Why the Titans Will Continue to Lose

I can trace the slow and steady decline of the Tennessee Titans to one play: Kevin Dyson falling one yard short of a game-winning touchdown in Super Bowl 34. From that point on, things have never been the same. They have not been completely bad...there have been some high points and some very low points, but one thing is clear. The Titans will never be a playoff caliber team until the front office learns how to put a football team together.

When the Titans came to Tennessee from Houston, the fans were spoiled quickly. Set aside the one season that we played in Memphis, the horrible chaotic ghetto-infested town with more panhandlers per capita of any other major city, and beginning in 1998 the Titans put up two 8-8 seasons. (Sure, they were 8-8 in Memphis too....but Memphis is so God-forsaken that no one noticed). For a "new" team, going 8-8 in the first 2 seasons isn't bad. The fans fell in love, the ticket revenue came streaming in, and fans in Nashville got used to seeing Frank Wycheck sexually harassing waitresses at the local Hooters.

Then 1999 happens. You have a stacked offense of McNair, Eddie George, Derrick Mason, Wychek. A solid defense. A good season turns into an amazing season with the iconic Music City Miracle (whose radio commentary is one of my all-time favorite sports clips...right up there with Skip Caray's call of Sid Bream's struggle to reach home plate in Gmae 7 of the 1992 NLCS). The Titans come up one yard shy of beating the Rams and all of a sudden Tennessee is one of the top teams in the league.

Except, they weren't. At least, they didn't manage the team like they were. They kept Jeff Fisher, who I think is a great coach, but didn't give him the players to work with.

Since 2000, the front office staff either has the worst scouting system in professional sports or the accounting skills of a 10th grader. Actually it might be both. With all this success and all this additional revenue, the Titans' have had absolutely no clue as to how to develop good players into great ones or keep the great ones they already have. What usually happens is they think they know how to develop a good one to a great one, let a great one go, and then the good one flops for two seasons before being traded away for something equivalent to a new Gatorade cooler and pom poms for the cheerleading squad.

(Sidebar: The Titans have absolutely the worst looking cheerleaders in the league. A friend of mine used to work at a paper in E. Tennessee and got their media guide. I swear they recruited from the local homeless shelter.)

The Titans have become a feeder club. They get talent in the draft. That talent plays for a while and gets more developed. That talent is then cleared out to make room for salary cap money to sign big name draft picks that like to pick up strippers in Vegas and shoot people a lot. Letting the likes of Samari Rolle, Tank Williams go for virtually nothing has left the secondary depleted. Derrick Mason is looking pretty good with the Ravens still. Drew Bennett had an acceptable year.

The ultimate example of this is the lockout fiasco that happened with Steve McNair. Veteran quarterback who has literally taken his lumps for the team, gets "replaced" by a hotshot rookie and they won't let him practice. So he goes to the Ravens and has a couple more productive seasons while Vince Young (Peace Be With Him) is hailed as the savior of the Titans. Vince (Peace Be With Him) might still be the second-coming of Warren Moon or whatever, but he was not ready to carry that team. With Kerry Collins in the starting spot and Neal O'Donnell, who bags groceries at the Kroger across from the stadium, on speed-dial to come out of retirement at a moment's notice, letting McNair go was a big risk. Yet, they took it and lo and behold they became average again, finishing 8-8.

Vince (Peace Be With Him) is good, but he does not have anywhere near the same quality of weapons around him as McNair did. Lendell White was close this year, but he still has a ways to go. The Chrises were jokes. The draft room should look something like a Vegas casino, as they need to fill so many spots the GM might as well spin a roulette wheel and draft the position that comes up. Only when the player development staff decides to build the team around Vince (Peace Be With Him) the right way, will they become a good team again.