Bills Hire Mike Pettine As Defensive Coordinator

ESPN’s Chris Mortensen reports that the Buffalo Bills have hired former Jets defense coordinator Mike Pettine to run their defense.

Pettine’s contract recently expired with the Jets and they made it pretty clear that they were prepared to move in a different direction.

Pettine joins the two men from Syracuse to round out the Bills’ coaching staff. He’s produced some pretty positive results for the Jets in the past few seasons, so there stands a reasonable enough chance that he would be able to fix an under-performing unit from a season ago.

It will be interesting to see if they choose to go back to a 3-4 base defense given that Pettine’s experience has been in that formation. Their defensive line has plenty of talent, but the two defensive tackles, Kyle Williams and Marcell Dareus, are good enough that they should probably be on the field as much as possible.