Lots to get to this week, so let’s fire off some Tuesday notes …
You can make it about the rookie quarterback, if you want. Or the Green Mile that Brian Callahan walked with his flat-lining team in Las Vegas on Sunday. No one, to be sure, has to take up a collection plate for the dismissed Titans coach or his staff—they won four games and lost 19, and in a results-driven business that’s not nearly good enough.
The bigger problem is one that none of them, or really anyone else, has control over, and that’s who owns the team. And until that person, Amy Adams Strunk, does a better job setting the course for her once-proud organization, things won’t get better.
A review of the past 34 months puts that much in plain sight.
She fired GM Jon Robinson in December 2022, two days after former Titans receiver A.J. Brown went off against his old team, leading a 35–10 Eagles rout of Tennessee. Robinson was replaced by Ran Carthon a month later, and coach Mike Vrabel was given increased authority over football operations. Twelve months after that, Strunk, not liking the climate in the building, after arranging the Carthon-Vrabel marriage, dismissed her coach.
In the weeks to follow, she promoted Chad Brinker, initially hired as Carthon’s assistant GM, into a newly created president of football operations role, where Carthon would report to his old No. 2, and hired Callahan to replace Vrabel. A year later, Carthon was gone, with Mike Borgonzi and an overhauled personnel staff arriving to replace him.
Now, Callahan has been fired. Just nine months after that.
And once again, the perception percolating internally is the swift move to remove Callahan was a result of an owner wearing the embarrassment of her franchise’s performance. Once humiliated by the Brown trade, or feeling shut out by Vrabel, or like she had to act after sinking to the bottom of the league last year, there she was Sunday, with a large family contingent in attendance at Allegiant Stadium, as her team gave a badly struggling Raiders team its get-right game.
Now, this is not to defend Callahan. They were projecting the former Bengals offensive coordinator both as a leader and a play-caller when they hired him. Following a battleship commander like Vrabel and coaching a rookie quarterback this year, he wasn’t what they’d hoped for on either count. So it had gotten to a point where the football brass saw it as a fait accompli that change was coming at the end of the year, in large part because Cam Ward wasn’t progressing as they’d hoped, and belief in the staff was waning in the locker room
Still, even with players privately grousing some, they liked Callahan. As a result, things hadn’t gotten toxic. That’s why, until Sunday, the idea was to give Callahan the season, under the premise that firing him wouldn’t accomplish much (and could actually work against the team, with the accompanying loss of Callahan’s father and respected line coach, Bill Callahan).
Things obviously changed since. The staff has a regularly scheduled meeting every Monday at 11 a.m. ET, with position coaches giving assessments of their groups and coordinators speaking thereafter. That meeting was moved to noon this week because the team got back late from Vegas; then, in mid-morning, abruptly canceled; and, finally, rescheduled for 12:30 p.m. At that meeting, Callahan came into the room and told his coaches he’d been let go. At 4 p.m., Borgonzi met with the staff to inform them Mike McCoy would be the interim coach.
Strunk wasn’t there—which is another element of all this. She was home in Texas, and isn’t around much, outside of game days. She talks to team president Burke Nihill and Brinker regularly and communicates with players, too. But her decisions have been made without the day-to-day context that being in the building more regularly would give an owner.
You could argue, if she had that context, maybe the Robinson-Vrabel tandem would still be around.
Yes, Robinson traded Brown, but that was largely because of a knee condition threatening the receiver’s longevity, which is why doctors advised the brass not to extend him. And yes, there was the perception of a for-us-or-against-us feel inside Titans HQ with the “Vrabel guys.” And sure, the team went 7–10 in Robinson’s last year, and 6–11 in Vrabel’s last year.
That said, Robinson inherited Marcus Mariota, and a 3–13 team coming off four consecutive losing seasons, and had winning records in each of his first six years in charge. Vrabel arrived in the third of those seasons, and made the playoffs in his second, third and fourth seasons, winning the AFC South twice and getting to an AFC title game with Ryan Tannehill at quarterback. Then, the core of that team aged out and things soured a bit.
