Mike Vrabel has a lot of great qualities, but one that might hurt the Tennessee Titans is his loyalty.
Stop me if you have heard this one before, but Mike Vrabel quietly hired another one of his former subordinates from his days with the Houston Texans. This time he hired Bobby King who has bounced around the Houston Texans coaching staff for the last half-decade.
Even though King coached the defensive line this season, the bulk of his experience has come as a linebackers coach. The report from Paul Kuharsky is that he will be going back to linebackers and that he will be replacing Jim Haslett who was just fired.
King is the 5th coach on the Tennessee Titans staff with connections to the Mike Vrabel era Houston Texans, and Vrabel has routinely hired from a pool of people he has worked with in the past.
It has to be said that hiring people you know isn’t inherently a bad thing. In the past, Vrabel hired people like Dean Pees and Kerry Coombs and those coaches did a great job.
However, at a certain point, you have to wonder just how far outside of the box Vrabel is thinking with his coaching hires.
Again, there is something to be said for hiring people that you know you will have chemistry with vs coaches who are the best candidates on paper. This might be a great move and King could be a future Defensive Coordinator like Shane Bowen when he was hired.
Something that King has on his side is that he has worked with Zach Cunningham in the past which means he already has a man on the inside in the organization. That will ease the transition and get him up to speed quickly, and given what he did with some of those linebackers in the past, maybe King is going to continue to elevate talent like he did before.
Another thing that King has going for him is that the Tennessee Titans don’t need him to completely revamp the linebacker position. David Long and Cunningham are clear starters and they are a great tandem to have in the middle of a defense.
All he has to do is not mess it up.