Chad Brinker becomes the de facto G.M. of the Titans

Chad Brinker arrived in Tennessee two years ago, as the Assistant General Manager. Now, the General Manager will essentially be his assistant.

The headline on Tuesday is that the Titans have fired G.M. Ran Carthon. The real news is that Brinker had emerged as the man in charge of the entire football operation.

Promoted to president of football operations in 2024, Brinker has now been given final authority over football operations as part of the post-Carthon transition.

“It is important to [owner] Amy [Adams Strunk] to have absolute clarity in the football organization.” Titans president and CEO Burke Nihill said in the article on the team’s website announcing the Carthon firing. “And so, while the general manager position will have a primary responsibility on all these things Chad is describing in terms of the day-to-day of overseeing the roster and the coaching staff, Chad is the leader of the football program, so Chad will be the final authority on all football matters, including the roster.”

And so the new G.M. won’t be the G.M. Instead, Brinker will be the G.M., with a different title. (On Sunday, we flagged Brinker as a potential replacement for Carthon.)

“Ran was hired into a very different job description than the one that exists today,” Nihill said. “Ran was hired for a general manager position that was very specific to the circumstances at the time, and the forecasting was the general manager would be able to partner very closely with the head coach, the existing head coach, and as the circumstances exists today, the general manager position is different. And so, what Chad, who is leading the search, will be looking for is a very different skill set for a very different job description.”

It’s dysfunctional, to say the least, for a team to fire the G.M. or the coach and not both. That creates a situation in which both react to adversity by blaming the other. If both have shared accountability, one won’t try to undermine the other. Instead, they’ll work together — or else.

And it’s clear that Carthon held powers that have been handed directly to Brinker, without a search. We’ve asked the league whether this complies with the Rooney Rule. (We’ve also asked whether Brinker’s 2024 promotion to the position of president of football operations represented the culmination of a Rooney Rule-compliant search.)

So who’s next for G.M. in Tennessee? One name to watch, we’re told, is Packers V.P. of player personnel Jon-Eric Sullivan. Brinker and Sullivan worked together for 13 years in Green Bay. And if Brinker’s latest coup is part of a broader plan that was launched when he became assistant G.M., the culmination could be the addition of Sullivan (or someone else with whom Brinker has worked) to be the G.M.

The bigger question is whether and when coach Brian Callahan will be the next to go. Much of it depends on whether Callahan was Brinker’s guy. If so, Callahan has a leg up. If not, he might want to lease and not buy in Nashville.

For now, the bottom line is this. Brinker came, saw, and conquered. In two years, he’s gone from assistant G.M. to guy in charge of everything on the football side. While not as stunning as the uncanny rise of Jack Easterby in Houston, it’s pretty damn close.