Titans officially expected to land top offensive coordinator target after Bills head coach news leaves just one small hurdle to clear

Brian Daboll, you are (almost) a Tennessee Titan.

Easton Freeze — Tennessee Titans Beat Writer
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The most important hire of the Tennessee Titans’ offseason was head coach. A close second was offensive coordinator. And as of Tuesday morning, It’s looking like both positions will be filled in short order.

As soon as new head coach Robert Saleh accepted the Titans job early last week, all eyes have been on who he would be able to convince to come be his compliment on the offensive side of the ball. This person is going to have an outsized impact on QB Cam Ward and a young offensive group that will determine the fate of this franchise’s rebuild. It’s really, really important.

After former Dolphins HC Mike McDaniel landed with the Chargers, the consensus turned their attention to former Giants HC Brian Daboll. Now that the Buffalo Bills have tapped their new head coach, it seems all but locked into place that he will be working with Cam Ward in 2026.

Brian Daboll expected to be new Titans Offensive Coordinator

The NFL is a multi-billion dollar mega-industry, and yet it still ebbs and flows with funny group-think trends like any other business. The strategy of the day often defines hiring cycles and eras of football, and the annual coaching carousel is no exception. The hot young offensive mastermind archetype of coach largely dominated cycles for the past decade, but we’ve seen a hard league-wide pivot towards prioritizing experience.

Perhaps we over-fished the innovated young OC waters. Or maybe we’d simply cast aside too many high quality coaches worthy of a second chance. A third uncomfortable option would be that this ends up being a fleeting fad, driven by a conservative desire for stability that leads teams to bump up against hard ceilings in the near future.

Whatever the case, the majority of the teams making coaching changes this winter are all-in on coaches who have been around the block. And the Titans are expected to land two former head coaches in their two top roles now that Brian Daboll has lost out on the Bills HC position.

The Athletic’s Dianna Russini was the first to state this plainly last week: if Daboll doesn’t land in Buffalo, he’s expected to land in Tennessee. This is proving to have been correct, after NFL Network’s Mike Garafolo said over the weekend the Titans were waiting to sign Daboll ASAP, and now ESPN is affirming that they expect him to land in Tennessee after all.

This news came quickly after the Buffalo Bills’ short head coach search landed on the in-house candidate Joe Brady.

After Bills owner Terry Pegula threw Sean McDermott’s coaching staff directly under the bus in the worst press conference of the year last week, he’s now preparing to introduce his fanbase to their new head coach: one of those idiots who “made” them draft Keon Coleman (who is still on the team)! Some truly brilliant stuff is going on up there right now.

This leaves Tennessee comfortably in the drivers seat pending one final road block: the Las Vegas Raiders head coach job. Daboll would apparently head to Vegas if they offered him the gig, for which he has interviewed twice. But it appears that Seahawks OC Klint Kubiak and Broncos offensive assitant Davis Webb are favorites to land that one.

Assuming Daboll comes to Tennessee, it would reunite him with his fellow early-2020’s New York City NFL head coach Robert Saleh! That fact alone is a real Rorschach test: are you excited to have two head-coach types with extensive experience manning each side of the ball, or terrified that you’ve farmed former Jets and Giants coaches?

All joking aside, I think the former opinion is the reasonable one. These two coaches were both sought-after across the league in this hiring cycle, and they’re both widely respected for their expertise. An interesting element to this impending marriage is that Daboll would be a significant departure from Saleh’s coaching tree roots. Saleh has no clear connection of any kind to Daboll, who comes from a Belichick background with stops in New England, Kansas City, and Buffalo most notably before becoming the Giants’ head coach.

It was publicly known how much Daboll liked Cam Ward during the draft process last spring. After coaching the second QB off the board in New York, he’s now expected to get a crack at coaching the top pick he may have wanted all along.

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