Tennessee Titans fans need to see through the myth of Mike Vrabel

The Tennessee Titans have a very solid coach in Mike Vrabel, but the myth surrounding what Mike Vrabel has done for the Titans leaves out a lot of crucial details.

Some of you are reading this article because you know what I am talking about, and other people are reading this article ready to angrily type in the comments section. In case you fall in the middle and don't know what I'm talking about, I'm talking about the myth that Mike Vrabel elevates the talent on the Tennessee Titans roster and that he gets the absolute most out of his starting 53.

It just isn't true, and I will give some examples of situations where circumstances have led to these conclusions. To do that, I need to go all the way back to when Mike Vrabel was hired and what he walked into.

When anyone brings up the idea of firing Mike Vrabel, there will inevitably be someone who replies, "What do you want to do, go hire another Ken Whisenhunt?" People remember the 2014-2015 era as some of the worst Titans football in the franchise's history, and they are right.

Before the season was even over, Amy Adams Strunk made her first big move as the new controlling owner of the Titans by firing Whisenhunt. That offseason, the next move that she made was not hiring Mike Vrabel, it was promoting then-interim coach Mike Mularkey to HC and hiring Jon Robinson to be the new General Manager.

After back-to-back 9-7 seasons and a playoff win against the Kansas City Chiefs, Amy Adams Strunk and Jon Robinson made the decision to fire Mike Mularkey so that they could hire Mike Vrabel. Despite his success, Mularkey was too loyal to some bad coaches underneath him and Robinson was eager to bring in Mike Vrabel who was a young coach who shared a common background with him from their time in New England.

With that preface in place, there are really three, two-year stretches of Mike Vrabel's time in Tennessee that you need to look at.

The start of Mike Vrabel in Tennessee (2018-2019)

Mike Vrabel walked into a team that had established a winning culture, and a team with players like Taylor Lewan, Delanie Walker, Derrick Henry, Jack Conklin, Ben Jones, Jonnu Smith, Corey Davis, Jurrell Casey, Harold Landry, Brian Orakpo, Kevin Byard, DaQuan Jones, Logan Ryan, Malcolm Butler, and Kenny Vaccaro.

That team went 9-7 just like the last two teams, but that record wasn't quite good enough for them to make the playoffs.

Then in 2019, the Tennessee Titans added Ryan Tannehill, A.J. Brown, Jeffery Simmons, Roger Saffold, and Nate Davis. That team also went 9-7, but they went on a run in the playoffs where they won two games.

This first section of Mike Vrabel's career was him doing an average job with a roster that had several Pro Bowlers and All-Pros on it. If that is how you remember it, then you are one of the few because most people have gone back and convinced themselves that he almost single-handedly pulled that team to the AFC Championship game.

Some of that is because not many people in the national media kept up with the Tennessee Titans, so they saw a roster full of names they didn't know and couldn't stop tripping over themselves to give Mike Vrabel compliments for what he had done with guys like A.J. Brown, Jeffery Simmons, and Derrick Henry, even though time would tell that those were just blue-chip players that hadn't gotten their spotlight yet.

After 2019, the Tennessee Titans started to get more respect and more notoriety, but not quite enough for the national media to keep up with a run-first offense. Besides, who knew if this was a fluke since they were doing it with a first-year OC who had been with the organization for nearly a decade dating back to before the Whisenhunt days.

Mike Vrabel's golden years (2020-2021)

The second section of Mike Vrabel's career is 2020 and 2021 when the Tennessee Titans went from being good to great (remember that mantra?).

In 2020, Mike Vrabel made the...interesting decision to decide not to officially name a defensive coordinator. Throughout the course of the year, it became apparent that it was Shane Bowen making the actual calls, though Mike Vrabel was involved heavily in the game planning and had the right to take the reins if he wanted to during a game.

Coincidentally I'm sure, the Tennessee Titans were one of the worst defenses in NFL history on 3rd down that season. It didn't help that "Mike Vrabel guys" Jadeveon Clowney and Johnathan Joseph were two of the worst starters on the team, or that Vic Beasley decided that he was going to basically collect a paycheck and sit the season out.

Despite all of the defensive turmoil, Arthur Smith got career years out of Ryan Tannehill, Derrick Henry, Corey Davis, and Jonnu Smith by masterfully marrying the running and passing plays so that the play-action passes would be especially dangerous. The constant threat of Derrick Henry allowed A.J. Brown and Corey Davis to have a season that could stand up to almost any WR tandem in franchise history.

