On the Titans firing Mike Vrabel

The latest of my occasional posts about the Tennessee Titans.

So why did the Titans fire Mike Vrabel?

Thirteen months ago, I wrote a post on the Titans firing Jon Robinson that started with this exact question for him. My answer at the time was “The only answer I can give you is I don’t know anything beyond what Amy Adams Strunk said in her statement that came with the official announcement of the firing.” This time around, the only difference in my answer is, in addition to that statement, we have an interview segment with Mike Keith. The key paragraph is

As the NFL continues to innovate and evolve, I believe the teams best positioned for sustained success will be those who empower an aligned and collaborative team across all football functions. Last year, we began a shift in our approach to football leadership and made several changes to our personnel to advance that plan. As I continued to assess the state of our team, I arrived at the conclusion that the team would also benefit from the fresh approach and perspective of a new coaching staff.

In a later paragraph, while also citing the Titans’ disappointing record the past two seasons, she adds firing Vrabel was about her “recognition that further changes are necessary to fully achieve our vision.”

Fine, so what does all that mean? The best answer is, still, I do not actually know. But what I’m going to do here is try to parse what she said and why she might have fired Mike Vrabel.

In the interview with Mike Keith, one thing she stressed about the next head coach is a high level of interest in what kind of staff he might be able to put together. This was one of my concerns when the Titans hired Vrabel, that he had a pretty thin history of coaching at the NFL level, only coaching with one team and under one head coach, and did not coach with many different people. It seems fair to point out that one of Vrabel’s downfalls was failing to find an offensive coordinator who could fix what ailed the Titans after both Matt LaFluer and Arthur Smith were hired away as head coaches, and that he seemed to hire largely from the thin pool of people he’d work with in Houston. Of course replacing people you lose when you’ve been a head coach for three to five years is a different story than assembling a staff as a new hire, but this is maybe a reason.

Going back to Jon Robinson’s firing late in 2022, the line about “empower[ing] an aligned and collaborative team” stands out to me. Robinson developed a reputation for using his scouts as information gatherers only and making all the critical decisions himself. By reputation, Vrabel’s enthusiasm for getting heavily involved into all aspects of coaching every position might have had results along the same lines, a kind of siloing of all authority in a single person.

Though not highlighted by anything Adams Strunk said, one aspect of Vrabel’s personality that might also have played a role is his extreme competitiveness. I described Robinson’s apparent strategy as tending to favor maximizing the current year while generally preserving long-term flexibility. This seemed like a strong match with Vrabel, and a fine thing to do if your goal is to try to go 10-7 every year. It’s also, in my view, a terrible way of trying to win a Super Bowl. At some point, the “let’s try to make the playoffs every year, even if only as a wild card” and “let’s try to win a Super Bowl” may conflict. It seems likely that Vrabel would have been content with the former goal. Adams Strunk’s statement on firing Vrabel made it clear she is prioritizing the latter, writing

I will never shy away from acknowledging that I have unapologetically high expectations for the football team and every aspect of the Titans organization. Our vision is not simply to produce more wins than losses, it is to regularly compete for championships.

This is admittedly partly speculation on my part, but it seems to fit with the statement and what’s been reported.

What was Ran Carthon’s role in all this?

After Vrabel was fired, it became general manager Ran Carthon’s job to do the season-ending press conference. This unsurprisingly ended up being about Vrabel’s firing rather than a more conventional season wrap-up. It was, frankly, a little strange. Carthon’s introductory statement began with him mentioning he was in “lockstep” with Vrabel on roster building and player selection. When pressed on the subject, Carthon failed to discuss any areas where he and Vrabel might have disagreed, whether about Carthon’s reported interest in trading Derrick Henry last offseason, or asking Kevin Byard to take a pay cut, or trading Byard during the season, or the Vrabel-approved signing of Andre Dillard, or frankly anything else. If you hadn’t known this was a “Vrabel just got fired” press conference, you’d be hard-pressed to figure it out from listening to Carthon.

