The worst part for Tennessee Titans was playoff loss proved the doubters correct | Estes

I’ve been stuck on an odd moment from Saturday's post-defeat gloom. It was when Tennessee Titans coach Mike Vrabel was asked about Ryan Tannehill. As usual, Vrabel didn’t point a finger at his quarterback: “It’s never going to be about one person, not as long as I’m the head coach … ”

Short pause.

“… which will be a while.”

Huh? Where’d that come from?

“Just kind of how I felt,” Vrabel said Monday. “I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

Oh, OK.

Kind of a strange proclamation for no apparent reason. Like arriving home after work and telling your family that you’re not going anywhere. Who said you were?

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In any event, the Titans will take it. Vrabel has been very good for them. He is 41-24 in four seasons, has been to the playoffs three years in a row, is a two-time reigning AFC South champ, and he probably deserves to be the 2021 NFL Coach of the Year.

The Vrabel era has been an unquestioned success.

That, however, will make its failures stand out even more.

Saturday’s loss to the Cincinnati Bengals was a gigantic failure. Period. The higher the climb, the harder a fall, and this Titans' crash was intensely painful. Easily their biggest disappointment under Vrabel.

The worst part? All the oddsmakers and pundits and analytics gurus were right about them.

The Titans really weren’t good enough to win it all.

Nowhere else in the world was that realization more shocking than at Saint Thomas Sports Park. Vrabel’s Titans were genuine believers.

“We knew that we had the pieces that we needed to compete for a championship,” safety Kevin Byard said.

They weren’t afraid to talk Super Bowl before the season, when the Indianapolis Colts were a trendy pick to win the division. They kept talking about it during the season, when they lost three of four games and their modest bandwagon had been emptied by Derrick Henry’s injury.

And they still talked about it Saturday night, after the season had ended.

“We didn’t get the job done,” receiver A.J. Brown said at the time. “We're not here seeing how good the regular-season record could be. We're trying to win the Super Bowl.”

You play all season to earn the chance to win one playoff game to keep playing, and while it is just one game, it means more than all the previous ones combined.

For the Titans, that has never been clearer. Had their record been 17-0 they wouldn’t have been in any better spot than they were Saturday morning, hosting the Bengals as the AFC’s No. 1 seed, rested and healthier than they’d been all season.

Those who closely follow the Titans understood how perfectly it was lined up for them.

And, of course, the Titans did, too.

“We were in position to do something real special,” Brown said. “We had the red carpet. … This year was the year to make it happen.”

The feeling among the team late Saturday wasn’t misery as much as surprise. To a man, Vrabel and his players said they didn’t expect to be discussing a defeat. That’s something teams say after a playoff loss, but in this instance, I found it truthful. The Titans simply knew they were going to beat the Bengals and advance.

Even Monday afternoon, it still didn’t “feel real,” Byard said. “It just doesn't feel like we're out of the playoffs. We feel like we're supposed to be preparing to play the Chiefs this week.”

I don’t view that as a team that was overconfident. It’s a sign of how deeply the Titans believed.

See, outsiders look at Vrabel’s Titans and wonder how they’ve been able to keep winning no matter what, outperforming what they were on paper. That belief is the reason. Call it a high-character locker room. Call it good leadership. Call it coaching. Call it culture. Call it well-earned confidence, too.

Probably goes back to Jan. 11, 2020, the night of the Titans’ most recent playoff victory – the stunning upset of the top-seeded, heavily favored Ravens in Baltimore. That playoff run was peak Vrabel-era Titans, feeding off all the disrespect, wanting more than anything to rub their many doubters’ faces in it. They’ve done it plenty of times.

This time, however, the Titans were the ones proven wrong.

And that hurts, especially when you are blindsided. It takes something out of you. For the remaining Titans in 2022, this will not be an easy recovery.

Their faith in themselves was a strength. Will it continue to be one? Vrabel? His coaches? His players? Will they be the same after this disappointment?

Heading into 2022, there’s no bigger question for a team that was all-in and truly believed it was a contender only to find out otherwise.

Certainly not the first time an NFL team has had that happen.

But it’s the first time in a while for this particular NFL team.

“Guys understand that we can be so great here,” defensive lineman Jeffery Simmons said Monday. “Guys know that we can win the Super Bowl here. ... Leadership is from within, and the type of leaders we have on our team in the locker room, that'll make the whole team buy in and eventually get past this point.

“This feeling sucks.”

Reach Gentry Estes at gestes@tennessean.com and on Twitter @Gentry_Estes.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Tennessee Titans proved doubters right and themselves wrong with loss