After the Titans made him their permanent head coach, Mike Mularkey’s top job was to put together a quality staff of coordinators and assistant coaches.
And, well, Mularkey certainly got the staff he wanted, even if nobody else did. The offensive line coach didn’t coach in the NFL for the past three seasons. The offensive coordinator hasn’t been an offensive coordinator for over a decade. The wide receivers coach hasn’t coached receivers, or any other specific position, since Bill Clinton was president. But each of those three men-Russ Grimm, Terry Robiskie, and Bob Bratkowski, has something Mularkey deemed more important than recent coaching experience-namely, a tie to Mike Mularkey.
Unsurprisingly, general public reaction to the Titans’ coaching staff, by fans and people who follow the NFL, was about as blah as it was to the “search” that resulted in Mularkey’s hire as head coach. I’ve seen comparisons to Mike Munchak’s initial staff in 2011, when he looked in his rolodex with fourteen names in it and found a UFL head coach and collegiate defensive backs coach to be his coordinators. I buy that there’s a parallel with one of Munchak’s staff, but I see it instead as with his 2013 staff.
Heading into his third season, Munchak knew his job security hinged on how the team performed that year, and decided that if he had to go it would be on his terms, with his people. Thus, moves like hiring long-term friends Bruce Matthews and Chet Parlavecchio as position coaches. I don’t think Mularkey’s job security for 2016 is nearly as tenuous as Munchak’s was heading into 2013, but I see the same principle at stake. Mularkey has heard the criticism of his record, and he probably knows that if he doesn’t win in Tennessee, he’s extremely unlikely to get a fourth opportunity to be an NFL head coach. Thus, a priority in hiring people who share his philosophy of building a team and who have ties to him-Grimm in Pittsburgh, Bratkowski in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Jacksonville, and Robiskie in Miami and Atlanta.
Hiring an organized and cohesive staff that is all on the same page philosophically sounds like a really good idea. That’s the goal for many, many organizations, in football and outside it. But can these guys coach?
The Offensive Staff
Terry Robiskie is the offensive coordinator. He has been an NFL coach since 1982 and spent most of the past two decades as a wide receivers coach. He’s been a coordinator twice before, with the Los Angeles Raiders from 1989 to 1993 and the Cleveland Browns in 2004. His 1990 Raiders had the best passing offense in the league by DVOA (I write for Football Outsiders perma-disclaimer), as Willie Gault averaged almost 20 yards per catch. His other offenses were not quite as successful, but seemed to be cut from a similar mold as that most successful Silver and Black Attack, combining power running with vertical passing.
Mularkey has indicated in media appearances Robiskie will work with the receivers more than an offensive coordinator might. That’s a big area of emphasis, as it was the one specific position coach I heard Mularkey single out as important before he made his hires because it was a young position and there was a lot of room for improvement there (don’t hire people because Matt Millen recommended them!). They took more time to fill this position than some of the others, and I was hoping for a new and interesting name, maybe a college coach used to working with and teaching young players. The name Bob Bratkowski was not necessarily the one I was expecting for or hoping to hear. His name was most familiar from his decade as the Bengals’ offensive coordinator, where he coached Carson Palmer, Chad Johnson, and T.J. Houshmandzadeh. How much credit you give him depends on how much you think he did with that prolific pair of former Oregon State teammates; if you’re like me, he was the coordinator and credit for that goes primarily to the receivers coach. Bratkowski does seem to know his stuff; Chris Brown of Smart Football pointed me to this post of his with clinic video where Bratkowski spends the first while talking receiver technique and releases. Mularkey gave him credit for developing Hines Ward, who started at Georgia as a quarterback. The thing I worry about is he hasn’t taught young players in years, and he wouldn’t be the first coach in Tennessee who knew his stuff but failed because there was a disconnect with the players (see Palmer, Chris).
Russ Grimm is the offensive line coach; what you think of him depends on how much you value that what he’s done in the past nine seasons versus what he did before that. In the past nine years, he was Ken Whisenhunt’s offensive line coach in Arizona, where they had some pretty dismal lines and didn’t seem to do a job at all of developing offensive linemen, for six years and out of the NFL for the past three. Before that, he was a well-regarded offensive line coach in Pittsburgh and a Hall of Fame player before he stepped into the coaching ranks (if that last is important to you, I’ll note that Bratkowski never played in the NFL and Shawn Jefferson did). Paul Kuharsky noted he heard “way better things” about the Titans’ other finalist for the offensive line coach, Pat Flaherty, and it’s best if I leave it at that. Mike Sullivan sticks around as the offensive line coach; in at least some situations, one of the line coaches is more of a technique guy and the other one is more involved in game-planning. I’ve heard good things about Sullivan from FO colleague Ben Muth, who played under Sullivan in San Diego as a practice squad player, but I’ll also note he’s a holdover (assistant wide receivers coach Jason Tucker is another holdover).
