NASHVILLE, Tenn. – This doesn’t have to be the Titans versus Mike Vrabel.
But for many who follow the league, it will be awfully hard not to measure Tennessee’s NFL franchise against the Patriots in 2025 and beyond. Both franchises are in similar positions of ruin and similar stages of rebuilding. One’s got the No. 1 pick and one’s already found its quarterback.
The Titans are a year removed from Vrabel. He didn’t hit it off big with Ran Carthon, and that perceived failure to collaborate was a big element in Amy Adams Strunk firing him a year ago. Now Carthon’s been fired and in all the comments Burke Nihill and Chad Brinker made last week, the word collaboration didn’t appear once, unless I somehow missed it.
Maybe it resurfaces once a new, lower-powered GM is brought on board to recreate a triumvirate when a duo with underlings appears a much sleeker, cleaner way to operate.
It’s hard not to look at all of that and Vrabel’s new post with successful ownership and Eliot Wolf, most recently executive vice president of player personnel, reporting to the coach with Ryan Cowden on his way in too and say anything other than Vrabel came out ahead.
This sucks for the Titans and Titans fans, but it can’t matter for the Nashville franchise now.
I don’t think Brian Callahan monitors Vrabel at all. He didn’t know him or work with him. But Strunk is just off the hook paying him. It’s hard to imagine she and her two chief lieutenants, Burke Nihill and Chad Brinker, are not eager to prove she was right, even though Carthon’s firing conceded a degree of defeat, and to try to outdo Vrabel. Surely they’d like to appear smarter than he, a game I’m not sure they can play well or win.
Vrabel’s last two years were bad. But he’s a good coach who helped solidify an organization that tumbled further without him.
He needs to adjust and I expect he will. Hire better, don’t overdo it with personnel power, embrace analytics a little more, soften with the press for a better public perception when times are tough and monitor the ego. With some of those changes, his second act could be far better.
And that could be worse for some Titans fans than watching Derrick Henry run for the Ravens because Henry was a free agent, and Vrabel was not.
The Titans have 31 other teams to try to beat and outsmart, not just New England, and they have a long way to go to prove they have the right people and are picking the right people to start chipping away.
They have a chance to reset the organization and build something.
I’m not dismissing the prospect, because we have evidence it can happen here.
It looked impossible after 2015, too, when Ruston Webster and Mike Mularkey seemed absolutely uninspiring as leaders. That team jumped from 3-13 to 9-7 in 2016, and with Jon Robinson as GM, it was 9-7 again in 2017 -- and in the playoffs.