Was that really the time to start tearing a battle-tested football operation down? Or would it have made more sense to view Brown’s big game as an unfortunate blip, ride out the rest of 2022 and then reset with Vrabel and Robinson in 2023, with hopes of coming out of a draft slump that had left the cupboard a bit bare?
I tend to think those two guys were, on balance, pretty good at their jobs. Everyone in the league knew it and maybe Strunk would have, too, if she was around more.
Instead, the Titans are still looking for the right mix of people to replace them, having already fired the successors for both in that pursuit. As I see it now, Brinker’s bright, and Borgonzi’s one of the NFL’s best personnel guys, and has already built an experienced, accomplished staff that has the connections and resources to conduct the coaching search ahead at the highest level. But they’ll need time to build, and it’s hard to be convinced that they’ll get it, when more days like Monday might be one embarrassing Sunday away.
Speaking of embarrassing Sundays, if you look at the schedule, there might be another one coming soon. A familiar face will be back with Vrabel’s in town for Week 7.
Then again, maybe the owner figured it’d be a little less humiliating with Callahan gone.
Cam Ward has struggled in his debut season, with the rookie being sacked 25 times through six games. / Stephen R. Sylvanie-Imagn Images
What a coach thinks of Ward will obviously be a part of how attractive the Titans’ job is after the season—and I do think you’ll see some change with McCoy in charge, just based on McCoy’s background. To this point, Ward has looked a little like a fish out of water, and knowing what I do about McCoy … my guess is he’ll get a green light to be more of a playmaker now, given where the team is.
McCoy’s experience with quarterbacks is varied, from pure pocket passers like Peyton Manning and Philip Rivers, to a true option quarterback like Tim Tebow, to an improviser like Jake Delhomme. So, at least on paper, he should have it in his bag to give Ward leeway.
And, again, his performance is important, in part because of the situation Strunk’s put her football team in. The Titans are not moving off of Ward, in all likelihood, in 2026 or 2027, and it’d be hard for any coach to trust, given the history, that he’ll get more than two years to prove himself with that franchise. So finding someone who believes in Ward will be important, if not essential, and there’ll be more believers the better Ward plays.
(I’d also, for what it’s worth, think the organization will probably look for a more experienced head coach this time around.)
There was a play in Sunday night’s game, early in the second quarter, that got almost no attention. On first-and-10, with 12 minutes left in the half, Patrick Mahomes took the shotgun snap, manipulated the defense with his eyes on Marquise “Hollywood” Brown, working out of the slot, and threw a no-look pass to tight end Noah Gray, split out and running a hitch, for six yards.
No one thought much of it, well, because why would they?
But the Chiefs’ people did—what they saw was a quarterback trusting what was around him, from the protection to the skill players to the play call, like he would’ve earlier in his career. His feet and eyes were in the right places. His head was, too. And for the rest of the AFC, that should be pretty terrifying.
Hope everyone had a good time burying Kansas City over the past few weeks. Because, by the looks of what happened Sunday night, that’s over now, and the 2025 Chiefs are just getting started.
So let’s start with the protection piece of it. Rookie Josh Simmons came along faster than anyone expected at left tackle. But even without him Sunday, there was a competency at the position—with veteran Jaylon Moore, brought aboard on a two-year, $30 million deal in March—that was absent for long stretches the past few years. And next to Moore was fast-improving Kingsley Suamataia, who moved to guard this offseason to replace Joe Thuney.
Then, there’s a deeper well of skill talent, with Brown, Xavier Worthy and Isiah Pacheco healthy, guys such as Tyquan Thornton and Brashard Smith contributing, JuJu Smith-Schuster and Kareem Hunt bringing an element of toughness, and Travis Kelce still finding ways to make important plays. And all that’s happened without the team’s best skill player, Rashee Rice in the mix—Rice showed up in shape, with his suspension ending this week.
That means now, the vision that Andy Reid and OC Matt Nagy have had for their offense, with Brown and Worthy threatening downfield and opening space underneath for Rice and Kelce, can come together, and with the best offensive line the Chiefs have had in a while.
