The Tennessee Titans fired head coach Brian Callahan on Monday after a 1-5 start to the season. Senior offensive assistant Mike McCoy, who served as the San Diego Chargers’ head coach for four seasons, was named interim coach.
“After extended conversations with our owner and general manager, we met with Brian Callahan this morning to tell him we are making a change at head coach,” Chad Brinker, Tennessee’s president of football operations, said in a statement. “These decisions are never easy, and they become more difficult when they involve people of great character.
“We are grateful for Brian’s investment in the Titans and Tennessee community during his tenure as head coach. We thank him and his family for being exemplary ambassadors of the Tennessee Titans.”
Callahan, 41, was hired in January 2024 after five seasons as the Cincinnati Bengals’ offensive coordinator that included a three-point loss in Super Bowl LVI. The Titans posted a 4-19 record under Callahan and had “not demonstrated sufficient growth,” according to Brinker.
“Our players, fans, and community deserve a football team that achieves a standard we are not currently meeting, and we are committed to making the hard decisions necessary to reach and maintain that standard,” Brinker said.
Brinker was part of a new power structure installed at the end of the 2024 season after the Titans fired general manager Ran Carthon, who stayed for one season following a decision not to bring back head coach Mike Vrabel after two sub-.500 seasons.
As timing would have it, Vrabel leads the New England Patriots (4-2) into Nashville on Sunday.
Lodged between Brinker and the head coach in the Titans’ atypical power structure is first-year general manager Mike Borgonzi, who was hired in January after spending 16 seasons in the Kansas City Chiefs’ front office.
McCoy, 53, was the Chargers’ head coach from 2013-16, compiling a 27-37 record. His first Chargers team was his most successful, going 9-7 with a playoff win. He finished 5-11 in his final year.
McCoy also spent five seasons as the Denver Broncos’ offensive coordinator (2009-12, 2017) and one season in the same role for the Arizona Cardinals (2018). He also was the quarterbacks coach for the Jacksonville Jaguars (2022-24).
Tennessee brought him aboard in March.
The Titans’ move comes one day after a 20-10 road loss to the Las Vegas Raiders.
Callahan said afterward that more was expected from everyone on the team, including rookie quarterback Cam Ward. The No. 1 overall pick in the 2025 NFL Draft and veteran defensive lineman Jeffery Simmons said the team was lacking in some fundamentals, especially coming off its first win of the season in Week 5.
“Today was bad football,” Simmons said on Sunday. “We didn’t play good today at all.”
Simmons said the team had a bad week of practice.
“In this league, you have to learn how to be able to stack wins and carry that momentum over,” he said. “It started at practice. Just being honest, this was probably one of our worst weeks of practice. We came out flat Thursday. Sometimes things carry over.”
Ward was not sharp on Sunday. He completed 26 of 38 passes for 222 yards and one touchdown, but he was intercepted once and lost two fumbles. He also took six sacks.
“We have to try new things, and if we’re going to stay the course, we need to make the course work,” Ward said. “It’s really just both the players and coaching staff continuing to either call out a play and execute the play, or at the end of the day, we have to do our job as a whole. At the end of the day, the coaches, they can only do so much. We as players have to do our jobs.”
Brian Callahan might not be the only member of his family headed out the door. Paulkuharsky.com reported Monday night that Bill Callahan, Tennessee’s offensive line coach and Brian’s father, left the organization. Bill Callahan has coached in college football and NFL since 1980, including several years as a head coach or offensive coordinator.
–Field Level Media
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