The 2020 team seemed destined for a postseason run after the Tennessee Titans won the AFC South for the first time, but an epic collapse in the first round of the playoffs where Derrick Henry averaged a pitiful 2.2 yards per attempt on 18 runs meant that the season was finished early.

Arthur Smith was hired by the Atlanta Falcons shortly after that game, and Mike Vrabel made the decision to promote Todd Downing to the OC job.

Jon Robinson took the swing to trade for Julio Jones in the offseason, which nearly everyone applauded at the time. To that point, Jones had never had a single season where he hadn't averaged 73+ yards per game, so the idea was to use Jones to replace Corey Davis's 70 yards per game in 2020.

It did not work.

Injuries hit the 2021 Tennessee Titans like a plague, but even a healthy offense wouldn't have been much better considering the Mariana Trench-sized dropoff from Arthur Smith to Todd Downing at OC.

Despite the massive decline in offensive production, the Tennessee Titans still managed to win 12 games and become the #1 seed in the AFC. That success relied almost exclusively on Ryan Tannehill (the only good offensive player who managed to stay off of I.R.) and the incredibly aggressive and effective defense.

Now if you remember back to 2020, the Tennessee Titans defense was a trainwreck, so you might be asking what changed. There were really two big changes, one had to deal with the coaching staff and one had to do with the players.

First, Mike Vrabel took a step back and officially named Shane Bowen as the DC, and the Titans also hired Jim Schwartz in a special advisory role.

The Titans also kicked Clowney and Beasley to the curb and brought in Denico Autry and Bud Dupree. The addition of those two enhanced what Jeffery Simmons and Harold Landry could do, and it helped catapult both young defenders into the Pro Bowl.

Unfortunately, the Tennessee Titans got Ryan Tannehill's absolute worst game in the NFL in a playoff loss to the Cincinnati Bengals. Despite basically carrying the team throughout the season, this is the game that turned Tannehill into enemy number one for about half of the Titans fan base and it is something that he never really shook off.

During this second stretch, Mike Vrabel made some really bad decisions. Pushing for guys like Clowney and Joseph, promoting Todd Downing, and getting too involved on defense (he was one of the worst DCs in the NFL during his sole season as the Houston Texans' DC), but at the end of the day, he was getting a lot out of some really good NFL talent.

That coaching and that talent showed up in the win column and he should get credit for it, but again there was plenty of talent on those rosters.

Jon Robinson's mistakes and how Mike Vrabel "fixed" them (2022-2023)

And now we are into the third and potentially final stretch of Mike Vrabel's career as the Tennessee Titans Head Coach.

Let's go ahead and get the elephant in the room out of the way, the collapse of this era of the Tennessee Titans started with the A.J. Brown trade. It was awful and it ended up being the straw that broke the camel's back for Jon Robinson. We all remember what happened, so there is no need to open up those wounds again.

However, it wasn't the only bad decision that the Tennessee Titans made. I would argue that the second-worst decision that the team made that offseason was keeping Todd Downing after he proved for 18 weeks that he had no idea how to run this offense.

On top of both of those season-wrecking mistakes, the Tennessee Titans once again had awful injury luck. Just to clarify, when I say awful injury luck I mean the worst in NFL history. The Tennessee Titans set the record for the highest number of players on a 53-man roster over the course of a season in 2021 and they nearly broke that record in 2022.

By the end of the season, the only player who had played in every game from 2021-2022 was safety Kevin Byard. Think about how many dozens of players have to get injured for there to only be one player to make that list.

Before the injuries took a catastrophic turn and Ryan Tannehill was placed on I.R., the Tennessee Titans actually had a fighting chance. Guys like Tannehill, Derrick Henry, Ben Jones, Jeffery Simmons, David Long Jr., Teair Tart, Kevin Byard, and Rashad Weaver helped kick and claw this team to a 7-3 record after an exciting road win against the Green Bay Packers. At this point, Mike Vrabel was getting the most out of his players.

That was the last game they won all year and Mike Vrabel and company lost seven-straight games after that to finish out the season.