Jason Michael is the quarterbacks coach, so Marcus Mariota will have a bit of something like continuity. Could the Titans have kept John McNulty, who rejoined Whisenhunt in San Diego, and did they want to, and would Mariota have been better off keeping the same quarterbacks coach instead of keeping Michael for that job? I don’t know, but I’m not negative about this hire.
Sylvester Croom sticks around as the running backs coach. I haven’t liked the backs the Titans have had around as players enough to blame him, except insofar as he convinced them to, e.g., take Sankey with their pick of backs. But I’m not negative about that, nor about Arthur Smith getting the permanent tight ends job.
The big macro-level question is just how the division of responsibility is going to work. I’d imagine Mularkey will have his hands in here more than he does with the defense. Would I feel better about the staff if Robiskie were the receivers coach and Bratkowski the coordinator? Maybe a bit, and I’ve tried to account for that in my evaluation and write-up of the staff as a whole.
The Defensive Staff
As I’ve mentioned before, Mularkey has never hired a new defensive play-caller, keeping Jerry Gray in Buffalo and Mel Tucker in Jacksonville. No change here in Tennessee either, as he sold Dick LeBeau on for sticking around for another season. For that reason, I don’t have macro-level concerns about the defensive coaching staff like I do on offense, just micro-level ones.
First, the holdovers and near-holdovers. Lou Spanos sticks around as the linebackers coach. Fine. Nick Eason gets a promotion from assistant defensive line coach to the head DL job; I don’t know what his division of responsibility with Giff Smith was, but fine.
The key will be the secondary, and particularly the corners. It was an underachieving group last year and I’d look for them to be breaking in some new contributors with Coty Sensabaugh probably unlikely to be back, who knows about Blidi Wreh-Wilson, and Michael Griffin a possible cap casualty once again. Deshea Townsend gets the top job. Chris Hope was notably effusive in his praise for his old teamate, noting Townsend ran some of the DB meetings in Pittsburgh as a player. I don’t pay close enough attention to Mississippi State to evaluate how he fared in Starkville as a defensive backs coach. The last Bulldog DB drafted was Johnthan Banks, and he didn’t play for Townsend. But I wouldn’t read too much into that anyway. Steve Jackson, the old Oilers/Titans corner with a long history of coaching, is the assistant DB coach. Fine.
Special Teams
I didn’t cover it in my omnibus post, but Mularkey emphasized special teams as an area, like the offense, where the Titans would be running new schemes going forward. I kind of give short shrift to special teams in my analysis (like other people, I don’t even necessarily watch special teams plays when I re-watch games). I was surprised Nate Kaczor came back for 2015, and am not surprised to see Mularkey move on. Bobby April has a long history as a very fine NFL special teams coach; Mularkey’s 2004 team that almost made the postseason had phenomenal special teams, and April led that unit. He’s certainly experienced, having coached special teams in the NFL since 1991.
I’m not sure how much to expect from April. Special teams is partly how good your kicker and punter is. The Titans are in fine shape there between Ryan Succop and Brett Kern, and aren’t and shouldn’t be chasing an upgrade. The Jets fired April because of bad special teams play in 2015; their biggest problem area was punts, where Ryan Quigley was quite bad. Overall team speed, depth, and roster quality is a big factor, and one I’m not sure the Titans fare well in. Returner quality is another area where I’m not sure how much special teams coaches can do-if April is successful, I think he can help out Dexter McCluster, since McCluster has shown he can be a good punt returner (assuming McCluster’s still here, of course), while I’m not sure there’s a quality kick returner on the roster (and April’s 2013 and 2014 Raiders units were both awful on kickoff returns because they couldn’t find a decent returner). But April’s been around, he’s had some success before, and special teams results will vary wildly from one year to the next even without noticeable changes in fundamental quality. If Mularkey sees some schematic things that he wants April to fix or at least change, I can’t tell him he’s wrong.
Steve Hoffman, the rare special teams coach who apparently knows something about the actual mechanics of kicking and punting, sticks around as the assistant special teams coach. He’s worked with April before.
Oh, and April is officially the special teams coordinator, not the special teams coach. I believe that may make New England the last team that continues to refer to the man in charge of special teams as a “coach” rather than as a third “coordinator.”
Conclusion-Type Things
For better or for worse, this is the staff Mike Mularkey wanted and the one he decided he wants to go down with if he has to go down. The cynic in me says there’s good reason to think it may be go down “because of” rather than “with,” there’s a reason these people haven’t had the jobs they’ve had in Tennessee, and the tradeoff for all the experience the new hires bring is a glaring lack of new ideas and exposure to new ways of thinking. I hate listening to my cynical side, and it’s probably objectively bad for me, but it’s been right too often about the Tennessee Titans lately for me to ignore it.
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