The Tennessee Titans look like a team who just fired their general manager for a pretty typical reason. But the truth is far messier than it appears on the surface.

On Tuesday morning, Titans controlling owner Amy Adams Strunk announced she had made the decision to part ways with GM Ran Carthon after Tennessee finished the season 3-14. If you need to catch up on the general details of the story, you can do that here.

From afar, this feels like a story we've seen plenty of times before. Carthon won 9 games in his first two seasons, and this is a results-based business. Sure, GM's typically get a longer leash than this, but you can get fired for that kind of thing in the NFL. Or maybe a simple power struggle was won between Carthon and Director of Football Operations Chad Brinker or Head Coach Brian Callahan. This stuff happens. Especially on bad, seemingly dysfunctional teams.

But do a little digging, and the reality of this situation is a real mess. It's not your typical GM firing at all.

Take for starters the statements made by Titans brass in the wake of the announcement. Chad Brinker, who will functionally be Tennessee's GM without actually having that title, used some interesting wording in his release describing who they're looking for to do a better job than Carthon did:

"Someone who wakes up every single day and the only thing they think about is building a roster…"

"At the end of the day, this person is going to be all ball, all day…"

Amy Adams Strunk's ultimate reason given for firing Carthon was twofold, and telling. It starts like this:

"I am deeply disappointed in our poor win-loss record during this period, of course…

And it ends in a way that practically dismisses the first reason for something more fundamental to the job than simply winning and losing:

"…but my decision also speaks to my concern about our long-term future should we stay the course."

Typically when an organization parts ways with an executive for simple failure to produce results, the parting words are along the lines of "best of luck to them and their family going forward". They don't go out of their way to repeatedly insinuate the guy wasn't capable of doing the job.

Longtime reporter Paul Kuharsky unloaded what he's heard about Carthon over the months in an article for his site on Tuesday. The common theme from his critics is that he's not a true grinder: there's talk of naps when his team is watching film and leaving events early. The one thing in his piece, which you should read, that resonates for everybody on the beat is this: Carthon hid from the media. He very rarely held press conferences. We didn't hear from him much. So there just wasn't much to cover.

There have also long existed rumors of Carthon being in over his head from the beginning and his lackluster drive at times. For over a year, they've floated about in the market. A to Z Sports has been aware of our fair share for some time, but it was nothing that could really be substantiated until a move like this is made. It's easy to be dismissive of smoke until you see firmer evidence of a fire.

It's hard to know what exactly to believe yet. For those who understand his personnel track record, it's truly impossible to say he'd done anything that was a fireable offense. When you go decision-by-decision, Carthon's body of work rehabilitating the Titans desolate roster the past two years was far from perfect. But he hit on some big free agents, and the totality of his two drafts were firmly above average. He was doing an OK job. So it begs the question, when combined with the messaging from the team on Tuesday and the year of rumors, just how much behind the scenes was there that led to his dismissal?

Here is the picture that all of this evidence currently paints: The Titans hired Carthon in a search for a hand-in-glove fit with their head coach, Mike Vrabel. But it's common knowledge at this point that Vrabel did not, in fact, necessarily want Carthon as his guy. He was not his pick. Amy and the league did a bit of a push-through job to get Carthon in anyways.

Excitement abounded anyways. Carthon was somebody whose relationship skills and rolodex preceded him. The Titans themselves flaunted this as a competitive advantage for the team. But ultimately, his strengths were relationship-focused more than they were football or business-focused. And that selling point only worked for so long.

Perhaps the team realized in year 1 that he was in over his head handling all of the GM duties, and this was the reason for the power structure shift going into year 2. Chad Brinker, a Green Bay man who knows and loves the business of football, was put in charge of everything that typically falls in the lap of a GM except for final say over the roster. That duty was still Carthon's, who was simultaneously promoted (given full control over the roster) and demoted (title change to Executive Vice President). Suddenly, the man Carthon hired the year previous was made his equal. And the Titans' dirty little not-so-secret in 2024 was that Chad Brinker was the man who was really in charge at St. Thomas Sports Park.

This was something that was clear to see when you sorted through the power structure on day one: Brinker oversees nearly everybody in that building besides Ran. And while Ran is focused solely on football, taking some responsibilities off his plate after year 1, Brinker was certainly involved in the football side of things too. He's an experienced scout who is known to grind tape daily. He's been the driver of the Titans new expensive analytics department, which has a direct hand in everything from prospect evaluations to injury projections to situational football decisions. So while Chad was "all the non-football business" on paper, there's no doubt he was involved in the football business in reality.

But even with much less on his plate in year two, the Titans still saw Carthon as an unsatisfactory worker. That's harsh, I know. And perhaps it's completely unfair. But frankly, I don't see any other way to piece together what the Titans message has been than them saying Ran wasn't a hard enough worker for the job. And so he was fired, despite the track record on paper that he rubber-stamped being far from a fireable offense.

That's the picture that has been painted. It's an ugly and complicated one. And at this point, it's still impossible to say with certainty that this is all accurate. So why write it? Because if it's not, the Titans have a responsibility to come out and explain themselves. They must set the record straight. There are a couple of questions that still don't make sense, after all. Like why did Amy Adams Strunk give him a 4-year extension before the 2024 season. That's the kind of thing you do to align the timelines of your new coach and GM and tie them at the hip, but obvious that's not what she did. At the very least, she changed her mind at some point.

We may never get the full story on what happened with Ran Carthon in Tennessee. but there's one thing we can say with certainty. The bottom line, honest truth in all of this: Chad Brinker made himself invaluable to the franchise, and Ran Carthon did not.

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