What a way to start the new year. Let's talk about this Doug Marrone and Bill Polian thing that has blown up in the past 24 hours - specifically, the opportunity it provides the Buffalo Bills to finally, mercifully, build a cohesive football operation from the top down.

Try as they might to rebuild over the past decade and a half - and they have certainly tried a lot, making seven different changes at the General Manager and Head Coach positions in the last 14 seasons - the Bills rarely run through a proper sequence of events in building their football department. That is one of the biggest reasons that they've had so much turnover; they have not had the right people in the building, to be sure, but they've also simply found ways to avoid doing it the right way.

Find a head of your football department that you trust. Let him hire people to work for him. Buffalo has really struggled with this basic concept during their 15-season playoff drought.

Tom Donahoe is one of the most reviled figures in Buffalo sports history thanks to his revolting five-season run as the Bills' President and GM from 2001-05, but at least he failed on his own merit. That era of the Bills was, at the very least, a time in which the organization approached rebuilds with sanity. Hire a GM; let the GM hire the coach. Donahoe whiffed badly on Gregg Williams, and didn't do much better with Mike Mularkey, but at least those people failed within a properly-built environment, based purely on job performance.

It all gets a bit hackneyed thereafter, to the point where the Donahoe era could, in some ways, be considered the last time the team had a stable front office infrastructure.

Donahoe was fired after 2005, and late owner Ralph Wilson brought Hall of Fame coach Marv Levy back into the organization as the GM as Donahoe's replacement. Levy then tried to retain Mularkey as head coach, only to be rebuffed; Mularkey walked, and Levy hired Dick Jauron as the next Bills head coach. Hire the GM, who hires the coach; that's how it went down for Levy, but it almost didn't.

Levy left prior to the 2008 season, and the Bills, hell-bent on preserving continuity, did not really replace him; instead, they kept Jauron as the head coach for two more seasons with a muddled front office power structure above him on the organization chart. Russ Brandon, then the GM (and now the team President, at least for the time being), was the figurehead of that group, but it was Jauron, John Guy, and Tom Modrak making the personnel decisions, with no one really holding final authority.

That changed in 2010, when that crew, aside from the promoted Brandon, was swept out after Wilson made Buddy Nix the new GM. But Wilson's last major front office decision (that didn't involve him handing over control of the organization to Brandon, which occurred two years ago) did not involve any sort of search for a GM. Instead, Wilson gave the gig to a candidate with whom he was familiar. (He did the same with Levy, by the way.) Nix conducted a coaching search and hired Chan Gailey.

Nix conducted another coaching search three years later, when he, Brandon, and then-Assistant GM Doug Whaley - hand-picked by Nix as his top aide shortly after he took over the GM gig in 2010 - flew out to Arizona for a week and hired Marrone. Five months later, Nix had stepped aside as GM; Brandon handed the reins to Whaley, who did not directly hire Marrone, and we've heard about nothing but friction between them for the past several months.

Is it any wonder that the Bills have continually had issues of authority, and subsequent power struggles, during this stretch in which they've all but refused to put together an organization from the top down? Ownership was a major issue, but process was the chief cause.

But now, owners Kim and Terry Pegula have a unique opportunity in front of them, thanks to these crazy past 24 hours. They were not beholden to Marrone, and should not be beholden to Whaley, defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz (the most popular non-player to Bills fans at the moment), or anyone else in that football department. Their organization's reputation has taken a hit, with Marrone quitting it and ripping it, so their task is to build it back up. The best way to do that: conduct a search, themselves, and find the best football mind they can to restore order and reputation to the way the Bills conduct football business.

That's it. That's what they lack. Fix the operation, restore some order and credibility, and they won't have any trouble at all luring coaching candidates to a roster that has plenty of talent. No coach in their right mind is going to drastically alter the way the Bills already play the game on defense and special teams, because they're already excellent in those phases. Blowing up and starting from scratch up top won't mean immediate changes to what already works on the field; in that way, it's not starting from scratch. But the Bills won't be able to sell status quo anymore, either.

So go ahead: blow it up, Mr. and Mrs. Pegula. Get the process right, and the rest will fall into place.