The Titans generally had become a team that will win the games it’s supposed to win, until a disastrous two-game road trip to Arizona and California, where they lost both to the Cardinals and the 49ers.
With their record falling from 8-4 to 8-6 and with the very real possibility looming that the team won’t even qualify for the playoffs, coach Mike Mularkey was asked by reporters on Wednesday to assess the mood of his team.
“I would say it’s pretty good right now based on Monday and the half of this day, it’s been pretty dang good,” Mularkey said. “I’m very pleased – good approach, focused, ready to go.”
They’ll need to be. The 10-4 Rams are coming to town, and this game has a little something in common with the time the team met in Super Bowl XXXIV; for the Titans, a loss quite possibly ends the season.
So what do the Titans need to do to get back on the right track?
“I would say play 60 minutes of really complementary football,” Mularkey said. “Between the three phases we’ve done it and when we’ve done it we’ve been as good as anybody in the league, we just haven’t done it consistently. We’ve had spurts of it, we’ve had it when we’ve needed it in some games to win the games, at the end of games, but it’s been a while since we’ve put all three phases together and they know that.”
With two games left, the chances to put all three phases together are slipping away. And it’s enough to spark concern that, if the Titans fail to make it to the playoffs, Mularkey may not be there any more.
Hopefully, that won’t happen. Mularkey has pushed the team in the right direction, and the franchise not long ago was one of the most irrelevant in all of sports to a real factor, playoffs or not. But ‘tis the season for coaches to get fired, and plenty of them will find out that they’ll be joining the ranks of the Fired Football Coaches Association on or before January 1.