Titans potentially hiring Matt Nagy as head coach is threatening to create a civil war with the fan base at the worst possible time

I can’t say I understand the level of hate for Nagy, but there sure is a ton of it from Titans fans.

Easton Freeze — Tennessee Titans Beat Writer
Add as preferred source on Google

The day of head coach reckoning seems to have arrived for the Tennessee Titans, and soon their fans will know if one of their worst nightmares has come true.

That nightmare, for some reason, is Chiefs OC Matt Nagy. He has been a strong candidate in this hunt for Brian Callahan’s replacement since the position opened last October. He’s gone from a logical connection to GM Mike Borgonzi from their days together in Kansas City, all the way to a steak dinner with Titans brass on the eve of a two-man finalist competition for the job.

I can’t say I fully understand why, at this moment, there is such a storm of disgust surrounding Nagy’s candidacy. But there is no denying it exists, and it looks like it might make landfall soon. Batten the hatches.

My opinion of Matt Nagy for Titans head coach

Before diving into documenting the hate that so many fans clearly have for Nagy, let me get my opinion of him as a coaching candidate on the record: I am perfectly fine with him as the choice if Borgonzi and the search committee feel compelled to back him.

I do not, in fact, think the Titans’ five-pack of executives leading this search is a big group of morons. And I know that they are in that room, while I am not. The coaching cycle is perhaps the dumbest knot we as fans tie ourselves into on an annual basis.

Of course, coaching matters in the NFL more than in any other major American sport. It is tremendously important to get it right. But the truth is that we know relatively little about these candidates before they are hired.

A lot of the things you see fans cling to love or to hate a candidate on social media are, frankly, mocked by coaches, players, executives, and others who know how the league actually works behind the scenes. There’s a whole lot of fluff. Everything can be used as a Rorschach Test.

Very few coaches are truly awful or incredible candidates on paper. Most have resumes that fall somewhere between intriguing and satisfactory if we’re being fair and honest. So, unless you think your team’s hiring committee is full of terrible decision-makers, it’s pretty foolish to adopt an extreme opinion of a decision before we get a chance to know the guy and see him coach the team.

Choosing Nagy would raise many questions. I like the idea of eight or nine coaching candidates more than I liked Nagy when I made my rankings. But on paper, Nagy’s resume has aged gracefully. This is why I don’t fully understand the vitriol.

He coached for four seasons in Chicago, with two objectively bad quarterbacks, Mitch Trubisky and Justin Fields. He took average rosters to the playoffs twice and posted a .500 or better record in three of his four years. He has also been a part of extreme success in Kansas City over the years, of course.

And when you listen to him and the people around him, he sounds like a guy who connects well with people, can command a room, and has done a lot of reflection and work to improve where he fell short in his first coaching stint. That sounds like a reasonable candidate to me.

There will be plenty of time to hate Nagy in the future if he is the next head coach of the Tennessee Titans. It’s perfectly reasonable to badly wish the choice was somebody else you really liked. It’s also fair to have many, many questions about taking this particular swing. I know that I will have plenty if it’s what they do. But doing so fairly and with an open mind is, to me, the right thing to do.

Titans fans clearly hate the idea of Matt Nagy

None of this is stopping the vast majority of Titans fans from hating the idea of Nagy as a head coach. I haven’t seen public pre-backlash to a football decision like this since the University of Tennessee nearly hired Greg Schiano. Even muttering something positive about his history as a head coach online is met with violent disgust:

It’s well-established how good friends Borgonzi and Nagy are, which is what makes this whole situation messy. The Titans have and will forever swear that their interview process was legitimate, Nagy was not the inevitable hire, and that he just won the interview fair and square.

That’s perfectly possible. But even if you are inclined to believe it, it can’t be proven. And the vast majority of people are determined to never believe it. It’s completely unfalsifiable, and the Titans will have to live with that if he is their choice.

Plenty of people seem upset about the way Tennessee has gone about its interview process now that we’ve all lived through the weeks-long saga of casting a very wide net. People feel like it was all a cheap trick to distract from the inevitable choice. They feel insulted.

And while I understand where these people are coming from on the surface, this is yet another “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation the Titans find themselves in. I feel strongly that had they gone the other way, the cries from these same people would be just as loud, and probably louder. If they’d just interviewed three candidates and then hired Nagy, attempting to hide nothing about their target all along, the masses would be feral over passing up so many viable candidates in this process.

With Harbaugh, Stefanski, McDaniel, Saleh, and plenty of others who the entire league is interested in floating out there, outrage over “not even wanting to talk to them!” would have been rampant.

If you’re curious why self-described Nagy haters feel the way they do, there are many answers in the replies to this post on X below:

Results vary, but a very popular reason is that fans of both the Bears and now the Chiefs seem very anxious to have gotten rid of the guy, and actively warn Titans fans online that he is a big fat mistake.

This leaguewide hearsay is a powerful drug. And in general, it’s wise to listen to how the last fans to deal with somebody feel about that person. But the reality with a failed head coach tenure is that fans of that team always sour strongly on the guy. And Chiefs fans seem intent on blaming Nagy for a lot of their offensive struggles the past couple seasons, even though he is in Andy Reid’s shadow. I’m just not sure I buy that.

The bottom line here is that the Titans are keenly aware of the ramifications of hiring Nagy. Amy Adams Strunk knows exactly how it will be received. Borgonzi does too. Perhaps the weight of this PR burden will keep her from ultimately giving the green light. And if not, it feels like a sure bet that it will be something she makes Borgonzi responsible for, tying his job to this hire in a way that is clearly more extreme than hiring a different candidate.

This is why, if Borgonzi still pulls the trigger on this hire despite all of this, I cannot help but marvel at what it tells us about his certainty that it will work. This is heavy stuff! GMs don’t get second chances; he’d be voluntarily putting all his poker chips on the Nagy square if he does this.

He’d be voluntarily putting his new coach and his whole organization behind the PR eight-ball for the next eight months minimum, as Nagy’s tenure will have to “work” twice as hard to gain people’s trust at every turn. And every misstep would be met with less grace than another candidate would receive. There wouldn’t be a typical honeymoon period here.

Borgonzi might be the only non-player in this entire organization who has a store of built-up goodwill to his name right now. Fans, his locker room, Adams Strunk, Brinker; everybody has entered this offseason putting a lot of trust on his shoulders. If he makes this move, he will be voluntarily taking a match to much of that goodwill, and he knows it.

It is impossible for me to acknowledge all of this and not be willing to at least hear out the man who believes this is the right path despite it all.

Related Articles