The Titans want everyone thinking they are taking a quarterback with the first pick
Tennessee Titans president of Football Operations Chad Brinker was on the Ramon, Kayla, and Will Show on 104.5 this morning. This interview was better than the one they did with former Titans general manager Ran Carthon last week. I stayed out of all of the bashing that went on with that interview because I didn’t know the parameters of the interview. I agree they should have asked some questions even if they weren’t going to get answers, but who knows if that stuff was discussed beforehand and was off limits.
One of the things that Brinker said this morning that really stuck out to me was “If there’s a generation player you cannot pass that up.” I said in the post I did earlier about Mel Kiper’s first 2025 NFL mock draft that the Titans are going to do everything they can between now and the draft to make everyone think they are going to take a quarterback. That drives up the value of that pick.
With that said, if the Titans do believe that Cam Ward is a “generational player” they should keep the pick and draft him.
Brinker was asked what went wrong with Ran Carthon that led to his firing. He did not answer the question at all instead talking about how much respect he has for Carthon and what a tough decision it was. It would have been nice for a follow-up question there to push him a little bit but we did not get it.
The “draft and develop” thing was talked about a lot. Brinker mentioned it when talking about why the Titans hired Mike Borgonzi as their general manager. That’s obviously how every team wants to build their roster. The key to that is finding the quarterback and then drafting good players. The Titans haven’t done either of those in a really long time.
They asked Brinker about the whole “final say” issue. He confirmed that he will have final say but said that it isn’t as big of a deal as people have made it out to be. He went on to give some examples of different teams around the league where the coach has final say, mentioning Andy Reid with the Kansas City Chiefs and Pete Carroll in his time with the Seattle Seahawks. He also talked about the Dallas Cowboys where owner Jerry Jones has final say. He said in almost all of those examples there weren’t examples of anyone “slapping the hand” of someone else when they wanted to take a player and there was a disagreement.
One interesting thing he said on that topic was that there might be a time where he and Borgonzi can’t agree on a player and instead of him overruling Borgonzi, they will move on to a different player that they can both agree on.
Did you listen to the interview? What were your biggest takeaways?