Sean McDermott’s Comments About The 9/11 Hijackers Made Their Way To ‘SNL’

The Buffalo Bills are dealing with one of the weirder controversies we’ve seen in the NFL this week. A multi-part piece by Ty Dunne into Sean McDermott’s tenure as Buffalo’s head coach included an anecdote about a speech he gave in 2019 to the team where he, essentially, cited the 9/11 hijackers as an example of a group that worked together to achieve a goal.

“He told the entire team they needed to come together,” Dunne wrote. “But then, sources on-hand say, he used a strange model: the terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. He cited the hijackers as a group of people who were all able to get on the same page to orchestrate attacks to perfection. One by one, McDermott started asking specific players in the room questions. ‘What tactics do you think they used to come together?’”

McDermott went on to apologize, both at the time and once the story came out, but for a team with an uphill battle ahead of it to make the playoffs, it was the exact sort of weird distraction you’d think everyone would want to avoid. And unsurprisingly, McDermott has been the butt of a ton of jokes in the aftermath, which included Colin Jost on Saturday Night Live cracking a joke during Weekend Update at his expense.

You can very clearly tell that a whole lot of people in the crowd learned that McDermott made this joke right then and there. Anyway, the Bills will spend their Sunday in Kansas City, as the team has a showdown with the Chiefs on the horizon.