This is strange on a couple levels, but it’s not just the press conference that was strange. Adams Strunk mentioned the “aligned and collaborative team across all football operations,” and Carthon did nothing to rebut the idea that was already in place. Even beyond the press conference, we haven’t gotten hints of that. It’s too simplistic to say Ian Rapoport = Carthon and Dianna Russini = Vrabel, but both spoke about what they’d heard about the Carthon-Vrabel relationship (Rapoport on The Insiders and Russini on 102.5 and The Athletic Football Show) and said they’d never heard any issues. Carthon’s job as the general manager is in part to make appearances and answer questions the owner doesn’t want to answer, but his “Vrabel and I got along great, what are you talking about?” story from the press conference (a) might actually have some truth to it?, and (b) kind of throws Adams Strunk in the bus, in his failure to articulate any of the reasoning behind a not-totally-expected and potentially quite controversial decision.

One thing I’ve thought about my work writing about the Titans over the years is that I have no effect on what happens on the field, but by what I write I can potentially affect what you think about what happened on the field (that “you” also includes me; writing these pieces normally forces me to think through and articulate what I think about different things, and what I end up writing doesn’t always end up being exactly what I thought I’d write). Carthon had a similar opportunity on Tuesday, to help build a positive image for the team and their future, and declined to do so. I previously wrote about his post-draft press conference and how he flatly declined to cite an example of how analytics played a role in any of his draft picks, so this isn’t the first time he’s been given an opportunity to make his case in public and simply refused. Carthon’s job is not quite the same as the one Detroit Lions and Tigers owner Spike Briggs once explained to Ron Luciano, that “You try to get the town to come see the ballplayers, and you try to keep the ballplayers from destroying the town.” But it’s not not the first half of that description (that’s why he was the one up there on Tuesday!), and it seems he has no interest in that part of the job. If he gets the rest of the job right (unlike me, he does affect what happens on the field), that can be fine, but it’s a missed opportunity to make himself and the team look better.

What do the Titans brass think of the Titans?

I never got my post on the Titans hiring Ran Carthon to a state I considered publishable, but one thing I noted in that draft was he made no commitments when he was hired about how good the 2023 Titans would be. This was, in my view, correct. As I wrote when J-Rob was fired, and was made even more clear by the rest of the 2022 regular season, the time when the Tannehill-Henry Titans could aspire to being AFC contenders was dead and gone. I was more explicit in Aaron Schatz’s FTN Football Almanac 2023, concluding my Titans essay with the thought that “next year’s version of this book will wonder what—other than Mike Vrabel’s competitiveness—convinced a mediocre team to try to squeeze out one last low-ceiling run.” Ryan Tannehill’s injury gave us more of a look at Will Levis than I thought we’d get at the time I wrote that last offseason, but I dubbed the 2023 season “stupid and pointless” in a tweet during the Week 17 loss to the Texans. The Titans are set to see 42% of their snaps head to free agency, the second-highest total of any team. Part of that is veterans like Henry and Tannehill, and part of that is the Titans didn’t have the money to bring in players like Azeez Al-Shaair or Sean Murphy-Bunting on multi-year deals because they were keeping the veterans around. Many of the defenses of Mike Vrabel center around how bad the Titans roster was; some of those roster issues were failing to make some difficult decisions that wouldn’t have helped the Titans win even as many games as they did in 2023.

My verdict is this question ends up pretty much a red herring. Adams Strunk, like everybody else, wasn’t happy the Titans weren’t good in 2023. But by the terms of her statement, she fired Mike Vrabel at least as much because she didn’t think he was the right coach going forward.

Is this just the latest stage of Amy Adams Strunk changing who she trusts?

