Mike Vrabel’s firing met with shock, followed by opportunity for every NFL team looking for a coach

When the news dropped, it was a wave of disbelief. Tennessee Titans coach Mike Vrabel — the bone marrow identity of his NFL franchise — had been shown to the door by team owner Amy Adams Strunk. Across the league, text messages exploded with utter incredulity.

First from a league source who worked with Vrabel for years and was just hearing the news: “You’re s***ting me.”

Next, a steady flow of reactions from high-ranking league executives into Tuesday evening:

“Unbelievable. … Guy is a phenomenal coach. … What a crazy business. … Hard to believe he’s free. … He will have a job in five seconds. … Big mistake on their part.”

Finally, an NFC general manager put a spin on it: “The Titans just got a lot worse, and a few of these coaching searches just got a lot easier.”

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This is what happens when a team fires a head coach who is nearly universally respected across the league. A coach who led that team to an AFC championship game and two division titles in six years, despite never having a high-caliber quarterback in a league defined by high-caliber quarterbacks. A defensive wizard who won NFL Coach of the Year after an injury-ridden 2021 campaign that saw the Titans roster an NFL record 91 players. And lest we forget, a coach who was ultimately undercut by former general manager Jon Robinson’s personnel mistakes, which gradually edged swaths of the Tennessee depth chart off a cliff.

You fire that guy, you invite the thunderheads of criticism to your doorstep, particularly when you don’t show up to the news conference explaining the decision. Strunk did exactly that, meeting with Vrabel one-on-one to deliver his pink slip Tuesday, then marching out her hand-chosen general manager, Ran Carthon, to face all the hard questions. It was a move that suggested two things about what happened Tuesday: First, Strunk knew she would be under significant pressure to explain exactly what went wrong…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/mike-vrabels-firing-met-with-shock-followed-by-opportunity-for-every-nfl-team-looking-for-a-coach-052932234.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-01-10 05:29:32

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