Brian Callahan finally caved to Titans fans’ demand in an attempt to save his head coaching job; announcing new play-caller vs. Texans

The Tennessee Titans are trudging through what you might call “the suck” at the moment, and that means changes are beginning to be made. They’re 0-3 after a brutal start marked by inefficiency, incompetence, and three strong opponents that amplify every little mistake. The performance from players has been poor. The performance of coaches has been poor. The reception from fans at home, with ownership and team executives physically in the verbal line of fire, has been poor. It’s been a big fat mess.

And before even a month of the season has passed, the decision has been made for play-calling to change hands. Head coach Brian Callahan announced on Tuesday that he is handing over play-calling duties to quarterbacks coach Bo Hardegree, who last called plays on an interim basis for the Las Vegas Raiders.

The pressure for something to change with Callahan’s feel for the flow of the game and game management performance has reached a boiling point, and this is the first big step. But how did we get here so quickly? And what will this actually change about a bad Titans team?

The one thing Callahan couldn’t do

As football fans, it’s always easier to blame the coaching first and the players second. Whether it’s conscious or subconscious, pointing blame at the coaches will be the inclination more often than not. That’s because it’s a much easier pill to swallow than that your coaching staff stinks. They’re relatively easy to replace, but accepting that your roster stinks? That’s a tough dose of medicine. Fixing a bad roster takes a lot more time, resources, and luck.

So, especially when a top draft pick QB comes to town, the heat will be on anything and everything else before fans put that on the player. Coaching typically comes first. We’ve seen it recently to different extents in Chicago, New England, Houston, and Denver, just to name a few. Now, that’s not to say that these coaches are always blameless martyrs. But it is the natural order of things to hate coaching first, players second.

That’s why it’s incumbent on coaches to do everything in their power not to make the story any more about them than it needs to be. I wrote this detailed piece on Callahan’s job security right before the season, laying out a well-sourced understanding of what the Titans’ leadership wanted to happen. Namely, what they wanted above all was patience.

They knew it would be hard, but they were committed to it. As I wrote then, the only thing Callahan could do to unseat himself early this season would be demonstrating incompetence as a manager. And regardless of exactly how fair all of the narrative has been so far, that’s more or less what he’s done.

Brian Callahan gives up play-calling

In Week 1, there were two fiascos: the end-of-half sequence and the in-bounds rule that went unchallenged. Both had stories behind them that never saw the light of day, but Callahan did what he felt a good head coach does and absorbed all the heat. He wasn’t blameless in either situation, but he’s also gotten a little bit too familiar with falling on swords lately.

In Week 2, some felt he mishandled that end-of-half sequence, too. I think that’s ridiculous personally, but it’s a narrative reality for a contingent of fans anyway. And in Week 3, he once again became the subject of discussion with an end-of-half sequence that was completely flubbed. To my knowledge, there is no story here. They just screwed it up, big time. It was his worst moment of game management, ever, in my opinion. Just plain inexcusable.

So in two of three games, he’s been a story. That’s not sustainable if he hopes to survive the season. And what’s equally infuriating and confusing is how this wasn’t the case in 2024. Have things gotten tight among the coaching ranks? Has it just been a series of unfortunate circumstances? It’s hard to say.

But what isn’t hard to say is that the consensus opinion from fans right now is this: he’s in over his head. And eventually, narrative becomes reality, whether it’s based in truth or not.

That’s why my ears perked up when he was asked about the possibility of handing off play-calling on Monday.

“Yeah, everything’s under evaluation right now at 0-3,” Callahan said plainly. “Certainly, it’s all part of it. That’s players in their roles. That’s everything. I mean we got to find a way to put ourselves in position to win a game. So we’re evaluating everything.”

When further pressed on if he’s specifically considering handing over play calling, he said, “I mean, there’s nothing to add to it other than that.”

That is not the same message or tone he’s answered that same question with in the past. This has been brought up more than once during his tenure as the Titans’ head coach, and each time, he more or less shut it down. It was dismissed out of hand.

But on Monday after Week 3, he sounded different. And on Tuesday, he jumped up to the podium before the regularly scheduled coordinator press conferences to announce he’d be making a change.

“So I said yesterday, a lot of things under evaluation, and a lot of things that you self-reflect on with the start that we’ve had so far, and things we’ve got to get better at,” Callahan said. “One of the things I think is going to help our football team, help me be a better head coach for our team is I’m going to hand over the play calling to Bo (Hardegree), and part of that process is — and part of the decision making in that process is that Bo had some interim experience calling.

“He’s been with a rookie quarterback before. That part of it will make it a little bit seamless in that regard. The other part of it is that our offensive staff and our game planning process and system is going to remain in place. It’s still a collaborative process. We rely on everybody to do their part. Nick (Holz) is still the offensive coordinator. He’ll still maintain his same exact routine and process that he’s gone through to help me, and then Bo is going to step in as the play-caller on Sunday to allow me to do a little more with our team and with all three phases, pay more time and attention to those things, and less in the weeds of getting ready to game plan.

“One of the things I told the team and told the players after our game is that, ‘Look, everyone owns a mirror. We can all look at it. We can all see where we need to be better and what can help us be better.’ And I think this is one of the best things for us at the moment to help me do a better job as a head coach and be more present and available for the football team and less involved in just the day-to-day minutiae of getting ready to call a game. I think it’s going to be positive for us.”

What good does giving up play-calling do?

The biggest question now becomes whose decision was it? Is Callahan handing it off by choice? Would he do so to genuinely help clear his plate for better overall team management? Is he doing it as an act of self-preservation, to shake things up and buy some time? Or is he being forced to hand it off? Is this a requirement from Mike Borgonzi, Chad Brinker, and/or Amy Adams Strunk? Could they have met and asked him to do it?

This is all merely speculative on my part. I do not know. But the tea leaves told me it might be, and when I polled my followers on Twitter (X), it was clearly something that a big chunk of people are interested in seeing happen.

From a sample of 750 people, roughly 300 said they’d be encouraged to see play-calling be handed off to somebody else. Some of that is surely driven by a general dissatisfaction with Callahan’s feel for the game as a play-caller.

Others merely want him to have less on his plate to improve his management ability. And others still probably just want to see something change. We’re all guilty from time to time of the nasty fan-brain habit of wanting heads to roll without actually having a clear plan for what comes next.

I also fundamentally disagree with the idea of hiring an offensive play-caller as a head coach for his play-calling, then taking it away from him to turn him into a CEO-style game manager. The whole point of having him as your head coach is to maintain continuity at play-caller and with your offensive system. Are you really going to keep him around beyond this year if he’s no longer calling plays?

Maybe that’s all this boils down to. He won’t be around for long, so there’s no point in keeping him at the helm of the offense on Sundays. If that’s where you’re at, or more importantly, if that’s where Callahan’s bosses are at already, then I can at least see the steps that were taken to get to “play-caller change.”

But if the general argument is “it can’t hurt,” my rebuttal is “I don’t see how it will help.” The Titans are more than welcome to prove me wrong, but even if Hardegree turns into a stud play-caller, I don’t know how that turns a bad roster into a not bad roster in a hurry.

Time and development are still the only lights at the end of this tunnel. For now, the Titans seem to be trying to capture the coaching-change bump without actually firing the coach. We’ll see if that impact is felt at all in the battle of 0-3 teams this weekend.