Titans request permission to interview Doug Marrone

So the Tennessee Titans have finally requested to interview a candidate for head coach, and it is.....Doug Marrone??  That news came from Adam Schefter this morning.  Marrone was the head coach of the Buffalo Bills in 2013-2014.  He had a 15-17 record and used an out in his contract to walk away.  He spent 2015 on the Jaguars coaching staff.

To me, Marrone is one of those guys that keeps getting his name mentioned in coaching searches for absolutely no reason.  Before he coached the Bills he was at Syracuse from 2009-2012.  His record there was 25-25.  Why is a guy that has a 40-42 career record as a head coach so intriguing??

Here is what Brian Galliford of Buffalo Rumblings had to say about Marrone:

I always thought Marrone was out of his element in that role, for several reasons.

He came into the job likening it to a CEO role, where you're not micro-managing everything and instead running the whole ship, but he never really followed through with that. He still essentially coached the offensive line by himself - he'd spend copious amounts of time with that unit during training camp practices - and left his defensive coordinators to themselves, at least as far as fans could tell. If you read some comments from his former players (Marcell Dareus specifically), he'd focus on random, meaningless details and lose sight of the big picture.

Marrone is terrible with media. That doesn't speak to his coaching abilities, but his personality - he seems very much like a gruff, irritable person. I lost count of the number of times that he'd grow frustrated with a line of questioning and huff and puff his way through a response. Tim Graham of The Buffalo News has said repeatedly that Marrone demanded a meeting with him, then reprimanded him for being too critical of the team. Again, that's not a knock on his coaching ability at all; he just seems a bit like a guy that doesn't handle things not going his way very well.

To that end, his opting out of his Bills contract reinforces the idea that he might not handle any sort of adversity the way you'd want your head coach to. He left a Bills ownership that really liked him, for reasons unknown. Buffalo wanted to keep him.

Regarding his coaching ability, he's very conservative, despite his telling everybody the opposite when he was hired. He punted just, like, so many times from inside opponents' territory. It was crazy. The Bills committed a lot of penalties in 2014, but then, they committed even more under Rex Ryan this year, so maybe Marrone's team was unusually disciplined. He brought in Nathaniel Hackett to run his offense, and while it was fine conceptually, it never adapted to the players on hand, and was promptly run into the ground. Buffalo's offense was terrible when he left. The defense improved dramatically on his watch, but again, most of that credit goes to the two coordinators he hired, Mike Pettine and Jim Schwartz.

I might be biased, because the team I follow has already employed him as a head coach, but: were my team interviewing head coaching candidates, Marrone wouldn't be the guy I'd want to see win the gig. Every coaching candidate has his flaws, but Marrone's are a bit too worrying for my taste.

There is also this piece from Sean Keeley at Nunes Magician, SB Nation's Syracuse website, about Marrone's time at Syracuse.

Now keep in mind that the Titans can't interview any of the coaches on playoff teams right now. Marrone is currently available, so that could be why the Titans chose to start with him. I would honestly rather have Mike Mularkey that Marrone.