The Titans appear to be going through quite a bit of dysfunction at the moment
There’s no way you can sugarcoat it: the Tennessee Titans are an absolute dumpster fire at the moment. Arguing otherwise is a futile exercise, given the performance of the team in 2024 coupled with the abrupt decision to fire general manager Ran Carthon on Tuesday, just two days after his team wrapped up a season in which they went 3-14 and secured the No. 1 overall pick thanks to the worst record in football.
But the issues extend beyond just the team’s shoddy, uneven performance this past season. The expectations were low, with Tennessee sporting a win total of 6.5 (juiced heavily to the under) heading into the season. Over the past several years, owner Amy Adams Strunk has presided over a rollercoaster of mediocrity that might not be headed in the right direction any time soon.
That can all change with a home run at the top of the draft, but even securing a franchise quarterback with a top-five pick doesn’t guarantee success. Just ask Tennessee’s divisional neighbors in Jacksonville and Indianapolis.
It wasn’t all that long ago the Titans were the No. 1 seed in the AFC. In 2021, despite an injury to star running back Derrick Henry, the Titans were able to lean on efficient quarterback play from Ryan Tannehill and the explosive downfield receiving ability of superstar A.J. Brown, along with stout defense to finish with a 12-5 record and secure a first-round bye. They lost in the divisional round to a swelteringly hot Bengals team that would topple the Chiefs in Arrowhead the next week and eventually just miss out on a Super Bowl in a close loss to the Rams. In other words, the Titans weren’t that far off from a truly special season.
Things started going south that offseason. You can probably pinpoint the now infamous draft-day moment when an apoplectic Mike Vrabel found out in real time that general manager Jon Robinson was dealing Brown to the Eagles during the draft, using the selection they received back (No. 18) to grab Treylon Burks out of Arkansas.
Vrabel, uh, wasn’t thrilled.
To say Burks didn’t work out is an understatement: he’s accounted for 699 yards and a single receiving touchdown in three years with the Titans so far in his career. For context, A.J. Brown had 119 yards and two touchdowns against the Titans in his first opportunity at revenge versus his old team.
It’s not unreasonable to say the Brown trade led to dysfunction between the front office and coaching staff. Robinson would be fired midseason in 2022, despite the Titans leading the division, immediately following Brown’s explosion in an Eagles 35-10 win over the Titans late that year.
The Titans would crater down the stretch, losing their next six games (and final eight all told), allowing the Jaguars to become the first team in NFL history to trail a division by multiple games and still manage to win a division by multiple games. Ryan Cowden took over personnel decisions for the remainder of the year, but Vrabel said at the time Strunk would have final say on all personnel decisions if there was a disagreement between he and Cowden. Strunk owns the team, so she can do whatever she wants with it in terms of setting up the front office, but it’s worth noting outside of inheriting the Titans she has zero experience in professional football in her background.
The organization looked outside for a new GM in the offseason, bringing in Ran Carthon prior to the 2023 season.
Carthon’s first draft class included offensive lineman Peter Skoronski in the first round, quarterback Will Levis in the second and running back Tyjae Spears in the third. Two years isn’t enough time to judge a draft class, but you can fairly call it “up and down” given how Levis has played and the expectations he was tagged with prior to the draft and prior to the 2024 season. The Titans would go 6-11 and fire Vrabel after the season.
In January of 2024, the Titans hired Brian Callahan to replace Vrabel and on the same day announced a promotion/extension for Carthon from general manager to executive vice president of football operations/GM as well as a promotion for Chad Brinker from assistant general manager, strategy to president of football operations. NFL teams make odd moves in the front office all the time, but promoting an assistant general manager over the current general manager while also giving said current general manager a promotion is curious, to say the least.
Firing the GM less than a year later, especially after allowing him to spend a robust $228 million in free agency, is just flat-out weird.
But it gets weirder! Titans CEO Burke Nihill said Tuesday in the wake of the GM change that Carthon was “hired into a very different job description than the one that exists today.”
“Speaking of a change of the general manager specifically, Ran was hired into a very different job description than the one that exists today,” Nihill said via the Titans website. “Ran was hired for a general manager position that was very specific to the circumstances at the time, and the forecasting was the general manager would be able to partner very closely with the head coach, the existing head coach, and as the circumstances exists today, the general manager position is different. And so, what Chad, who is leading the search, will be looking for is a very different skill set for a very different job description.”
That’s some elite word salad. My takeaway, with no inside info and by simply reading between the lines, would be that Brinker’s the de facto general manager now and will be looking for someone to take that title (and the pressure that comes with it) and answer to him.
Nihill confirmed as much in the press release, noting “while the general manager position will have a primary responsibility on all these things Chad is describing in terms of the day-to-day of overseeing the roster and the coaching staff, Chad is the leader of the football program, so Chad will be the final authority on all football matters, including the roster.”
Every NFL organization is free to create its own structure, but the Titans sure seem like they’re employing an unusual one. Or at the very least, they’re going around their ankle to get to their ass when it comes to how they build it out.
In less than two years, they have fired a general manager midseason and hired an outside GM to work with the current coach. They then fired that coach and hired a new candidate to work with the recently hired general manager, who they also gave a promotion, albeit to a position underneath someone who previously worked for him. And now they’ve fired that general manager and have positioned themselves to hire a new one, who will sit in a nebulous position underneath the recently promoted assistant GM while also working with a coach coming off his first year where he won three games.
Let me put this more succinctly: Carthon hired Brinker in February 2023, and less than a year later Brinker essentially fired Carthon.
Tennessee touted a “collaborative” process with Carthon, Brinker and Callahan prior to 2024, and after just a single season, one of the key figures in the process is out the door. Brinker worked for the Packers for a long time, under both Ted Thompson and Brian Guntekust. He might very well know what he’s doing from a roster-building perspective. But the process here seems immensely flawed.
This sort of setup is going to severely limit the candidate pool for general manager the Titans have to work with and it’s going to — if it hasn’t already — place an immense amount of pressure on Callahan to win immediately or else potentially see himself on the chopping block as well.
Tennessee is already on two coaches and multiple GMs (number TBD?!) since the middle of 2023. It just wrapped up a season as the worst team in football. That makes it tough for the arrow to be pointing further down, but the latest round of news out of Nashville doesn’t indicate the arrow is pointing up, either.
