The Tennessee Titans fired Ken Whisenhunt earlier today, and named Mike Mularkey interim head coach. The Titans still have nine games to play this year, so Mularkey has a significant portion of the season left to play, and to make changes. What can he do?
How to address the offensive line and the protection issues is the first and most obvious issue for Mularkey and new play-caller Jason Michael, who did retain his job as offensive coordinator. That more than anything else might have been what created Whisenhunt’s ouster, given that five times in 23 games his starting quarterback was injured during the game and did not finish the contest.
At Tuesday’s press conference, Mularkey indicated they would be making some roster moves on the offensive line. In early November, there’s only so much you can do, personnel-wise. The Titans are extraordinarily unlikely to find an upgrade on the street. The obvious move would be to shift Byron Bell out to right tackle, where he’s played in the past, and to find another left guard. In May, putting Jeremiah Poutasi there made a lot of sense to me. But in the six months since they drafted him, the coaching staff has seemed to consider him a right tackle, and there’s a decent chance moving him to left guard right now downgrades the line. At least at right tackle you can put a tight end outside him every play if need be. The more likely move might be to play Jamon Meredith at left guard, since he has some experience there.
Fundamentally, though, he can only do so much with the offensive line and the personnel in general. The line about firing the coach because you can’t fire the players is a cliche, but there’s some truth to it. You can do a little bit of tinkering with the 53-man roster, but you are and basically should be stuck with 45 or 48 of them for the last two months of the season. What you can do is deploy them in different ways. A couple things I’d look for:
1. More use of 2-back sets. The Titans drafted a fullback in the fourth round, but fullback remained a position whose snaps varied hugely from week to week even when the Titans were more balanced between run and pass. Mularkey’s Falcons when he was the offensive coordinator from 2008 to 2011 played a lot of two-back sets, and the Jaguars team he was the head coach of in 2012 used two back much more often than the Titans have.
2. Heavier protection sets. Whisenhunt’s apparent attitude was that if we can’t block your four with our five, we don’t deserve to win. I’d turn around something Ray Horton has said-if we can’t block your four with our five, we’ll use six. Or seven. Mularkey’s Falcons teams ranked as one of the heaviest users of max protection packages in the league to help out a young Matt Ryan, and the same could help young Marcus Mariota.
3. More tight ends, fewer wide receivers. The Titans’ current receiving depth chart is Justin Hunter, Dorial Green-Beckham, and Rico Richardson, with Kendall Wright probably likely to miss at least Sunday’s game against the Saints and Harry Douglas’ status for New Orleans up in the air (Whisenhunt’s Monday optimism doesn’t mean anything to me). Playing a lot of 11 personnel with that doesn’t make sense to me, and Mularkey’s Falcons his first three years ranked in the top eight in usage of multiple tight ends sets and bottom eight in usage of three or more wide receivers (personnel-related stats all come from the relevant edition of Football Outsiders Almanac; I write for FO perma-disclaimer, but anywhere else would have similar stats).
4. More personnel consistency. Ken Whisenhunt didn’t seem to spend a lot of time preparing plays to feature individual players, but he seemed to spend a lot of time getting the players he wanted in particular personnel packages. When this isn’t working, as it wasn’t, players seem to find their apparent usage frustrating, and it’s difficult to watch from the outside because it looks like the coach doesn’t know what he’s doing. Relying on fewer players and doing less substitution between plays seems like it could be helpful, at a number of positions.
5. Fewer plays with more reps. Watching the Titans’ offense, the players didn’t seem to be playing fast and smart. From the outside, it’s easy to attribute that to the inconsistency in usage and putting too much on their plate and asking them to do things they don’t do well because that’s what your system demands. There’s obviously a balance there, but it probably should be tilted more towards putting players in better positions to succeed. If that means going into Sunday with 12 plays, just call those 12 plays, it might even work since Rob Ryan hasn’t been any great shakes lately (the Saints did give up 49 points last week) and New Orleans doesn’t know what 12 plays might be coming.
6. Concentrate on minor improvements. Related to the previous point, get to where you can execute all of those plays successfully. That especially includes the protections, because Ryan will undoubtedly look to blitz and force the quarterback to make quick decisions.
7. Adjust to what’s working and what’s not. The Atlanta game, Antonio Andrews is gaining as many or more yards per play running as Zach Mettenberger is throwing it, and Whisenhunt sticks with the pass-heavy gameplan he probably had coming in (and for perfectly sensible reasons).
8. Be intelligently aggressive. Mularkey went for it a down on fourth downs in Jacksonville; part of that was probably it was Jacksonville and who cares when you’re 2-14 and in a hopeless season, but Whisenhunt’s risk matrix seemed off. The Buffalo game was a great example-you could (and I did) say he was consistently conservative by punting on the fourth and shorts inside the 40 and again with the field goal on fourth and short, but it’s hard to square those decisions with a consistent analysis of the particular strengths and weaknesses of the teams involved; the inside the 40 punts suggest you should go for it inside the 5, at least unless you think your offense is incredibly terrible.
9. Don’t blame players in press conferences. Sometimes, you do have to talk about how individual players played, like if a receiver dropped a deep pass or a quarterback missed an open deep receiver. But one of the things that wore on me and probably others about Whisenhunt is it was never his fault, it was the players losing one-on-one matchups. You’re the head coach. Part of your job is to take criticism from us outside yo-yos who may or may not have any idea what they’re talking about without telling us how badly the players are screwing up your genius.
10. Improve. The Titans were last in passing DVOA in Week 6. The Titans were last in passing DVOA in Week 7. The Titans were last in passing DVOA in Week 8. Individual players seemed to keep making the same mistakes, without either getting help or anything ever changing. It would be nice to see players get better and for the team to get better. It could be the run game. It could be the pass protection. It could be converting third downs. It could be getting to makeable third downs more often (one of the “hidden factors” behind some of the recent third down struggles). It could be converting third and shorts better. Anything, really. It would be great to be able to point to something on offense, maybe even something not relating to Marcus Mariota, and say with confidence “This offense is good at doing this.”
I strongly doubt Mularkey has much of a chance of shedding his interim tag. The chance the best coach for the Mariota and the Titans going forward was their tight ends coach seems pretty remote to me. Even if he does well enough they want to hire him, they would still have to comply with the Rooney Rule requirement. That general manager Ruston Webster was not up there with Mularkey and Underwood told me as well that his job is in no way safe, and it’s easy from the outside to build a case against his continued job security. Having a head coach and a general manager who are on the same page on many levels is extremely important when it comes to building a winning organization, and I have no clue if Webster and Mularkey are simpatico, and forcing Mularkey and New General Manager to work together would likely be an awkward marriage. But this team should be better than worst in the league. Mularkey unsurprisingly wants to be a head coach again; doing a good job with the Titans the rest of the season would be his best argument for getting another chance, even if it’s not in Nashville. As a fan of the team who’s grown increasingly disinterested in poring over the fine details the way I used to because doing so exacerbates some of my worst tendencies, I really hope he does.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