All of which has to be unsettling for a lot of other people in the AFC.
Baker Mayfield led Tampa Bay to a 30–19 win over the 49ers. / Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images
We made the case for Baker Mayfield as an MVP candidate in my Week 6 takeaways—and, now, I think we can give the rest of the Buccaneers their due. What Tampa Bay has done over the past few weeks, with so many guys hurt, is really remarkable. And maybe most of all, to me, has been how they’re performing down the stretch of games, almost regardless of who’s in the lineup.
The coaches see it as a sign of the standard the veterans are setting.
“The maturity level of the older guys, making the young guys accountable, with the way they come to work every day, has really been a joy to see,” coach Todd Bowles told me. “That really has been giving us the edge to scratch out games, and fight for our lives. Now, even though the games are close, we don’t feel like we are fighting for our lives, we feel very confident, those guys feel very confident they can make plays to win the game.
“And there’s a lot of trust.”
In other words, it’s Mike Evans and Chris Godwin setting the bar for rookies such as Emeka Egbuka and Tez Johnson, or Tristan Wirfs and Luke Goedeke showing the way for Charlie Heck, or Mayfield playing at a level that compels everyone to hold the rope.
And it’s something that should serve the Bucs down the line, when we find out whether this particular group has a shot to go further than the past couple Tampa teams did.
“I mean, it’s really developing mental toughness,” Bowles said. “Understanding the work we’ve put in practice, especially in two minute, which we work diligently at, those guys get into the game and the moment’s not too big for them. They treat it just like practice, so the confidence level is high that they can execute because of the things they’ve seen in practice for so long. It’s really establishing toughness and understanding we feel like we have a chance to win every week.”
Which, clearly, they do.
And here’s some credit to the Patriots for having conviction in Drake Maye in 2024.
The opportunity was there for a team riddled with holes to build up capital by using the No. 3 pick as a trade chip. The Vikings offered the Patriots the 11th pick, the 23rd pick and their 2025 first-round pick (along with Day 3 pick swaps that favored Minnesota) to go up eight spots to No. 3 and get Maye. The Giants offered their 2025 first-rounder to move up three spots, from No. 6 to No. 3.
In the Giants scenario, the Patriots would’ve had their shot at Michael Penix Jr., J.J. McCarthy and Bo Nix. In the Vikings scenario, they could’ve gotten McCarthy or Nix. And ultimately, they decided that Maye was better than those quarterbacks and the combination of draft capital they would’ve gotten after taking one of the other guys at No. 6 or No. 11.
It’s also a good reference point going forward that if you believe in a guy at that position, like the Patriots very much did that spring (they loved how Maye endured a tough 2023 season and refused to blame anyone else for it), the opportunity to get him is priceless.
The Bills’ injuries are piling up—with Dalton Kincaid, Matt Milano, DaQuan Jones, Joshua Palmer and Terrel Bernard now among the wounded, and the team at 4–2.
So the bye week is coming at the right time. And their handling of Week 8 in Carolina will be interesting, too, given how winnable that game is, and how important the one after it, a home date against the Chiefs set for Nov. 2, promises to be.
I was fairly stunned by Mike Tomlin’s commentary on the Joe Flacco trade on Monday. In case you missed it …
“To be honest, it was shocking to me,” Tomlin said Monday. “Andrew Berry must be a lot smarter than me or us because it doesn’t make sense to me to trade a quarterback that you think enough of to make your opening-day starter to a division opponent that’s hurting in that area, but that’s just my personal feelings.”
My feeling? I think Tomlin is getting Kevin Stefanski’s back on this one.
With Fred Warner out for the year, the 49ers’ defense is likely to lean on yet another rookie to fill the void left by the all-world linebacker—with third-rounder Nick Martin a good bet to see more snaps.
He’ll join defensive linemen Mykel Williams, C.J. West and Alfred Collins, and corner Upton Stout among those in his draft class playing sizable roles on that side of the ball.
(Which is another reason why it was so huge for Kyle Shanahan to get Robert Saleh back.)
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