Of all the managing jobs in sports, the most important is head football coach. Nobody has a bigger impact on an organization, from the way the players practice, to the food that is cooked in the cafeteria, to the way receptionists answer the phone. The head football coach is more than a play-caller; he or she is the team’s CEO. The coach’s vision is everybody’s mission.
But because it takes time for the head football coach’s ideas to permeate the entire franchise, and because it is hard to rebuild a football roster overnight, the head football coach has traditionally been granted a grace period to instill his theory. Unlike baseball or basketball, where teams can turn around overnight, football teams often need three or four seasons to demonstrate who they will become.
The day of that grace period has ended, however. Now NFL owners demand the same instant results NBA teams have been seeking for years. More and more coaches are getting two years to deliver or risk being dumped. On Tuesday, the Tennessee Titans, who have had one winning season in six years and are trying to rebuild with a rookie quarterback and a flawed roster, fired coach Ken Whisenhunt halfway into his second year.
Whisenhunt was 1-6 this year after going 2-14 last season, so based on results alone it’s easy to see why the Titans made this move. But Whisenhunt, who took the Arizona Cardinals to the Super Bowl in 2008, was paying for the Titans’ previous sins. For instance, it wasn’t Whisenhunt’s fault the Titans spent a first-round pick on quarterback Jake Locker in 2011 only to spend the next four seasons learning that Locker is not an NFL starter.
His interim replacement, Mike Mularkey, hasn’t had much coaching success himself, getting fired after a 2-14 season in Jacksonville in 2012. So why fire Whisenhunt just a year and a half into a rebuilding job that was clearly going to take more than two years?
“We have expected more progress on the field, and I felt it was time to move into a different direction,” the Titans’ controlling owner Amy Adams Strunk said in a statement.
Whisenhunt has always had a reputation for being prickly and bull-headed – never a good combination when you are 3-20. He has been criticized for forcing his offensive philosophies regardless of whether they fit his team’s talent. But this describes plenty of football coaches who struggled two and three years to get their team to fit a system. Expecting Tennessee to thrive early in the second year or a reconstruction with Marcus Mariota only months removed from the University of Oregon at quarterback?
Already talk is circling around the usual names of coaches known for developing quarterbacks. Expect to hear a lot about Cincinnati’s Hugh Jackson and bright offensive coordinators like Adam Gase in Chicago and New England’s Josh McDaniels. Jackson had one season as a head coach – Oakland in 2011, finishing 8-8 amid dysfunction. McDaniels spent less than two seasons as head coach of Denver.
Whisenhunt wasn’t gone half an hour before the internet was buzzing with rumors that the Titans are opening a path to lure Mariota’s college coach, Chip Kelly, from the Philadelphia Eagles. The idea of bringing a coach to his college quarterback is an intriguing one, but it seems a strange precedent. What if Mariota doesn’t adapt to the NFL? What if he gets hurt? Already he has missed three games because of a knee injury. There is no guarantee Mariota’s mobile style will keep him healthy in pro football.
But the Titans are plunging forward in a reset of their reset. How long will this one last?
- This article was amended on Tuesday November 3 to clarify that Josh McDaniels had spent time as the head coach of Denver.
