The Tennessee Titans’ firing of Ken Whisenhunt came as a bit of a surprise, but now we’re getting some details as to why the Titans acted now in removing him.
NFL.com’s Albert Breer reports in his week 9 notebook that a key factor in Whisenhunt’s firing was the fact that he struggled to protect his quarterbacks, leading to injuries. Jake Locker, Zach Mettenberger, and Marcus Mariota have all suffered injuries during Whisenhunt’s tenure, and the Titans saw this as more than just bad luck.
“Some of it is the offensive line, but some of it’s not,” a team source told Breer. “What we worried about, we just never protected them.”
The Titans were moved to act after recent games in which noted sack threats Cameron Wake and J.J. Watt were both singled up by Tennessee, leading to Wake collecting four sacks and Watt picking up 2.5 sacks and nine quarterback hits while being faced with only rookie tackle Jeremiah Poutasi. “I don’t know, but they did,” Watt said after that game, when asked why he thought Tennessee had singled him. “I told them they shouldn’t have.”
It seems that the fact that they didn’t was a motivating factor in Whisenhunt’s firing. With so much invested in Mariota, the Titans clearly didn’t want to risk the already banged-up quarterback’s future and apparently felt that Whisenhunt’s schemes were needlessly putting the young signal-caller in the line of fire after already losing two quarterbacks to season-ending injury in 2014.
