On Sunday, former Titans coach Mike Vrabel won’t be facing his replacement when the Patriots come to Nashville.
The Titans have fired coach Brian Callahan.
The team announced the move on Monday afternoon, making Callahan the first coach to be fired during the 2025 regular season. There’s a very good chance he won’t be the last.
The last straw for Callahan came in Las Vegas on Sunday, a 20-10 loss after which defensive tackle Jeffery Simmons said the team had one of its worst weeks of practice.
The end arguably should have come after a Week 4 26-0 loss to the Texans in Houston. Callahan got a reprieve from the football gods, in the form of a dropped ball by Cardinals running back Emari Demercado and an unholy roller that was kicked into the end zone for a Tennessee touchdown in a stunning come-from-behind win.
Callahan exits with a record of 4-19. An interim head coach has not yet been named.
Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel is set for a walk down memory lane in Week 7.
The Patriots will be in Tennessee to face the Titans next Sunday and it will mark Vrabel’s first time back in town since the Titans dismissed him after the 2023 season. During an appearance on WEEI on Monday, Vrabel acknowledged that the history makes this game unique but said that nothing can change when it comes to the way the Patriots approach it.
“Well, I think it’s going to feel different, [but] it can’t be different,” Vrabel said, via WEEI.com. “It has to be the way we prepare, the way that we try to put together a game plan. But I mean, I think it’s gonna - we have to recognize the obvious, having spent time there. So [there’s] a lot of people on the other side that I know that I coached or worked with.”
Vrabel was 54-45 in six seasons with the Titans and he has put the Patriots on a good path with a 4-2 start in his first season. The Titans have gone 4-19 under his replacement Brian Callahan and a loss to Vrabel in Week 7 would likely push the Titans closer to finding another new coach. If that thought brings any extra satisfaction to Vrabel, he’s keeping it to himself.
After Sunday’s loss to the Raiders, Titans head coach Brian Callahan said that the team “felt good coming into the game” but that doesn’t appear to be a universal assessment of everyone’s frame of mind.
Defensive tackle Jeffery Simmons had a different take after the 20-10 loss. Simmons called the Titans’ performance while falling behind 17-0 “bad football” and that it came after a week that left him feeling like the team was not ready to build off of their Week 5 win over the Cardinals.
“In this league, you have to learn how to stack wins,” Simmons said, via Buck Reasing of 104.5 The Zone. “To be able to carry that momentum over — it started at practice. If I’m being honest, this was one of our worst weeks of practice. Came out flat Thursday and things like that — sometimes things carry over. In this league, you have to prove it every week and reprove it.”
Quarterback Cam Ward agreed with Simmons about the team coming out flat at practice and said that they played the same way against a Raiders team that came into Sunday with a four-game losing streak. The practice habits could improve this week, but it’s unclear if there will be a significant change in the results without larger changes around the team.
Things aren’t getting any better for the Titans offense.
A week after picking up their first win of the season thanks in large part to an error-filled performance by the Cardinals, the Titans slumped back to their losing ways in Las Vegas. They spotted the Raiders a 17-0 lead and turned the ball over three times en route to a 20-17 loss that dropped them to 1-5 on the season.
The Titans have now scored 83 points this season, which is the lowest total the team has reached through six games since moving to Tennessee and the lowest for the franchise since the 1985 season. Rookie quarterback Cam Ward was responsible for all three of the turnovers and head coach Brian Callahan said the first-overall pick’s lack of ball security is one of the areas where he needs to improve if the offense is going to put up better performances.
“I am incredibly discouraged by the outcome,” Callahan said at his postgame press conference. “We felt good coming into the game. To not be able to perform well on offense and not be able to score any points and then lose the game is disappointing. We all gotta be better, Cam’s a part of that too. Cam’s gotta play better football as well. We gotta coach better, we gotta play better, all those things. It’s not all just him, but he is a part of it.”
Callahan is now 4-19 since becoming the Titans’ head coach, so Ward’s clearly not the only issue and the Titans will have to figure out if they think Callahan is capable of bringing the kind of improvement that’s needed or if another coach is likelier to turn things around in Tennessee. Wherever they come down on that question, they’ll be facing a coach who was much more successful with the Titans when Mike Vrabel brings the Patriots to town next Sunday.
The Raiders are celebrating a win for the first time since the first week of the regular season.
Quarterback Geno Smith threw a touchdown pass to tight end Michael Mayer on their first possession of the game and rookie running back Ashton Jeanty ran for a score on the first possession of the third quarter to help the Raiders get out to a 17-0 lead. The Titans showed a little life at that point, but the Raiders had things comfortably in hand and sealed the 20-10 win with a strip sack of Titans rookie quarterback Cam Ward with 46 seconds left to play.
Defensive lineman Thomas Booker made that play and recovered the ball. It was Ward’s third turnover of the day and the second of the six sacks he took that resulted in a lost fumble. Defensive end Maxx Crosby had two of the sacks, linebacker Devin White had the other forced fumble and White also picked Ward off late in the first half.
Smith threw a bad interception of his own, but was otherwise 17-of-22 for 174 yards on the afternoon. Jeanty carried 23 times for 75 yards while Tre Tucker led the team’s receivers with five catches for 70 yards. The end result of 226 offensive yards isn’t going to blow anyone away, but it was enough to carry the day thanks to the work that the defense turned in.
The Titans came into Sunday’s game off a win that was gifted to them by a string of Cardinals errors. They didn’t get the same hospitality from the Raiders and couldn’t create any luck of their own. Ward is up to 25 sacks on the season, which leaves him on pace for 71 on the season, and the offense’s overall lack of firepower is measured by the fact that they’ve now scored six touchdowns on the season. One of those came on a Tyler Lockett fumble recovery after an interception, so even that meager level of success is a bit misleading.
Week 7 will bring the Titans a visit from the Patriots, which means their former head coach Mike Vrabel will be in town for the first time since the Titans cut him loose after the 2023 season. They are 4-19 since that point and Vrabel will be bringing a 4-2 team to town, so it would be as good a time as any for the Titans to show they are capable of more than they’ve done to this point.
The Raiders will be in Kansas City to face the Chiefs and they’ll likely need to be sharper than they were on Sunday to avoid a return to the loss column.
