Given Many Better Options, The Titans Still Bewilderingly Hired Mike Mularkey

The Tennessee Titans were given an impressive war chest of assets to lure a top head coach this year. Quarterback Marcus Mariota had a successful, if abbreviated, rookie season. They have the No. 1 overall pick in the 2016 NFL Draft. Tight end Delanie Walker and wideout Kendall Wright can be successful players in the right offense.

This was a franchise that should have appealed to most wannabe NFL coaches. There are dozens of qualified candidates for head coaching jobs in a given year, and most tend to fit certain archetypes. For example, there's the retread coach with shaky game management. There's the guy who failed at his first stop and is looking for a second chance. There's the hot college coach who could revolutionize the NFL. There's Jim Tomsula! The Titans could have gotten any one of these.

Here's how things played out in reality: the Titans fired general manager Ruston Webster and conducted a search for his replacement explicitly, reports say, with the idea of keeping interim head coach Mike Mularkey.

I've been told a reason Jon Robinson emerged with #Titans was his willingness to retain Mike Mularkey as HC. Also has history with McDaniels
— Ed Werder (@Edwerderespn) January 14, 2016

Then—surprise, surprise—the Titans wound up hiring Mike Mularkey! And they were so proud of this hire that they leaked it to Adam Schefter and company at halftime of a Saturday playoff game.

Titans are hiring HC Mike Mularkey, sources told ESPN.
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) January 16, 2016

There's a lot to unpack here. Let's start with Mularkey. He has a career 18-39 record as a head coach. The teams he coached didn't exactly have great talent bases, I'll allow that, but he wasn't exactly improving them, either. Mularkey was fired after just one season after replacing Jack Del Rio as Jacksonville's head coach in 2012.

So why would the Titans pick him? Their reasoning might best be summed up by this statement from controlling owner Amy Adams Strunk: "He has experience as a head coach and a track record for developing young quarterbacks and dynamic offenses, and he also brings continuity for our franchise quarterback."

While Mularkey did help develop a young Matt Ryan as an offensive coordinator for the Atlanta Falcons, here are the young quarterbacks Mularkey has coached in the NFL: Blaine Gabbert and J.P. Losman. Neither made it to a second contract with their first team.

As for those dynamic offenses? The Steelers fell down the DVOA rankings with every year Mularkey stayed in Pittsburgh as offensive coordinator. The Falcons never climbed higher than 11th in passing DVOA under him. As head coach in Buffalo for the 2004-05 seasons, Mularkey led the Bills to 21st and 30th in offensive DVOA, respectively. In 2012, his Jaguars finished 28th. Last year's Titans finished dead last.

That Mularkey has experience as a head coach is something you could say about many NFL head coach candidates, and the continuity for their franchise quarterback that Adams Strunk cited amounts to nine games.

CBS' Jason La Canfora reported that this might be about money, but the larger implication is even worse for the team and its fans: Bud Adams's controlling heirs don't care about football. It's why Tommy Smith stepped out and couldn't be bothered to leave his Houston home. It's why Adams Strunk couldn't be bothered to come to the league meetings in Houston to vote on the Rams' move to Los Angeles.

Now, I'm never going to complement Bud Adams. As a lifelong Houstonian, I grew up believing that he was the embodiment of greed and sleaze. The stories of Adams selling up Vince Young despite his staff's preference for Jay Cutler and his coach's preference for Matt Leinart are rather emblematic of his ownership style. Adams was loud and brash. Say what you will about him, though, at least he had an ethos.

Under current ownership, the Titans are just going through the motions. They're the depressed kid at school who goes to classes but then reads all alone in the stairwell at lunch. They may stumble into some success accidentally, but there's no grand motivation for them to improve. That's fine if Tennessee's owners want to run the Titans like a moneymaking enterprise first. They'd be foolish to sell the team. Unless and until they appoint someone willing to actually plant some flags, however, this team isn't going anywhere.

The Titans aren't unmanageable, and there are players here who actually could be good. The talent level on the team is low, but that's the easy part of an NFL roster to improve. Look at teams that are still playing, like Denver, Arizona, and Carolina: you'll see deep rosters built brick by brick in the lower rounds of the draft, in undrafted free agency, and with unwanted veterans who still had something to prove. Football, more than any other sport, is a game of attrition. Build a roster that can withstand non-quarterback injuries, and you've got a chance to be a consistent playoff contender, but this franchise needs a mentor. It needs someone pushing every day to get the most out of its players.

In Mularkey, they've just hired a substitute teacher.