The Tennessee Titans fired general manager Ran Carthon on Tuesday, roughly 48 hours after the team locked up the No. 1 pick in the upcoming draft. While a two-year run for a general manager is not without precedent, it’s alarmingly short. Also alarming is the path that Tennessee took to arrive at this moment, ahead of not only the franchise’s most important draft selection since 2015 but the completion of the team’s new stadium in downtown Nashville.
These must be disorienting times for those who have closely followed this franchise and remember it being the No. 1 seed in the AFC playoffs not long ago. In 2022, the Titans fired general manager Jon Robinson because, as owner Amy Adams Strunk said in a statement: “I believe there is more to be done and higher aspirations to be met.”
The Titans then fired Mike Vrabel at the end of the 2023 season. Strunk, in a statement after that move said: “I believe the teams best positioned for sustained success will be those who empower an aligned and collaborative team across all football functions. Last year, we began a shift in our approach to football leadership and made several changes to our personnel to advance that plan.”
Now, in early 2025, Carthon, who was brought in to replace Robinson, and ostensibly to install this process of sustained success and collaboration, has been let go. The Titans have won nine games in the two seasons since Robinson was dismissed. This did not happen without Carthon going on one of the NFL’s most eye-opening spending sprees—a luxury that did not seem to be afforded to Vrabel and Robinson while they were building a team crafted out of more homegrown talent—which included high-dollar contracts for L’Jarius Sneed, Calvin Ridley and Tony Pollard. While the grading process is not an end-all discussion on a player’s skill, Sneed was rated as the league’s worst cornerback in ’24 before his placement on season-ending IR. While Pollard and Ridley both topped 1,000 yards, the Titans’ offense finished 27th in points scored.
Within that same time frame, Vrabel has become arguably the most sought after head coaching candidate on the market. Robinson has arrived back on the scene as a general manager prospect having interviewed with the New York Jets.
If we’re reading between the lines, it seemed Carthon was supposed to come in and redirect or challenge the weight that Vrabel had amassed in the building. The upside of that prospect was deemed great enough to let go of Vrabel, one of a few head coaches who have been fired over the past decade with a winning record.
Life is always more complicated than the narratives we construct to simplify more granular issues. So, in the defense of the Titans, Vrabel may not have grown into the sought-after coach he is now without a gap year spent as an advisor for the Cleveland Browns, first exploring the personnel side of the organization and later diving into offensive coaching. During that year, employees in Cleveland I spoke with described Vrabel as generous and dynamic. Sometimes those are easier muscles to build and hone when the weight of a head coaching job is not bearing down on one’s shoulders. Also, the desire for Vrabel on the open market is a reflection of the current state of play: Vrabel fits in with the trendy archetype of the moment, the Dan Campbell–esque former player everyman who is tough and capable of demanding respect.
After firing Vrabel, the Titans hired Brian Callahan, their own pivot to a desired coaching archetype—the younger offensive wunderkind—that was wildly popular at the time.
While these individual pivots—a GM from the San Francisco 49ers’ tree in Carthon and a coach from the Gary Kubiak–Sean McVay lineage in Callahan—are understandable in a vacuum, the fact is that Tennessee let go of a general manager with a more than respectable hit rate in the draft (A.J. Brown, Jack Conklin, Harold Landry III, Jeffery Simmons and a majority of players picked since 2016 who are still in the NFL) and a coach who made the playoffs in three of his six seasons (with winning records in four of those six) for a taste of rudderless chaos.
In New England, it took the Kraft family less than a season to feel the whiplash of an organization in disorder after years of stability. They fired Jerod Mayo, it would seem, to interview Vrabel among a host of other candidates. Tennessee doesn’t have that option, of course, but will now begin to look for some version of what they already had and gave away.
