While Tennessee Titans quarterback Ryan Tannehill will get the lion’s share of the blame for the team’s 19-16 loss in the divisional round, head coach Mike Vrabel isn’t ready to blame one person for the defeat.
Of course, Tannehill had one of his worst performances of the season. Not only was he inaccurate and late on some throws, he also made some poor decisions, leading to a trio of picks that were back-breakers to say the least.
After the game, Vrabel said the loss wasn’t about one person despite the outcome hinging largely on Tannehill’s mistakes.
“Well, I don’t think Ryan (Tannehill) or myself or anybody did enough to win the game,” Vrabel said. “That’s how it goes. It’s never going to be about one person, not as long as I’m the head coach, which will be a while. So, it’ll never be about one person. We have to play better, get open, not fall down. Defense has got to get some turnovers. But we can’t turn the ball over, we know that. We can’t get stopped on downs. Those are all the things we talk about and reasons why you lose. Our third-down conversion wasn’t good enough, our ability to score touchdowns in the red zone, but we all have to play better, we have to coach better.”
As far as the turnovers are concerned, Vrabel isn’t ready to put the blame all on Tannehill’s shoulders for those, either.
“No, it’s never all,” Vrabel said. “Obviously, the guy pulling the trigger is going to get blamed. I mean, that’s just what happens. But we all have to do a better job of taking care of the football. Ryan (Tannehill), nobody feels worse than Ryan does. You know, there were some contact, and, I mean, on the last one it’s like, where would you want him to put the ball any differently, in a better spot? So, they let them play, and that’s how it goes.”
When touching on his own performance, Tannehill said he felt good coming into the game, but the team simply didn’t make enough plays to win.
“It was a frustrating day all the way around,” Tannehill admitted. “A great opportunity and we didn’t make the plays we needed to win. The defense played a heck of a game, really dominated. It was really fun to watch them play. We didn’t make enough plays to win it. This hurts, hurts bad. I didn’t think we would be having this conversation right now. It was not my vision for the game at all. We had an opportunity at the end and there was no doubt in my mind that we were going to go down and get points.”
With their attention now turning to the offseason, the Titans have some questions to answer on offense, and more specifically about Tannehill and offensive coordinator Todd Downing.
While the Titans don’t really have an option to make a change at quarterback in 2022 thanks to Tannehill’s enormous dead cap numbers the next two years, they could look to start planning for the future by bringing in a successor in the draft, or quite possibly a better backup quarterback as insurance.
No matter what the Titans do (or don’t do), conversation about Tannehill’s viability will go on throughout the offseason.
One big change the Titans could make on offense is to get rid of Downing, as the offensive coordinator was not good this season and oversaw an offense that took a giant step backwards.
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