Brian Callahan is gone, but the talent deficit remains
There are many NFL writers – I'll go with Albert Breer to name one, though he is hardly the only one – who led the story of Brian Callahan's firing with the idea of a dysfunctional organization. I actually don't think I agree, or at least I think that is a symptom rather than the diagnosis.
The unplugging of – what do you call a small run at the top of the AFC South? A mini-dynasty? An extended stretch of competence? – the Mike Vrabel Titans started with the trade of A.J. Brown for a first-round pick and a late third-round pick. The Titans used that first-round pick to draft Treylon Burks. The third-rounder would get spun, in a trade down, for Roger McCreary, Nicholas Petit-Frere. and Kyle Philips. None of those players are currently Tennessee Titans asides from McCreary, who has not been extended and feels imminently available as we hit the trade deadline.
It is hard to tell whether parting with Brown was the choice of ownership or the choice of Robinson dealing with a tenuous salary cap situation, but whichever is true, the spin was that Brown would get a blockbuster extension. Brown has since received a second extension from the Eagles. Neither contract was a market-setter. Brown is miles away from Ja'Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson in terms of average per year and guarantees. It is not currently the best time to talk about how good Brown is because the Eagles are in the part of Nick Sirianni's moon phases where they pretend they don't know what offense is, but we all know he's still one of the 10 best receivers in the NFL.
The problem isn't that the Brown trade failed. The problem is that the Brown trade was only the beginning of the failure: The Jon Robinson Titans did not successfully develop an iota of value out of the draft after Robinson's 2019 pool that hauled in Brown and Jeffery Simmons. The number of remaining Titans from the 2020 NFL Draft on the roster is zero. (Their best pick, Kristian Fulton, is a struggle-to-stay-healthy one-year contract corner.) The number of remaining Titans from the 2021 NFL Draft on the roster is zero. (Elijah Molden is probably the best player they picked, he got traded to the Chargers at last cuts last year.) The less said about the value they got out of having six top-150 picks in the 2022 draft, the better. Those three years of misses – the Isaiah Wilson-Caleb Farley-Burks trio – are haunting the roster to this moment. They do not have a single NFL player from any of those three drafts signed up for next year.
Perhaps Jon Robinson is a good man. Perhaps he's a good GM – good GMs sometimes go on cold streaks! – but nobody with that three-year stretch can be talked about as undeserving of being fired.
In Mike Silver's piece about the team, he came up with this above quote, which I think sums things up pretty well. That is the quote that matters to me because it shows you what Robinson left this team as.
I don't think highly of Brian Callahan's work as a head coach, and I don't think Ran Carthon was some sort of overlooked genius despite the fact that he drafted better than Robinson did. But the foundation of this team's failure was set from 2020-2022.
Was Will Levis good? No. Was surrounding him with veteran talent like Tony Pollard, Calvin Ridley and L'Jarius Sneed as part of a strategy to try to win some games necessarily a "bad" one? I don't think so. I respected the fact that the Titans were trying to build something around a young quarterback and see what could grow. The problem with the Titans is that they weren't adding that talent to anything but Simmons. They let Derrick Henry walk. Their offensive line from the core got old, decomposed, and was never properly replaced. They were happy to let Harold Landry go. Kevin Byard got older and became less of a priority for them. And the classes that should have been replacing those guys never blossomed.
Is it dysfunctional to fire two general managers and two head coaches in the span of three years? On the results, I can't say I think either Callahan or Robinson deserved much grace. I think there were two people who got raw deals in this: Carthon and Vrabel. Carthon's picks weren't developing in a hurry and JC Latham doesn't look good two years in, so I can't even say he left behind a legacy or that a bunch of his picks are killing it for the Titans right now. But I sure felt like if you were going to can him last offseason, Callahan should have gone with him. Maybe in a situation with a more normal draft pick foundation, Carthon's picks and free agents develop enough footing for him to stay. The 2024 Titans were like buying a prefab home and trying to place it on a hill.
The Vrabel five o'clock shadow that hangs over this whole organization is still, to this day, hard to understand. The 2023 Titans won six games somehow and they were already terrible. They had Ryan Tannehill at quarterback past his expiration date, and Levis sprinkled in. The offensive line was already bad enough that Henry was limited to one of the worst seasons of his career. Firing Vrabel felt like an emotional reaction to losing to the Case Keenum Texans while wearing the Oilers uniforms, something that owner Amy Adams Strunk is notoriously sensitive about given her Houston roots. And I think it could be argued that not firing Callahan last year after how bad things got was a move that was wrapped up in being right about firing Vrabel.
I don't doubt that Strunk is vain about the appearance of the Titans, but I also don't think that's necessarily a bad or dysfunctional thing. She saw a team spiraling and pulled the ripcord too late on Robinson to save it.
The problem the Titans have isn't that they fired two general managers and two head coaches. The problem is that they never drafted or spent their way into surplus long-term value at any point in the last five years, instead trading away one of the two players they had who retained any. And when you look at this roster today, you feel that. When you see the team desperately praising Peter Skoronski for finally becoming a slightly above-average guard, it's because there's not much else to praise right now.
This roster feels like an expansion team. That's not any one person's fault so much as a series of bad decisions accumulating to become so undeniable that nobody can see otherwise. Vrabel, who was throwing while up 20-plus points against the Panthers a few weeks ago, is going to offer no quarter in Week 7.
Because firing Brian Callahan isn't just an admission that he wasn't cut out for the job – it's an admission that this club is back to ground zero.
