Brandin Cooks relived the fateful play on a loop.He obsessed over every frame.Slow it down. Freeze it. Rewind. Play. Slo-mo, pause. “There! Look at that!” Advance a few more frames, squint, study closer, rewind and play again.Even when Cooks closed his eyes, he kept seeing it. He relived the sequence through his own eyes, how the football left Josh Allen’s hand and soared through the night air, how it felt in his hands, how the defender engulfed him, how Empower Field at Mile High fell into silent suspense and then erupted.“For a week straight, I was watching it over and over,” Cooks told The Athletic. “But I knew, as a father, that I had to put it away. If I’d have kept watching, it would have put me in some type of mood that my wife and my kids didn’t deserve.”The last time we heard from Cooks, he didn’t have enough time to process one of the most consequential plays in Buffalo Bills history. He wasn’t sure what just happened, hadn’t seen a replay yet. Tears ran down his cheeks.And he had no clue that within 36 hours Bills owner Terry Pegula would directly reference the cataclysmic moment multiple times while trying to explain why he fired head coach Sean McDermott.The Denver Broncos eliminated the Bills in overtime of last season’s AFC divisional round, a game effectively decided when the NFL ruled that defensive back Ja’Quan McMillian stripped the ball from Cooks for an interception as they tumbled to the frigid ground.
Brandin Cooks opens up on catch that wasn’t, play that ended Sean McDermott Bills’ era
Cooks is done rewinding the catch that wasn't and hopes to run it back with Buffalo in 2026.