With Jon Robinson gone, Mike Vrabel was given a full vote of confidence by Amy Adams Strunk and she even had him help conduct the interview for the next GM. Once Vrabel and Amy Adams Strunk hired Ran Carthon to be the new GM of the Tennessee Titans, it became abundantly clear that the new power structure was Amy Adams Stunk on top, Mike Vrabel right below her, and then Ran Carthon below that.

In his first offseason at the wheel, Mike Vrabel made it abundantly clear that this was a roster that could compete immediately. Electing to pass up trades for Ryan Tannehill, Kevin Byard, and Derrick Henry, the Tennessee Titans were going to push for the playoffs in 2023.

Because they held onto those players, they didn't have a ton of cap space to work with but they had enough to make some moves. With a glaring need on the offensive line, Mike Vrabel's biggest/most expensive addition of the free agency period was...a 3-year/$30 million deal for Andre Dillard.

Instead of grabbing a proven starter at left guard like Isaac Seumalo who was also from the Philadelphia Eagles and who would have had natural chemistry with Dillard, the Titans decided to take a swing on EDGE Arden Key for the same price.

The lone offseason signing that looks like a good deal has been Daniel Bruskill who has been a very solid right guard for the Tennessee Titans, but they could have signed Seumalo and Brunskill for what it cost them to sign Dillard.

Luckily, DeAndre Hopkins fell into the Tennessee Titans' lap because five teams that he was trying to get in contact with never showed any interest. If not for those five teams missing on Hopkins, the Titans would be unwatchable this season.

So remember, the messaging from the Tennessee Titans with every move they made was that they were going to push for a playoff spot. With that in mind, the Titans were almost certainly going to grab a tackle and a wide receiver high in the draft, right?

Nope. In fact, the Titans somehow avoided both of those positions until Day 3 of the 2023 NFL Draft. Shockingly, the Tennessee Titans spent seven draft picks (including a future 3rd round pick) and only added one starter. In other words, Mike Vrabel tried to ride the fence between a rebuild and being competitive.

Seeing through the myth and deciding where to go next

Those are the decisions that basically bring us to where we are now. This is tracking to be the worst Tennessee Titans team in about a decade, and while Jon Robinson certainly made Mike Vrabel's life more difficult in 2021 and 2022, Mike Vrabel didn't make a single move this offseason that should convince you that he should be the one pulling the strings next season.

On top of making bad decisions in free agency and the draft
(though the ownership-driven pick of Will Levis might be the thing that saves his job), nearly every player on the Tennessee Titans roster has regressed this year.

Before his injury, Ryan Tannehill was on pace for some of the worst numbers of his career and the same is true for Derrick Henry. Young players who showed flashes last year like Chig Okonkwo, Rashad Weaver (5.5 sacks last season), Treylon Burks, Monty Rice, and Nicholas Petit-Frere all have taken a step back this season. Even players who should be in their prime like Jeffery Simmons, Arden Key, and Amani Hooker have either stalled out or they have regressed.

The myth with Mike Vrabel is that he is getting the most out of his players and that he always has. While it is absolutely fair to say that he is a good coach when he has a good roster, all you have to do is go back and look at his record to see that he isn't some miracle worker that is the only reason that the Titans have had any success over the last six years.

As the Tennessee Titans plummet past mediocrity and into irrelevance, Amy Adams Strunk has to look at this and ask whether she really thinks this is the best she can do, especially if someone is willing to give her premium picks for Mike Vrabel.

Sure, there is a talent issue on this roster, but do you know who the worst teams in the NFL are over their last 17 games? The Arizona Cardinals, Tennessee Titans, Chicago Bears, New England Patriots, and Carolina Panthers.

Two of those teams fired their head coach over the offseason, and the Chicago Bears and New England Patriots are almost certainly firing their head coaches this offseason. It should ring some alarm bells when Bill Belichick is trending towards getting fired and your coach has a worse record than he does over that stretch.

Also, looking back at the two "big-ticket" decisions that Mike Vrabel made during the free agency period (Andre Dillard and Arden Key), do fans really think that more money is going to help him make better decisions? What about ownership, do they think that he is the guy who can quickly build an offensive line and set Will Levis on the right path before he is off of his rookie contract?

Maybe it isn't time to fire or trade Mike Vrabel, but it is certainly time to stop pretending like he is a blameless victim of previous mistakes and that he isn't to blame for any of the Tennessee Titans' rapid decline.