2017 and he was coaching in a super bowl two years later. the league stopped treating a young face as a disqualifier a while ago. it treats it as a hiring strategy now.
What comes next is the part nobody can simulate. Coordinating is a craft. Head coaching is 53 personalities, a staff, a locker room in December, and a Sunday afternoon in Houston where you have to manage a game and not just design one. Brady gets his first real look at it on Sunday.
The thing I'll be watching is not the caffeine. It's how he handles the first bad half. Everybody's a genius in September.