At yesterday’s press conference Tennessee Titans head coach Brian Callahan was asked multiple times about whether or not he thinks he is coaching for his job down the stretch of the 2024 season. Callahan said he doesn’t worry about that kind of stuff. All he can control is working as hard as he can to build the type of program he wants to build. That's the standard stuff you would expect a coach in his situation to say.
Is it fair that just 13 games into his tenure as the head coach he is getting these types of questions? There is no question the results on the field haven’t been good enough. While we were all probably a little bit too optimistic heading into the season about what this team could be, no one expected this to be one of the worst teams in the league. Amy Adams-Strunk spent a lot of money on free agents this offseason. They certainly did not operate like they were expecting this to be a rebuilding season.
With that being said, it is a rare occurrence, outside of the Houston Texans who did it in consecutive years, for a coach to be fired after just one season. The other two that everyone talks about are Urban Meyer with the Jacksonville Jaguars and Nathaniel Hackett with the Denver Broncos.
Meyer got fired because he was an idiot. He had completely lost the locker room and there was that video from that bar that certainly didn’t help things. With Hackett, his in-game decisions were just a disaster from the jump.
Callahan doesn’t have any of that stuff going on. The team is still playing hard, and while there have been some things in-game that we don’t necessarily agree with, like running four times from inside the five in two different games, he hasn’t committed any fireable offenses.
I have no idea if Callahan will develop into a good head coach or not, but he deserves at least one more season as things stand right now. Constantly starting over is not a recipe for success in this league.