The Tennessee Titans Failed to Reboot the Whole Franchise, Again

Stop me if you've heard this before: the Titans thought that the best candidate for a position was already working for them.

When the team parted ways with Jeff Fisher, they promoted Mike Munchak to the position. When Mike Reinfeldt was moved up in the organization, they promoted his assistant, Ruston Webster. Webster then gained even more power when Reinfeldt was later fired. Finally, after firing Ken Whisenhunt, Amy Adams Strunk has decided to retain Whiz's assistant, Mike Mularkey, and give him the permanent job.

The pairings are as followed:

The Titans have many problems right now and one is that despite needing a complete franchise reboot, the team continually feels partial change is good enough. This sort of staff carryover is fine when your team is winning. The Titans are not. The cumulative record from the last Reinfeldt-Fisher season up until now is 33-63, good enough for a 34.4% win percentage.

This was the Titans chance to wipe the slate clean. They could have hired a general manager and paired him with a new head coach. Everyone could have been on the same page. Instead, ownership decided to retain their interim coach after a sham of an interview process. Part of that is understandable. It can be scary to hire outside the organization. Ken Whisenhunt was the only external head coach hire for the franchise since Jack Pardee in 1990, and obviously was a tremendous mistake. That isn't a good excuse though. Either you settle for constant mediocrity or you start taking chances.

Maybe pairing Robinson with an external head coach hire would have ended up in the history books as another big mistake. Or, perhaps this Robinson-Mularkey duo works out well. If it doesn't though, the Titans have only themselves to blame. They shouldn't expect different results when they hire from within an organization that has grown all too familiar with losing.