It’s not uncommon for head coaches to react to particular comments or stories from media members. It’s a little more unusual, though, for a head coach to put a local media member from a different city in their sights, especially when that’s continuing a multi-year saga. That’s what happened with the Buffalo Bills’ Sean McDermott Sunday, when he took specific aim at Baltimore radio host Jerry Coleman.
There’s a whole lot of context here. The current wave of outrage about Coleman (currently the sports director at Baltimore classic rock station 100.7 The Bay, also the co-host of The Adam Jones Podcast for The Baltimore Banner) is related to comments he first made in 2020 (while he was at Baltimore’s 105.7 The Fan, where he worked from 2009-22) about Bills’ fans and the city of Buffalo, which he called a “city of losers.”
While there was some initial pushback to those remarks from Buffalo fans, as expected, that 2020 situation then took a turn. In the wake of Coleman’s comments, Bills’ fans saw that he’d talked about his mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease, and 300 of them donated more than $7,000 to the Alzheimer’s Association of Western New York in reference to Coleman’s remarks. And Coleman discussed that on air, and got emotional about it, and it seemed like the “city of losers” comment had actually produced something good.
But, for some reason, Coleman’s “city of losers” take on Buffalo came back up this week, and he took the opportunity to double down on it with “I was just stating the facts.” And he did so in an even higher-profile setting than his normal broadcasting work. This came during Baltimore Ravens’ head coach John Harbaugh’s press conference last Monday.
This answer took a MUCH different turn when asking about #Ravens visiting #Bills #NFL #Ravensflock pic.twitter.com/gjyzMePLk0
— Jerry Coleman (@sportswcoleman) January 13, 2025
There, Coleman asked about how Harbaugh and the Ravens would “go up and deal with the Bills Mafia and their fanbase.” Then, around 0:38, another other media member pointed out “Bills Mafia doesn’t like Jerry anyway,” Harbaugh asked Coleman if that was true, he said “They didn’t like what I said about them a few years ago,” Harbaugh asked “You want to share that?”, and Coleman said “I think it’s out there virally, but I called them a city of losers, and they didn’t like it.” After laughter from others, Coleman says “I was just stating the facts.”
That led to this getting resurfaced, and in some surprising ways. That included the Bills’ stadium operations crew playing the clip of Coleman’s 2020 comments (at a station he is no longer with) during the Ravens’ introduction Sunday, to an expected chorus of boos:
City of losers, huh? #Bills #BillsMafia pic.twitter.com/weunRZLQ7W
— alex brasky (@alexbrasky) January 19, 2025
And, after Sunday’s victory, Bills’ head coach Sean McDermott took the time to call out Coleman (in response to a question about that) and claim Buffalo is a “city of winners”:
city of losers? pic.twitter.com/zEAEwH9nf4
— Matthew Bové (@Matt_Bove) January 20, 2025
“No, it’s a city of winners. It really is. These people and this town are winners. And I’ve been here just eight years, but I consider this my hometown. This place is different, and the people here are different, and they deserve more than whoever said that about them.”
It isn’t that uncommon for a local radio host to say something provocative about a team the local side is about to face. But this one was a little stranger thanks to how the 2020 comment here came up again through some commentary from other media members, how Coleman then doubled down on his old take, and how it started spreading around again, to the degree of the Bills’ stadium ops team eventually using it pregame and McDermott reacting to it postgame.
None of that’s necessarily that odd in its own right. McDermott only discussed Coleman’s old take when asked about it, while the Bills’ stadium team thought they could get some mileage out of it considering how much attention it got this week. Both of these responses are fair.
But a Baltimore radio host’s thoughts on the “loser” quality of Buffalo (as if that could even be applied across a metropolitan area), especially when those thoughts were originally stated five years ago, doesn’t necessarily seem like something worth all this higher-level response from the Bills’ stadium ops team and their coach. If we’re going to see this level of reaction to every inflammatory bit of city-generalization trash talk from an opposing media market, that’s going to take up a lot of time for coaches.
