Thread by @ThomasGower

Sooo.... Mike Mularkey ... #Titans (1/x)

It really hard to fire a coach who goes 9-7 and 9-7 and makes the playoffs after you went 5-27 the two years before that.

Until I was told* it might be otherwise, I thought Mularkey's job was basically completely safe. Wouldn't have bought into any reports.

*-I don't play the Sources game. Don't try to. No interest in it. But sometimes I hear things. Mularkey's not completely safe was one of them.

But ll I saw from my position was Amy Adams Strunk hired him after non-process & results hadn't been bad. Felt safe, but I Really Knew little.

Implicit in the whole question of when to fire a coach is what's a good result & what isn't. TEN after 2015 need new HC to provide certain things, several of them hard to evaluate from the outside.

One data point is Titans have gone 18-14 past two years + 1 playoff win. Much better than 5-27, but how much better than expected?

My baseline expectation was based on my view Mariota gave them avg+ QB play, AFCS is bad, and fixing obvious roster failures would get them pretty far. Think I predicted 7-9 in both 2014 & 2015.

Called 6-10 IIRC for 2016. 14-18-ish was kind of a "par" expectation for 2016 + 2017. 18-14 is above that... but Mularkey's Titans are 12(+1)-7 in games decided by <7, 6-7 in games by 8+. Not far off from "par" expectation.

(NFL people will talk about knowing how to win close games and whatnot. That's not completely meaningless, but winning games by a lot predicts future wins better than close wins.)

Looking at results, I'm seeing roughly around par with Mularkey. Not bad, definitely, but also not great.

Noted the old "NFL teams are billion dollar lemonade stands." Key part of my interpretation of that is lack of processes & systematized decision-making. No clue if my idea of "par" results & what Titans were doing had anything in common.

If I ran an NFL team (which is probably a bad idea), I would definitely try to have realistic expectations as to how good my team would be in that year, but also Y+1, Y+2, Y+3 & know what my planning window is.

That goes beyond not just the obvious roster stuff & cap flexibility, but also knowing how good I can expect to be & what steps I might reasonably take to affect that.

One of the big macro-level issues here is the Titans are enjoying one of the biggest benefits the current NFL offers, an avg+ QB on a cost-controlled sub-market contract. They have one more year of that.

The Colts had a !#!$!@# awful team in 2011, earned the #1 pick by awfulness, and made the playoffs Luck's first 3 years & won playoff games. Titans are well behind that for reasons we can't change now.

(Yes, Ruston Webster. But if Ruston Webster was better, Titans don't go 5-27, don't get high picks, don't get Marcus. Ship's mostly sailed. Worth noting, but not worth dwelling on.)

So overall Mularkey results have been par. Huge missed opportunity but has worked okay from a smaller perspective.

A more perspicacious franchise will say, fine, great, now can we get from 9-7 to True Super Bowl Contender w/ one more year of Cheap Marcus and then Marcus At A Real Salary.

Key issue here for Mularkey was overall offensive regression from 2016 to 2017. Stuff stopped working late in 2016, never really started working regularly again in 2017.

I won't make this Yet Another 2017 Offense Rant, don't that enough. But it looked bad an awful lot & nothing seemed to change.

Even if Mularkey's completely safe, that cannot happen again in 2018. Huge issue going forward. On the fence, still a concern. Saved his job with wins, still a concern.

And 2018 is your last year of vacation. Luck might be back, Colts have a real GM, Jags might get a QB, Texans ditto, cheap Marcus. 2017 AFC stinks ex-NE/PIT. Add in FA/draft & much stranger things have happened in this league.

Not an opportunity you're getting back if you miss it. Is Mularkey the right guy to take advantage of that, or could a new coach do better w/ McVay-like effect?

Don't know how real the interest in Josh McDaniels was from the Titans side v. McD's apparent real interest in working w/ Marcus. Obvious J-Rob ties, but did they go beyond the natural factors? Can't answer that.

Making decisions off single-game results seems like an absurdly bad idea. Evaluations should be holistic. Saving a playoff spot w/ that dreadful win against the Jaguars should decide jack squat.

But see above re processes & NFL teams. The KC game, ditto. But pause for a second. The complaint about Mularkey is that he was wedded to a single way to play offense, & didn't change if it wasn't working.

And what did we see in the KC game? Not the Mularkey offense, with its condensed formations, under center, 2TE personnel, & heavy run focus that I didn't like even when it was working.

Instead spread, tempo, 3WR sets, 55% pass on 1st/2nd downs in Qtr 1-3. They were in shotgun half+ the time on every possession but 4-minute drill to end the game. What I'd been screaming for.

And it didn't come completely from out of nowhere. Saw a bit of it in ARI, more against SF and LAR, even though not at all against JAX. Evidence of actual learning!

It wasn't all positive, of course. Titans got a few breaks. But those are signs that Mularkey might care more about winning games than being right, something you can't just assume in the NFL.

Obvious Q is "why didn't we see more of that earlier?" Coaches know how to play a certain way. Still a lot I don't like about Mularkey, his style & his staff. I'd guess staff changes will come this offseason.

But I'd been the guy saying for months changing OC doesn't do much, it's Mularkey & he won't change. And he does. And it worked. And they won. I'm happy. But can I trust those changes?

From the outside, I don't. Pretty sure he still Believes in stuff. People do that. They don't change overnight. But it's a sign you're not condemned to failure if what he Believes In doesn't work.

(What Mularkey says about the effect of job rumors on him and his family, congratulations, it comes with the territory. And the paycheck.)

Since you're bringing him back, I think Mularkey does get a 1-year extension through 2019 so you can attract the staff you need. More than that, I wouldn't do at all (I'll accept it as Flacco-like if they win the SB).

And, really, I'm just glad my nightmare scenario of "Mike Mularkey gets to Year 5 without making the playoffs" didn't come to pass.

(Yes, this would've been a blog post 2, 3, 5, 8, 10 years ago, and would've probably been better for it.) Will now get to questions.

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