Robert Saleh knew what he was doing when he scheduled joint practices with the San Francisco 49ers. The Tennessee Titans first-year head coach travelled to one of the best offensive minds in the NFL, a coach who knows every flaw in Saleh’s defensive scheme, and let him loose on a young roster still figuring things out. 

The Titans got mugged. They got exposed. And I’m sure Saleh wanted it that way.

The 49ers won the practice overall. That much is clear. San Francisco’s offense sliced and diced the Titans defense, and the Tennessee offense got punked by a veteran 49ers defense led by players like Fred Warner. But this feels like the plan.

Saleh’s reasoning straight from the podium

Robert Saleh explained why he wanted to practice against Kyle Shanahan and the 49ers at the post-practice press conference.

“This offense, Kyle and his staff, they know every single flaw or every weakness to our (defensive) scheme. They’ve been going against it for the last 10 years. So it was really good to get a lot of the route concepts that we need to help teach the principles of our defense. And it’ll start making sense to our guys, hopefully, and in terms of how it evolved and how we got to where we are, uh, from a teaching standpoint,” Saleh said. 

“Anytime you get exposed to tape and new systems and new bodies you’re going against, which is why I value these joint practices so much, you’re going to learn something from it rather than the redundancy of playing against your own team versus the same schemes over and over again. These days to me are gold if you can handle it the right way, and I think our guys did.”

Saleh is in his second opportunity as a head coach after getting fired by the Jets following that whole disaster of good defense, bad offense, and the Aaron Rodgers injury. Every coach who gets a second chance in the NFL knows they’re probably never getting a third. He’s taking over a team that won only six games combined over the last two seasons, with young pieces everywhere. 

So what does he do? He schedules one of his best friends in Shanahan, who has coached one of the best teams in the NFL consistently for a decade, and says let’s put our guys through the hardest test possible where the other team knows all the answers.

This is what football coaches do. They set their teams up on purpose.

Buck Reising called this a reality check in our recap video, and I think the whole idea was for Saleh to create exactly that. Shanahan knows the defense. He knows where to go. He knows how to pick it apart. New corners, new linebackers, the defensive line… Everybody has to figure it out. And it’s not just that Shanahan knows the scheme. His offensive play-calling ability has been slicing and dicing defenses for a decade in the NFL. So this was Saleh setting them up to get exposed.

And that’s a good thing. The only failed experiment is one where you don’t find an answer. If the Titans got their tails kicked and found some answers, that’s a productive day.

The conspiracy on the Titans offensive side

Here’s something worth chewing on. The 49ers offense sliced up the Titans defense, and the Titans learned from that. 

But Tennessee’s offense is the group that really got mugged. 

The Titans offense is younger than the defense. So there could have been a conversation between coaches along the lines of, ‘hey, I want your defensive guys to bring it. Test Carnell Tate. Hit him. Don’t hurt him, but agitate him,’ to see how the young offense responds to a team punking them with veterans who don’t take anything from anybody.

I don’t know that for certain, but it’s not crazy to think that head coach to head coach, Saleh told Shanahan to check his guys. Did Saleh seem mad about the fights in the press conference? No.

A reminder, too, that the NFL does not schedule preseason opponents. The teams do. Coaches like Saleh and Mike Vrabel before him have talked about wanting to find preseason opponents with staff you know and trust, where both teams can get work done without somebody with a chip on their shoulder doing something stupid and getting players hurt. 

Saleh picked this fight with intention. Now we find out what the Titans learned from it. And they’ll do the same in joint practices hosting the Super Bowl Champion Seattle Seahawks and the up-start Chicago Bears.