In clownish AFC South, Indianapolis Colts are jesters and Tennessee Titans are kings | Opinion
The Tennessee Titans are far from flawless. If you've watched them, you know. They have issues. There’s the paltry offense, the subpar wide-receiving group, the absent high draft picks, and so on.
But say this for the ol' Titans:
They aren’t the Indianapolis Colts right now.
They aren’t the Jacksonville Jaguars or Houston Texans, either.
No, the Titans have become the AFC South’s preeminent team simply by being the only AFC South franchise that has been run competently of late.
In a division rife with outlandish mismanagement, this week was Colts owner Jim Irsay's turn to raise the bar. His firing of coach Frank Reich and appointment of NFL coaching newbie Jeff Saturday as the interim replacement was a bizarre turn of events.
It was punctuated by an even more bizarre introductory press conference, during which Irsay explained his wildly unconventional midseason hire as “an intuitive decision” and said he liked Saturday’s lack of NFL coaching experience because he hadn’t learned to be “afraid” like veteran coaches who'll fearfully lean on “analytics.”
Huh? Analytics?
Was that how the Colts made a series of missteps at quarterback or, better yet, how they lost inexplicably in Jacksonville at the end of last season in front of Jaguars fans wearing clown makeup – to protest their owner Shad Khan – and the Colts needing the win to get in the playoffs?
No better representation of the modern-day AFC South than that clown show of a game, I’d say.
And then there's the Titans, good enough and stable enough to keep benefiting from all the buffoonery. Since the start of the 2020 season, the Titans have gone 13-2 in divisional games. They are 3-0 already this season and FiveThirtyEight has them at 92% to win a third consecutive division title – almost by default.
This isn’t about the Titans as much as it has become about the rest of the division.
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The Jaguars hired Urban Meyer: A disaster of historic magnitude from which they still haven’t recovered.
The Texans fired David Culley. Shouldn’t have, but hey, there are a lot of things the Texans shouldn’t have done lately and did. They’ve systematically dismantled what was the division’s best roster not that long ago, and the fans’ apathy for football in Houston was tangible the week before last. I was there watching Derrick Henry run all over the Texans again.
As for the Colts, they’ve been a major disappointment in 2022, no question. But that’s mostly because we keep being told each preseason how they should be favored in a division they haven’t won since 2014. My favorite this year was an article by The Athletic in early September – don't tell Mr. Irsay that it was based on analytics – that was headlined, “Indianapolis Colts: The NFL’s most undervalued team” and tossed out the following stray with barely a passing glance: “They’re just better than the Titans.”
The Titans, for the record, have beaten the Colts five times in a row. I’d suspect the most recent of those had a lot to do with quarterback Matt Ryan’s benching and Reich’s firing.
And perhaps there's some never-to-be-spoken regret over decisions from 2018:
That's when the Titans hired Mike Vrabel.
And the Colts didn't.
Reich became the sixth of seven head coaches from the NFL’s 2018 hiring cycle who have been fired from those jobs. The only one still in his? Vrabel. (Hat tip to AtoZ Sports’ Sam Phalen for the tidbit).
Remember when the Colts reportedly interviewed Vrabel in 2018, too?
Perhaps it was my own location that made me think, as I was watching Irsay explain hiring Saturday, that in many ways he was trying to hire someone similar to Vrabel.
"He's extremely tough, and he's a leader," Irsay said of Saturday. "When you're looking for head coaches, leadership is the No. 1 thing. … Certain people just have it. They have it.
"And you see it when you know it."
If you’ve got a few free minutes and want some amusement, go back and find some of the takes on that 2018 hiring cycle. NFL.com and CBS Sports, for instance, both had writers at the time rate Vrabel as the worst hire of the seven.
Were these to be re-ranked, I figure Vrabel and the Titans would jump to No. 2 on some lists.
Behind the Colts, of course.
Reach Tennessean sports columnist Gentry Estes at gestes@tennessean.com and on Twitter @Gentry_Estes.