NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- When the Tennessee Titans went to Kansas City for the season opener on Sept. 7 and sprung an upset, tight end Delanie Walker got excited.
“I thought that was the team that we were: a fast, smart, disciplined team,” he said. “And that wasn’t the case.”
The Titans capped a 2-14 debacle with a 27-10 loss to the team they are chasing, the AFC South champion Indianapolis Colts.
Tennessee hit on all the themes we’ve seen this season. It lacked playmakers, allowed long third-down conversions, and couldn’t sustain drives with conversions of its own.
When the Titans got a 79-yard punt from Brett Kern, they saw the Colts counter with an 80-yard catch-and-run by Reggie Wayne. When the Titans got a 52-yard kickoff return, they saw Indy's Josh Cribbs return his next chance 76 yards.
After that, the Titans had little expectation of winning.
In the wake of this season, the worst for the franchise since 1994, the locker room on Sunday evening was still filled with guys who echoed their coach’s primary message.
In the face of a lot of tough games and the sting that comes from losing, Ken Whisenhunt said the team needs to stay the course.
“You stick with what you believe in,” he said. “That’s one of the things I have learned from some of the good coaches I have been around. You’ve got a foundation for what you believe and how you do it, and stick with that. …You believe in what you are doing and that’s why you do it.”
That’s a far cry from: We will evaluate every single element of what unfolded, including our methods, and will make any change necessary.
And since Whisenhunt’s players know he intends to be unwavering, no one is jumping to say he shouldn’t be.
“It works,” safety Michael Griffin said, pointing to the same game Walker referred to. “We saw in the first game it works.
“… It has worked, and you’ve got to believe in it. If you start doubting the system, then it’s never going to work. You’ve got to believe in the system, and if you do that, it will work.”
Said defensive end Jurrell Casey: “If you don’t believe in it, it’s not going to work. You’ve got to believe in it. You’ve got to execute the plays that they call. Everything comes down to a player making the play and beating a guy one-on-one.”
Yes, the coach designs the systems and the plays, and if players do things correctly, they should work. But the coach also has to adjust when they don’t work. At the start of a term with a new team, Whisenhunt needed to bend to what he inherited far more than he did this season.
This presents a tough line for players to negotiate.
Job security can suffer when a player even subtly suggests a coaching issue, and such comments can set off a firestorm. But talking so strongly about faith in the way things are being done can make players appear to the public to be hypnotized or delusional.
Like the system or not, Whisenhunt signed a five-year deal and is going nowhere. Players who can do what he wants and buy in are going to be here. Players who can’t and don’t are going to be pushed out as soon as possible.
If the 2015 team doesn’t make significant progress, Titans CEO Tommy Smith could decide to make changes at the top, and a similar cycle will restart.
Second-year guard Chance Warmack is one of the few young players who followed the desired and expected course, playing better at the end of the season than he did at the start.
I asked Warmack: Do you think everybody is on board with Whisenhunt, or do you think everybody knows they have to say they are on board with Whisenhunt? And is there a difference?
“I don’t think there is a difference,” he said. “The guys in here are honest people. If they didn’t feel like it was the right thing to say, they wouldn’t say it.
“Everybody has each others’ backs. Coaches, players believe what we are doing is right. We just have to keep doing it and the fruits of our labor are going to show up.”
They believe a lot more than I do. I think for most, seeing is believing. I think for most, they'd like to forget what they saw.
