Dysfunctional teams do dysfunctional things. The reverse is also true.
The Titans showed they’re not dysfunctional this week by choosing to fire G.M. Jon Robinson the moment owner Amy Adams Strunk decided to do it.
“At the end of the day, I’ve got to make hard decisions,” Strunk told Teresa M. Walker of the Associated Press on Friday. “Once I made the decision, I was like, ’I can’t sit on it. I’ve got to go ahead and do it to be fair to Jon.′ I don’t know how many weeks we have left in the season. There could be a lot more hopefully in our season, and it just didn’t seem like the right thing to do to drag this along.”
Four years ago, when the Packers fired coach Mike McCarthy in early December, some saw it as a sign of disrespect. The truth is that it’s more respectful to not act like all is well, while the process has commenced of considering candidates for replace the current coach.
Ditto for the Titans. And it will be interesting to see what they do next.
“It gives us plenty of opportunity now to identify future candidates that we’re going to interview, to watch the internal candidates,” Strunk said in a video accompanying the article.
There has been no reporting or commentary to refute the idea that Robinson lost a power struggle with coach Mike Vrabel, and that the performance of former Titans receiver A.J. Brown in Week 13 was the catalyst for Strunk siding with Vrabel. If so, Vrabel looms over the upcoming search process.
Vrabel may have plenty of power now, and whoever takes the job will be subject to Vrabel emerging from the squabble as the man in charge of the football operations.
And, yes, some will say that the mere timing of the decision and its implementation suggest dysfunction. The more accurate assessment is that it would have been dysfunctional to allow a bad situation to continue to exist -- especially after Strunk decided to make a major change.
