When you hear the "Tennessee Titans" name nowadays, you don't associate them with many good adjectives. In fact, it ilicits quite the opposite reaction, with terms such as dysfunctional coming to mind.
It is the current and unfortunate reality for Amy Adams Strunk's franchise, one that just clinched the first overall pick in the 2025 NFL Draft and fired general manager Ran Carthon. It is the second time in three seasons in which she has fired a GM, and the third in a row in which she has fired either a GM or head coach.
No team in the NFL can build consistency when change is made so frequently, and it is especially difficult when you hire and fire GMs/coaches at different times, failing to align your front office with your coaching staff. It makes matters worse when there's no clear-cut division of power.
When Carthon was hired, former head coach Mike Vrabel was supposed to also have a key role in team building, and Strunk sold everyone with the term "collaboration," which was to represent the way the two would operate. But they obviously did not see eye to eye, so then Strunk moved on from Vrabel and gave Carthon significantly more power, which included hiring current head coach Brian Callahan.
But it seems as if Carthon and Callahan did not work in harmony either, as Carthon is gone and Callahan is being retained for at least another year. Now, President of Football Operations Chad Brinker is leading the search for a new GM, have the final say on all roster moves, and apparently he was the one running the show the whole time when Carthon was GM.
Strunk and the Titans have been all over the place structurally speaking. Scapegoats are paraded annually, instead of realizing her impulsive tendencies are the root of this franchise's disarray.
Further compounding issues for the Titans is that they bottommed out in a year where there is no top-flight quarterback prospect in the upcoming draft. The Titans aren't going to have a straightforward solution to their QB issue this summer, at least not one everyone universally agrees on.
It's currently a grim outlook for the Titans, as they're searching for answers in terms of roster talent and organizational structure. As bad as things are now, it was not that long ago when this team was perennially in the playoff hunt, so the question is where did it all fall apart?
The popular answer to that is the AJ Brown trade, as that was the mistake that had everyone mocking the Titans on a national scale, and things have only gone downhill since that moment. But the true beginning of the end for this team came before anyone realized, and to make sense of everything, you have to go back to the 2020 offseason.
That was a few short months after they made the AFC Championship in Vrabel's second year as head coach, a time when things were looking up for the franchise. Unfortunately, then-GM Jon Robinson failed to build on the success, and his mistakes started the downward spiral that got the Titans to where they are today.