Mike Vrabel led the Tennessee Titans to their most prosperous stretch of football since Steve McNair was slinging passes in Nashville. Then, somewhere around 2022, the warning lights came on. Vrabel’s vehicle was running out of gas.
The Titans ignored some rest stops along the way. They tried to keep him running with ethanol and moonshine. Eventually, the whole thing sputtered to a stop.
Vrabel went 6-18 in his final 24 games. On Tuesday, he was fired.
Two things can be true here. Vrabel needed to go. He was a gutsy coach who made a run-heavy offense work in pass-first NFL, but that approach was no longer viable.
He hadn’t won a playoff game since January 2020. His star tailback is a pending free agent and the quarterback he’d pumped up to new heights had deflated on his way to the open market, since replaced by a second round rookie. A new era is on the way. A hard reset was necessary.
But Vrabel was given little opportunity to thrive as the warning lights began to glow. Tennessee’s front office created a team wildly unable to gracefully pivot from Derrick Henry’s ground-based attack to something that could work with a mortal running back. Former general manager Jon Robinson was fired for his inability to generate new stars. New hire Ran Carthon came in before the 2023 offseason and, despite modest success, was unable to fight back the rising tide of failure that eventually flooded the Titans.
In a way, Vrabel was too successful for his own good. The 23-10 regular season record between 2020 and 2021 was a placating calm that covered the chaos brewing beneath. Ryan Tannehill was slowly getting worse, falling from the league’s best quarterback in terms of passer rating, completion rate and success rate in 2019 to the middle of the pack by 2021. Tennessee’s run game improved from 2019 to 2020, but saw its yards per carry drop from 5.2 to 4.4 the following year. The warning signs were there, but were tough to take too seriously for a team that won 11, then 12 games in the regular season.
This manifested in a pair of one-and-done playoff appearances that laid the foundation for the collapse to come. Tennessee got complacent. Rather than pay A.J. Brown, a wideout who could have helped keep Tannehill afloat before bridging the gap to a new young passer, Robinson shipped him to the Philadelphia Eagles for a first round pick. Brown has nearly 3,000 receiving yards in the two years since for the reigning NFC champions. The player drafted to take his place, Treylon Burks, has 665 yards in that same span.
That’s a big deal for any team, but particularly one that had to wean itself from the power runs of Henry. The clock was always ticking on a player with one of the most prolific workloads of the millennium. And while Henry hasn’t been bad (barring a few frustrating games), he slowly devolved from being the star in the middle of Vrabel’s solar system to an average to above-average tailback.
The easy solution to that would have been to shift him into a more complementary role, saving his legs and throwing more often. Except, whoops, Tannehill’s predictable slide continued its downward trajectory. The two Day 3 quarterbacks drafted to succeed him, Malik Willis and Will Levis, were simultaneously unready for primetime and forced to deal with the empty cupboard Robinson left behind at the skill positions.
As a result, Henry led the league in carries for the fourth time in five years while averaging the lowest yards-after-contact of his career (1.8, still 11th in the NFL but way off his career best of 3.2). Tennessee’s offense finished the season ranked a middling 16th when it came to expected points added (EPA) per play — down from second place in 2020.
This could have been survivable with the right personnel. This is not who Robinson acquired. Between 2018 and 2022 Robinson’s first round draft picks were Rashaan Evans, Jeffrey Simmons, Isaiah Wilson, Caleb Farley and Burks. Simmons is great. Farley and Wilson were each disasters. Evans and Burks either were or currently are below-average contributors for the Titans.
Robinson’s biggest free agent acquisitions in that same stretch include Malcolm Butler, Vic Beasley, Dion Lewis, Rodger Saffold, Stephen Gostkowski, Bud Dupree, Denico Autry, Jackrabbit Jenkins and Austin Hooper. Saffold and Autry were each strong signings. The rest range from forgettable to disastrous — especially when you consider Butler and Dupree were given contracts worth more than $140 million in total value between them.
This left no exit for Vrabel other than the slow slope of disappointment that led to his firing. His offense was hamstrung by a lack of playmakers, and while Carthon did what he could be bringing in a still-useful DeAndre Hopkins in 2023 free agency and drafting Tyjae Spears, it wasn’t nearly enough. There was no defense to fall back on in a constellation of two stars (Simmons and Harold Landry). In the end, there was no choice but to blow the whole thing up and start from, well not scratch, but pretty close.
Tuesday’s news doesn’t mean Vrabel is a bad coach. It means the pumps were shut off each time he was forced to gas up a fading team. The good news for his successor is Carthon’s small sample resume has been better than Robinson’s. The bad news is counting up the amount of trustable, exciting young talent currently on the roster won’t take more than two hands.
Ultimately, that’s what ended the Vrabel era. Now both he and the Titans get a fresh start, each looking to prove they can build something from ashes.
