Titans need new coach to provide alignment
In announcing her decision to fire coach Mike Vrabel, Tennessee Titans controlling owner Amy Adams Strunk said she believes the best way to sustain success in the NFL is with an “aligned and collaborative team” across all departments.
A few hours later, general manager Ran Carthon spoke to the media.
“We worked well together and we got along,” Carthon said of his relationship with Vrabel. “I feel like our collaboration was fine.”
The Titans aren’t even aligned on whether or not they’re aligned.
Now, as the franchise enters its first coaching search since 2018, the big questions are whether the Titans can achieve the kind of collaboration Adams Strunk wants, what that collaboration could look like and how that approach can translate into wins.
Ask one prominent former NFL and college coach and he’ll tell you the answer is simple.
“You talk to each other,” former Cleveland Browns coach Butch Davis told The Tennessean. “Go to lunch. Go to dinner. Sit in the office and talk and talk and talk. Talk to each other about what’s the most critical thing to try to win the game. If you say, ‘This is what it’s got to be,’ and the GM says something completely opposite, you’ve got a problem.”
Philosophy, collaboration and the Tennessee Titans
Davis and former Titans coach Jeff Fisher both told The Tennessean that philosophy is paramount. Fisher said it transcends all aspects of the organization. Every employee, regardless of department, needs to be working toward the common goal, servicing the ideas of those who set the direction.
The issue then becomes who gets to set the direction.
“It’s critically important,” Davis said of organizational cohesion. “Whether it’s Bill Belichick or Joe Gibbs or Jimmy Johnson or Dick Vermeil, almost everyone who had success could decide. They worked with the scouts and the organization, but they picked the players. Bill Belichick, his famous word was if he’s going to cook the dinner, he wants to go to the grocery store.”
Having a head coach with absolute authority often has a huge payoff. Belichick (New England), Gibbs (Washington), Johnson (Dallas) and Vermeil (St. Louis) combined to win 12 Super Bowls, after all. But the era of all-powerful coaches is fading out, with Belichick being the obvious comparison point.
After 24 years as the coach and de facto general manager, Belichick and the Patriots parted ways Thursday. Among Belichick, Josh McDaniels, Joe Judge, Brian Flores, Matt Patricia and Bill O’Brien, that makes six former Patriots coaches who have been let go from NFL head coaching positions in the past four years. That’s not counting Vrabel, who played eight seasons under Belichick.
But league dynamics have shifted. Acolytes of Andy Reid, Kyle Shanahan and Sean McVay dominate the NFL. Many of those coaches and their organizations preach the virtues of alignment and collaboration between coaching staffs and front offices as Adams Strunk has.
As of publication, there aren’t any more NFL teams whose head coach also serves as GM.
How philosophy informs football
Carmen Policy was an executive with the San Francisco 49ers from 1981 to 1997, helping oversee operations as the organization won five Super Bowls. Policy transitioned into a role as president and minority owner of the Browns when the franchise returned to the NFL in 1999 and hired Davis in 2001.
Policy wanted to mirror the expansion Browns’ philosophy after the wideopen passing identity he observed when Joe Montana and Steve Young led the 49ers. Davis didn’t agree.
This could have been a huge hiccup in their organizational partnership. Instead, they trusted each other.
“In Cleveland, with the bad weather, we can’t be the team that’s going to throw the ball 30 or 40 or 45 times a game. We can’t be like the San Francisco 49ers,” Davis remembers saying. “We’re going to have to be a team that can run the football and we’ve got to play great on defense. It’s going to be raining and sleeting and snow. We kind of butted heads a little bit on that because he thought, ‘Well, no, we did it and that didn’t work.’ Well, we went 7-9 and the next year we made it into the playoffs. He kind of bought in and said, ‘Yeah, I see now.’ “
One person doesn’t need to be making every decision or be right every time for collaboration to work. There just needs to be trust.
Fisher, who coached the Titans’ franchise from 1994 to 2010 and the St. Louis/Los Angeles Rams from 2012 to 2016, tried to distill his teams’ philosophies into a few pithy ideas. He wanted anyone and everyone who worked for the organization to be excited about coming to work. And he wanted opponents to have trouble taking the field the week after they played the Titans due to how physical the game was.
Like Davis did in Cleveland, Fisher had a specific plan when he got to St. Louis. Former No. 1 pick Sam Bradford was heading into his third year as its quarterback. Fisher said he deliberately picked the Rams over other vacancies because it afforded him the opportunity to work with the best owner and the best quarterback.
Building around Bradford was a must. So the Rams executed one of the most famous trades in NFL history, acquiring three first-round picks and a second-round pick from Washington in exchange for the No. 2 pick in the 2012 NFL Draft, and through further moves, ultimately netted 13 players across the next seven drafts.
He compares the situation awaiting
Vrabel’s replacement to the one he opted into with the Rams.
“There’s a guy here (in quarterback Will Levis) that’s talented,” Fisher said. “That’s shown it a lot despite the fact that there’s some games missed and injuries. I saw a lot of good things out of Will and I know whoever comes in is going to be excited about that opportunity.”
So how can a new coach, and collaboration, fix the Titans?
Third-year defensive end Rashad Weaver summed up the 2023 Titans season colorfully.
“We just (expletive) up as many times as we could,” he said. “Whether it was special teams, defense, offense, we’ve just all got to be better. We were finding a way every game to make it hard. Whether that’s on punt getting our punter hurt, whether that’s on offense with whatever they had going on over there, whether it’s on defense, teams being able to put up points when we know they shouldn’t. I think it was a collective effort on that not being successful.”
The consensus from Titans players is this team should’ve been better in 2023. There’s a fine line between excuses and explanations, but the Titans have both. Horrible injury luck. Untimely penalties and turnovers. A thin roster resulting from past draft and free agency blunders. Inconsistency. Road woes. Special teams mistakes.
It’s a lot.
But despite it all, had the Titans been able to re-do one play in every game, they could’ve been seven wins better.
“When we were healthy and everybody from the start, I think there were some games where we had some really good stuff happening,” guard Daniel Brunskill said. “In the games that were close, it was kind of just the pre-snap stuff that we were going to fix.”
The players aren’t alone. Fisher and Davis also said they believe the Titans are close to where they need to be. The organization just needs that one last push forward.
Adams Strunk and Carthon are betting on collaborating their way there. No matter who has final say on the roster, Carthon says he never intends to sign a player the coaches don’t want.
He aspires to have everyone in the organization working toward the same goal.
Given how the NFL works these days, they have to be.
“You’ve got to kind of eventually be on the same page,” Davis said. “Because if you’re not, it’s not going to work.”