Adams Strunk became the Titans’ controlling owner during the 2015 season. She conducted a legitimate GM search after letting Ruston Webster walk and then hired an apparently pre-selected Mike Mularkey as head coach. Then Jon Robinson apparently won a power struggle and Mularkey was fired after 2017 despite making the playoffs and winning a postseason game, and got to hire his apparently pre-selected candidate of Mike Vrabel. When Jon Robinson was fired, a common explanation for what happened was that Vrabel had a role in the firing and won something of a power struggle. And now, a year later, Vrabel has been fired and Ran Carthon is still in place. A plausible reason of this is:

2015-16: Mike Mularkey up, Ruston Webster out
2017-18: Jon Robinson up, Mike Mularkey out
2022: Mike Vrabel up, Jon Robinson out
2023-24: Ran Carthon up, Mike Vrabel out

This is a common pattern, that GM-coach pairings don’t last long when the GM is hired after the head coach, and it’s hard to deny the larger pattern (though last year’s J-Rob firing did not lead to the most Vrabel-friendly general manager being hired). Perhaps Adams Strunk’s emphasis on a more collaborative front office is designed to avoid this problem. But the simple facts, and the lack of a broader explication about her thought process over the years, makes it difficult to counter the general impression.

Were the Titans right to fire Mike Vrabel?

This is the big question. I don’t think anybody thinks Mike Vrabel is a bad coach. I don’t think that. Carthon didn’t say that. Adams Strunk didn’t say that. The 6-18 stretch was terrible, but the season-ending win over the Jaguars showed the players would still play hard and try to win games the Mike Vrabel way. This wasn’t Ken Whisenhunt, losing almost every game outside of Week 1.

But this was like Ken Whisenhunt, in terms of QB injuries. Ryan Tannehill got hurt in 2022, missed time, returned, and then got hurt again. And again in 2023. Will Levis came in, got hurt, returned, and got hurt again. Unlike under Whisenhunt, the Titans tried to prevent their offensive line failures, but sometimes there’s only so much you can do about that. And like with Whisenhunt, offensive line coaching seemed like an issue, with Keith Carter a convenient and possibly deserving scapegoat after his departure and 2023 hire Jason Houghtaling unable to make the league’s worst unit heading into the season anything other than a bad unit. And in a multi-coordinator trend, running the ball ineffectively was no reason not to keep running the ball, as the Titans were disposed to run the ball often on first downs and run the ball on second-and-long. There’s a deeper discussion to be had here about offensive philosophy and personnel, but Vrabel’s never changed.

One other note: among coaches hired in the Super Bowl era, the list of coaches to win their first Super Bowl more than five years into their tenure with that team is Chuck Noll (took over sad sack team in pre-free agency and won it in year 6) and Bill Cowher (who made it to the Super Bowl in year 4). Would Vrabel have any interest in participating in a sort of franchise reset in Tennessee, built around Will Levis or maybe even his eventual successor? And is the ceiling with that high enough to be worth it if winning a Super Bowl is what matters? It’s hard for me to say the answer to the second question is yes, even if Vrabel answers in the affirmative on the former.

I think it’s plausible the Titans were correct to fire Vrabel. I’m also uncertain whether what I think were reasonable reasons to fire Vrabel were why the Titans did fire Vrabel.

What happens next?

The Titans hire a new head coach, obviously.

As a guide for what to expect there, we have Adams Strunk’s comments in her interview, which also included rejecting the idea that the next head coach would necessarily have an offensive background. And we also have Carthon’s comments in the presser, where he declined to articulate what characteristics the Titans would be looking for in the next head coach, and where he also declined to specify anything about the vision the Titans had for their next head coach aside from that the next head coach would share that vision. Very helpful of him.

I will of course be watching to see what happens. After a couple coaching searches that looked extremely pre-selected, the Titans seem to be casting a wider net this time. They reportedly sent out seven interview requests on Wednesday. If they go on to interview all of those men, that matches the number they interviewed in 2016 and 2018 combined, and those 2016 and 2018 totals include the required Rooney Rule conversations. We’ll see if they follow through on that level of depth and breadth, and just what sort of characteristics the next head coach brings and what sort of vision he fits.