Malik Willis is the latest example of Titans’ organizational incompetence, a symptom of Amy Adams Strunk’s instability

It’s time to call a spade a spade: the Titans’ trade of Malik Willis was a complete failure.

Easton Freeze — Tennessee Titans Beat Writer
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The Tennessee Titans have been an incompetent franchise, on the whole, for the better part of the 2020s. That means they’ve given us plenty of examples of doing goofy, foolish, and otherwise ill-advised things. It’s a rich tapestry of recent cases.

Cam Ward is the shining beacon of hope that, paired with a high-floor coach and GM Mike Borgonzi, Titans fans largely believe can get them back to the adult table in the NFL. But the greatest risk in that hope is the belief that continuity will be maintained and that poorly timed decisions won’t be made.

Based on recent history, that’s not something the Titans have been good at doing. And in primetime on Saturday night, a highly entertaining matchup gave us yet another example of the Titans’ recent franchise failure.

Malik Willis is latest example of Titans’ organizational incompetence

No, I’m not talking about the decision not to aggressively pursue Derrick Henry in free agency after his deal was up in 2023. That was the right call for new GM Ran Carthon and the state of his declining roster. However, that knowledge hasn’t made watching him ball out for the Ravens any less palatable.

On Saturday, he balled all the way out. Henry ran the ball 36 times (career high) for four touchdowns (tied career high) and 216 yards (his seventh 200+ rushing yard game, the most in NFL history).

No, we’ll brush that one off. Henry is a pretty cut-and-dry situation.

It is past time to call a spade a spade: the Tennessee Titans royally screwed up with Malik Willis. Since the moment they traded him to Green Bay in 2024, he has looked like one of the best backups in the league. He showed the city of Nashville up close what they shipped away in Week 3 that fall, beating them in their own house. And in a handful of spots since, he’s risen to the occasion basically every time.

I was skeptical of the sustainability of his sudden success in Green Bay at first. But that skepticism fell away many weeks ago. In Week 17, he put together an absolutely vintage backup performance that will serve as the feather in his cap when he enters what should be a lucrative free agency in a few months.

He is the real deal. And the Titans had him, developing behind the scenes, for two years. The part of this story that I find infuriating is that his progress as a QB didn’t begin the day that he set foot in Wisconsin. I can understand why you may think it did if you’re watching him on TV.

But the reality is that he was making real, rather noticeable strides the summer that he last spent as a Titan. I know because I was there, and I was among the local media who wrote and spoke about him looking better than we’d ever seen him.

At the time, we spoke about it mainly as a novelty. Like, oh, wow! Look at Malik go! That sure would be cool if he’s developing into a decent backup in this league! Admittedly, it felt like a classic example of training camp “progress” that ends up being a nice summer story with little meaning in the fall.

So I won’t play armchair QB on this one and pretend that I or anybody else was screaming from the rooftops that the Titans needed to keep Willis at all costs. This is hindsight criticism, but the reality is that these people in the Titans’ front office are paid handsomely for their expertise on player development. I am not. They see everything that these guys do both on and off the field; I do not.

So this failure on their part, though a criticism primarily in hindsight, is their cross to bear nonetheless. This was a big miss.

What good can come from loudly criticizing this mistake, though? Teams miss on guys and make the wrong decision all the time; that’s the nature of the league, right?

Yes, it is. But what happened here with the Titans is not a simple miss. It is a symptom of the chaos within this house. The latest ugly sore on the festering face of this franchise. This is the kind of stuff that happens to you when you’re a discontinuous, misaligned, rotating door of an organization. And that fundamental rot falls at the feet of owner Amy Adams Strunk at the end of the day.

Titans’ constant turnover by Amy Adams Strunk makes evaluating players properly difficult

When Carthon sent Willis away, he did right by him. It wasn’t careless or cruel. They sent him to the best situation for him, and he has blossomed in it. But it was Carthon who sent him away. It was Brian Callahan who held the camp competition between Willis and Rudolph to be Will Levis’s backup.

Herein lies the problem. Perhaps if the GM and head coach who took a swing on Willis and committed to developing him in the first place were still around, the tangible signs of his development that summer would’ve been more bought into.

Willis and Rudolph weren’t dissimilar in that training camp. Rudolph was chosen as the “stable” veteran backup option for a team piloted by Will Levis. Still, nothing was stopping Tennessee from retaining its former third-round pick on his cost-controlled contract.

Again, if the people who had placed a bet on the project QB in the first place were around to see his growth that summer, I find it hard to believe he would have been so flippantly traded away.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you constantly churn important figures in your franchise. This is what happens when you don’t work to align timelines. The Titans have been a revolving door for years now, with one piece replaced at a time.

All of these different leadership permutations have led to this kind of turn-and-burn on the roster. I wrote about how this very thing impacted the trades of Jarvis Brownlee Jr. and Roger McCreary earlier this season.

If the Titans really want to be a draft-and-develop team like they claim to be (which would be a nice thing to be at QB in particular), then they have to pick a lane and ride it out.

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