Why the Titans decided to pull the plug on firing Brian Callahan now before Mike Vrabel’s Patriots returned to Nashville

The Tennessee Titans are a good football team again… right?

The Titans decided to pull the trigger on firing Brian Callahan on Monday afternoon following their 20-10 listless loss to the Raiders in Week 6, and the hope is this team can somehow start trending in the right direction because of it.

This is a move that is only surprising in terms of timing, not the outcome. The end of the Callahan regime was easy to spot over the horizon less than a month into the 2025 season. That’s how bad things had quickly gotten. The bottom line is that coaching miscues were a big story in two of the first three games of the year, and Callahan “chose” to hand over play-calling duties to QB coach Bo Hardegree before the end of September. The canaries in this coal mine have been dropping dead left and right.

I didn’t expect it to come this early. I knew the Titans wanted to ride it out and practice patience as much as they could. And I knew they wouldn’t mind riding out a lost season with some semblance of stability for Cam Ward and the rest of the players in that locker room until making a change actually allowed them to get a jump on the coaching market this winter. So why jump on this now?

Why Amy Adams Strunk Chose To Fire Callahan Now

I’ve always felt firing a head coach in-season, particularly early in a season, only makes sense in very few circumstances. If the locker room no longer respects the coach, that’s the easiest indicator that it’s time to move on. There’s no coming back from losing the locker room.

I hadn’t seen any potential signs of that, as somebody who is regularly around the team. Perhaps Jeffery Simmons’ comments after the Raiders’ loss were the first glimpse into a cracking facade?

But for the dam to finally break in practice the week after your first win of the season? That’s really when the locker room finally turned on this staff? That doesn’t seem to track.

Another reason to fire a coach in-season is if they are actively hurting the team’s chances on gameday with game management. This was clearly an area of concern in the first couple of games, but since handing off play-calling duties, there really haven’t been any massive game-management stories that have dominated the narrative. And if you want to say the play-calling was hamstringing this young quarterback, well, that wasn’t Callahan’s doing any longer. That got taken away from him, which materially changed absolutely nothing.

So why now? What caused this? What led to owner Amy Adams Strunk further bolstering her ugly reputation for impatience, instability, and incompetence? She is keenly aware of what she’s infamous for in the eyes of the public, and I know she’s wanted to shake that reputation. But she isn’t beating the allegations here!

In the immediate aftermath of this news, I’ve now heard from two different people inside the Titans building that there doesn’t appear to be an actual interim head coach plan in place.

The Titans will name one eventually, with STC Bones Fassell, DC Dennard Wilson, and senior offensive assistant Mike McCoy as the leading internal candidates. But to not have a plan reeks of ownership, making this call. So why assemble the brain trust and pull this plug in Week 7?

It’s hard not to think the answer is, at least in part, Mike Vrabel. The former Titans head coach is headed to town with his Patriots this weekend to take out any pent-up anger he has on this hapless Titans team. Cynically, why would you want to give him the satisfaction of taking his replacement out behind the woodshed? Except it wouldn’t have the dignity of privacy behind a proverbial woodshed, it would be in the proverbial living room of Adams Strunk’s own home: Nissan Stadium, on television, in the light of day.

The Titans know it’s liable to be ugly. Vrabel is ruthless, and the Titans are touchdown underdogs at home. If there were ever a game to try to capture the artificial “fired coach” bump that teams seem to experience in these cases, a game against the Patriots would be a nice time to do so!

This also softens the narrative of timing if the Callahan firing had come after a loss to the Patriots. Adams Strunk will never beat the allegations of allowing A.J. Brown’s thrashing of the Titans’ defense in Philadelphia to lead to the firing of GM Jon Robinson two days later. That’s a particularly ugly, petty, foolish look for an owner. And if she’d (at least seemed) to do it again because of a loss to Vrabel, well, that’s a whole lot uglier a look than ripping off the bandaid now.

The bottom line is that something changed here. The Titans did not want to make this change in-season, no matter how tough it might’ve gotten. They wanted to hunker down and stay the course until the winter. But now, just six weeks in, that plan is out the window.

The anticipated firing of Callahan was moved way up on the schedule. He leaves Tennessee with a dismal 4-19 record in 23 games, coaching a poor roster, and the hope for everybody still involved with the franchise is that his dismissal can somehow spark improvement for this team’s future.