And just like that, we’ve got our first coaching exit of the season. The Tennessee Titans have officially shown Brian Callahan the door after yet another loss [20-10] to the Las Vegas Raiders. And Team president Chad Brinker didn’t dance around the reasoning.

According to President Chad Brinker, the Titans made a collective decision to fire Callahan, along with GM Mike Borgonzi & owner Amy Adams Strunk. He said that (via Cameron Wolfe) “change was needed from HC Brian Callahan because we weren’t seeing growth.”

Brinker made it clear that rookie quarterback Cam Ward was also one of the factors behind his firing. “We drafted Cam Ward 1st overall & we need to see him grow as a football player,” he said.

It might be harsh to call the Tennessee Titans the worst team in football right now. But it’s just as hard to argue they’ve made any progress since Week 1. And when you’ve got a rookie quarterback running the show, progress is really the whole point.

The hype skyrocketed after the Titans drafted Cam Ward as the No. 1 pick, but six weeks in, the offense has barely gotten off the runway. Tennessee has topped 20 points once all year.

And that came in a chaotic Week 5 win over the Cardinals, where one of their touchdowns came on a bizarre play that started as a Ward interception and ended with a defensive fumble recovery in the end zone. That pretty much sums up the Titans’ season. Nothing has come easy.

Sunday’s loss was the final straw for head coach Brian Callahan, whose offense mustered just 225 total yards and zero life. It was another week where nothing looked different, nothing looked improved. And for a team trying to develop a young quarterback, that’s fatal.

Callahan walks away with a 4-19 record in his brief stint at the helm. But the real concern isn’t about the record; it’s the fact that Cam Ward doesn’t look any better than he did at the start of September.

Over his last three games, Ward has thrown just one touchdown against three interceptions. So far, he’s got three touchdowns and four picks. The flashes are there, but there’s been no growth. And that’s what Tennessee needs to fix, fast. That’s where Mike McCoy steps in.

Mike McCoy is the Titans’ interim coach

McCoy is taking over as the interim head coach, and this is going to be the toughest challenge of his career. He’s got head coaching experience from his four-year run with the Chargers (2013–2016), where he went 27-37 and even grabbed a playoff win. But this Titans job? This is a whole different kind of project.

The team is sitting at 1-5, dead near the bottom of the league in scoring, and hasn’t sniffed a playoff victory since 2019. The vibes are low, the fanbase is restless, and the rookie quarterback everyone was excited about is struggling to find his footing. But McCoy has one thing going for him: his track record with quarterbacks. Everywhere he goes, QBs tend to level up.

Look at Trevor Lawrence. When McCoy was his quarterback’s coach in Jacksonville, Lawrence took off. He racked up more than 4,000 passing yards in back-to-back seasons and threw 46 touchdowns over two years. Go back further to his Chargers days, and Philip Rivers was averaging 31 touchdown passes a season under McCoy’s guidance.

He knows how to get the best out of his quarterbacks. And that’s exactly what Cam Ward needs right now. The final 11 games of the season are going to be an audition for everyone. For McCoy, it’s a shot to prove he deserves the full-time job in 2026. For Ward, it’s a chance to show that the flashes of brilliance from his college tape can translate to the NFL.

The Titans will undoubtedly launch a full-blown coaching search once the season’s over, but if McCoy can help Ward find his rhythm, clean up that 1-5 mess, and make this offense believable again? He might not have to go anywhere.