The Titans have a plan for their final minicamp of the spring, but they don’t have a script.
During their final three days of work before vacation and then training camp, the Titans are working without a scripted set of plays in practice, which head coach Mike Munchak said was more for the benefit of his assistants as his players.
“That’s as good for the coaches as anybody, to make them have to think how to try to attack each other and not be able to pre-plan everything we are doing out here,” Munchak said, via Paul Kuharsky of ESPN.com. “Once we had everything installed, once we spent the first nine OTAs getting everything in and doing it at a teaching pace where we felt they had a good understanding, then to me this is the best thing we could do.
“You can’t tackle, this is as close as you get to playing real football, at least mentally. I just thought this would be a nice change for these couple days. Let it flow, let it happen and create some situations.”
That forced offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains and defensive coordinator Jerry Gray (unless assistant Gregg Williams was doing it) to work against each other, after establishing a rough plan for the day.
“Whatever you call, you call and the players have got to make their adjustments off of it,” Gray said before the practice started. “So we’re really going through a bunch of game-type situations: You’re in two minute, you’re in four minute, you’re in goal line, it’s first-and-10. All they are going to do [on offense] is tell us personnel. Then we are going to treat it as a game, . . .
“Not only does it help me, it helps Dowell, it helps the head coach get a chance to see what we like to call in certain situations, and the players do too. You can script and say hey, ‘I can always have the pen last and win.’ You’ve got to make the call from what you are looking at, what you’re thinking, what’s that going to do to you, because that’s how the game is.”
The Titans have spent aggressively this offseason, but that only adds to the pressure on Munchak and the rest of the staff. So perhaps it’s fitting and smart that they add a little on themselves in the offseason, before the consequences are real.