‘It’s been addressed’ — Titans coaches forced to handle player’s postgame rant criticizing staff performance in latest loss 

Are the Titans beginning to fray with the end in sight?

Easton Freeze — Tennessee Titans Beat Writer
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December in the NFL is really hard when your team is dead. It’s even harder when it’s been a foregone conclusion for months that all the coaches and many of the players on this iteration of a failed team will be gone after the season. Keeping everybody rowing in the same direction in a circumstance like that, well, it’s tricky.

Following the Tennessee Titans’ Week 15 loss to the San Francisco 49ers, EDGE Arden Key was officially fed up. He went on a rant about what needs to change for the Titans, and it led to a talking-to from his coaches this week.

Arden Key’s postgame venting got addressed by coaches

In the postgame locker room, Key had this to say about the Titans’ inability to get a stop on defense:

“We gotta adjust. We don’t adjust enough over here. We don’t adjust. We don’t adjust. That’s what it is. We don’t adjust. X and O’s. We don’t adjust.”

When asked for clarification on whether this was a coaching issue or a player issue, he attempted to land the plane with “we all need to do better on that.”

First of all, nobody is fooled over who this is a criticism of. This is clearly about coaching. And it’s absolutely something that he shouldn’t have said, however true it may be. But this is an example of the cracks in the foundation of a team that aren’t all that shocking to see crop up for a team like this.

Key probably isn’t back next year. These coaches certainly aren’t back next year. So the guy is just speaking his mind. In that way, frankly, I get it.

But is it even true? Defensive coordinator Dennard Wilson was asked about Key’s comments on Tuesday, and he didn’t mince words either. “We adjust all the time,” Wilson replied. “Look at it in the second half. I mean, what other adjustments do we need? We lost a one on one ball in man coverage, and we missed a tackle. And we didn’t hang on cover two. I don’t know what else adjustments that we needed. At this point, everybody has an opinion about everything. Everybody needs to stay in their lane and focus on what they need to focus on.”

Stay in your lane! Probably some sage advice from Wilson, who knows how this goes. I’m sure he didn’t take kindly to his player criticizing him in the locker room so openly, especially when he’s been dealt a crappy hand basically his entire time in Tennessee. In this most recent game, Wilson had to adjust to losing three safeties in the first half for crying out loud.

And when interim head coach Mike McCoy was asked about it on Wednesday, he explained that they’d handled this situation in-house:

“That’s been addressed. So it’s one of the comments, he made the comment and we’ve addressed it with him. And so it’s what it is. And I think we’ll keep that in-house. We have those conversations, we have tough conversations. You’ve asked about that before. And things are said in the heat of the battle at times that people speak up. And when we feel it’s the right thing to do to go address it and sit down with the player and talk to him about it and go from there, we do that. Because we’re all in this thing together.”

That’s a perfect way of summing up the job that McCoy is doing here in these final weeks: we’re all in this together, gang! Go out there and have fun. Everybody just hang on through the new year and we’ll be done here.

If more players like Key start to speak their minds down the stretch, though, that could prove tricky.

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