The Tennessee Titans finally made it official Thursday evening, announcing what seemed very like Wednesday evening and what had been reported as done Thursday morning, announcing Jon Robinson was their new general manager.
Evaluating a general manager hire is a tricky task, simply because it is very unusual for a general manager to get a second job, so we don’t know how they did with the same responsibilities before. Robinson is no exception to that strong trend, as his previous NFL jobs were on lower levels of the personnel side, as a area scout, regional scout, and director of college scouting for the New England Patriots before spending the past two years as director of player personnel with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. So, he’s done the pre-general manager jobs, but we don’t know how many of the personnel decisions made the past two years in Tampa or the draft picks in New England in his time there were his as opposed to Lovie Smith’s and/or Jason Licht’s in Tampa or Bill Belichick’s in New England.
Lacking specific knowledge of Robinson’s work in the past, the best information we have is the various reports from insiders, where Robinson showed up on most of the short lists people put together of potential future general managers. He also reportedly interviewed well with the New York Jets last year, another encouraging sign. People who’ve worked with him are suitably effusive, as this article from the team’s official site indicates.
Until we get some information from Robinson himself, I’ll refrain specific comment aside from that he doesn’t seem unqualified. One interesting thing is to compare him to the criteria Steve Underwood enumerated in last Monday’s press conference, speaking of the list of 80 candidates:
- “15 years of experience in talent evaluation, either as a scout, pro personnel director, or player personnel director”: Robinson just missed the cut here, with 14 years as a scout and personnel director;
- “they need to have some background and experience, for example, in the salary-cap management, in the collective bargaining agreement. They need to know and understand how those things work”: None in New England, where he worked on the college drafting side of things. He seemed to have some responsibility in those areas in Tampa Bay. The player personnel director job varies a bit from team to team. Per Tampa’s official site, Robinson “oversees all areas of the scouting department, both college and pro, including advance scouting, free agency preparation, evaluating players in the NFL and all other professional leagues, as well as assisting with college scouting and preparation for the NFL Draft.” Buccaneers GM Jason Licht was on 102.5 in Nashville and spoke effusively of Robinson’s exposure to the various tasks a general manager encounters on a regular basis.
Underwood also noted the broader organizational responsibilities of a general manager; as team president, he’ll supervise the business and football sides, but the Titans franchise has made the GM a sort of the president of the football side. That was one of the criteria that made me thought the Titans might be interested in being one of the rare teams to go the re-tread route, but apparently not.
In my post on Webster’s firing, I noted on the general manager search that
My general preference is for people who have worked in more than one city, for more than one boss, in more than one system, and who have had success. Given the Titans are where they are, I would prefer a candidate familiar with a rebuilding process. The most important things are that this person have a vision for building the franchise and that they work well with the head coach.
Robinson has at least worked in more than one city, since he’s been in both New England and Tampa Bay. Licht brought him in after the two of them worked together in New England, but their times didn’t perfectly overlap-Licht was pro personnel director in Foxborough at the same time Robinson was college scouting director. On the whole, though, Licht (to name one fairly recent general manager hire) had an overall more varied resume. I’d definitely say the Buccaneers gave him a familiarity with a rebuilding process, and they did improve from 2014 to 2015 much more than the Titans did. As to his vision for building the franchise and whether he can work well with the head coach, we’ll learn in time.
Now that the Titans have a general manager, the next question is figuring out who that head coach will be. The widespread assumption is that interim coach Mike Mularkey is the heavy favorite to become the permanent head coach. Various reporters have indicated that at least some of the general manager candidates the Titans hired indicated they did not want to retain Mularkey. We don’t know where Robinson came down on that, but it is not overly speculative to wonder if Robinson was hired because he seemed most comfortable with Mularkey among the candidates the Titans liked most.
Robinson also has obvious ties to Josh McDaniels. If you wanted to tell a non-Mularkey story, you could say that Titans ownership had zeroed in on McDaniels as a preferred head coaching candidate notwithstanding his decision not to take any interviews during the Patriots’ bye week, and Robinson’s hiring is a sign of McDaniels’ favor. But it does seem the Mularkey story is the more likely one.
What you think of a potential Mularkey hire depends on what you think of the Titans’ front office structure. The popular perception of Mularkey is that while he was a welcome change from Ken Whisenhunt’s reign of (t)error, there is little enthusiasm outside of perhaps the players for his elevation to the permanent position. His previous head coaching stints in Buffalo and Jacksonville were uninspiring, featuring mostly bland and ineffective offenses (DVOA rank: 04 Bills 21st, 05 Bills 30th, 12 Jaguars 28th), and a 2-7 performance as interim coach including three dud losses in the final four games (playing dead at Jets and vs. Houston, plus losing to two QBs who weren’t on the active roster the week before at Colts) just reinforced that uninspirational picture.
If you trust the front office to make a good decision, then a Mike Mularkey hire tells you that notwithstanding all that, Mularkey did what I asked for a head coach to do, present a compelling vision for the future of the team and a plan for executing that vision. I’m not sure where Mularkey stands on that whole vision thing; reading between this lines, his termination in Jacksonville was about that issue much more than the results on the field with the dreadful roster Gene Smith had created.
If you don’t trust the front office to make a good decision, then a Mike Mularkey hire speaks more of a firm commitment to mediocrity, but mediocrity of a known and familiar type. Hiring a new head coach is scary, and the last time the organization hired an unfamiliar face who seemed like a good candidate, it blew up in their face. Plus, Mularkey probably won’t be too expensive; the decision to eat Ken Whisenhunt’s salary is one thing, that to throw a bunch of money at the next new hawtness perhaps another, and paying assistant coaches (if any are under contract beyond this season) could be part of that as well. It’s really, really easy to see the Mularkey hire as a bad decision that is itself Bayesian evidence for a front office that can’t be trusted to make a good decision, and really hard to see Mularkey as a hire that gets the Titans where they need to be. It’s not just about winning the press conference, but about creating, selling, and executing the vision and plan for the team’s development going forward. Gus Bradley is apparently getting another year in Jacksonville because of his success at the first two of those tasks, even if the third category has been lacking. I don’t know about Mularkey’s ability at any of the three of those.
But we’ll see. Perhaps Robinson is just as strongly anti-Mularkey as the other general manager candidates reportedly were, and we just don’t know it yet. Perhaps Mularkey really is the best candidate, and not just part of a blah fait accompli search that talks of an initial list of 155 candidates and an interview process that also included just Teryl Austin (to satisfy the Rooney Rule) and Doug Marrone (who seemed to draw opprobrium in NFL circles for his decision to voluntarily give up a head coaching gig). If Mularkey is the head coach by early next week, that that probably is what happened. If he’s not, then maybe the front office is making another good decision and we’ll have to revamp what we think of the Titans. And, yes, the whole ownership structure thing potentially plays into this in some ways I can’t exactly be sure about, but that’s a subject for another time and another day and maybe somebody else with more information.
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