Welcome to another edition of the OTP. I'm Amy Wells and we are joined by Tennessee Titans head coach Brian Callahan. Coach, We're so happy to have you here. It's a holiday weekend, so there's a lot of time for relaxing and slowing down, and we want to talk about all of that. But first we've got to do some football stuff. Early, early, early, early in the off season program, you established that competition was the name of the game throughout the whole process.
What was it that you saw or noticed about the twenty twenty four season that you felt like a little more competition could solve that problem.
I think there's probably more layers to it than that. Okay, certainly after the season, from feedback from coaches and players as we left, and obviously whatever whatever we did prior wasn't quite good enough. And so how do you know as a as a leader, you have to sit there and you got to take a lot of different viewpoints and criticisms, and you have to be open to that because at the end of the day, it's going to make make you better, it's going to make our team better,
it's going to make our process better. So there's a lot of different things that that some coaches and players and people had sort of gave me feedback on that I reflected on for a long time, and it's how do you take all this information and how do you make it actionable? How do you how do you take a comment here and an idea here and another idea over here, and so how do you manage all those things?
So I spent a lot of time going back through all the things that the conversations I had at the end of the year with a lot of people, and and I sort of came away with like three or four main points of emphasis. One is how do we win football games? That's that's the goal, right, how do we better put ourselves in position to win in doing that? When you're saying how do we win football games? Well, how do we keep ourselves first and foremost from losing
football games? Because that's a huge part of NFL football is that you can lose a game a whole lot easier than you can win one. And so we went through and looked at and as part of yourself scout and all that, all the different things that we did and where we can actionably improve the things that we can control, right, what are what did we do in games that don't doesn't have anything to do with talent,
doesn't anything do with scheme. What are the things that we can very actionably be better at that we can control on a regular basis, And then how do we measure it and verify it? That's kind of the theme of what you what I'm going to talk about ultimately, And that was the first thing. How do you do that? Then the second thing was, we need more connection on our football team from top to bottom coaches and players. Coaches and coaches, how do you how do you players
to players? How do you foster connection? I thought we had okay connectivity on our team, but it just needed it needs to be more, It needs to be better. So how do we do that? And for pro athletes generally speaking, the thing that they connect over the quickest
is competition. Yeah, and so how do you how do you make something that they're going to that doesn't feel like you know, Kitchie and in high schooling and stuff like that, but still but still gets to the core of what you're trying to accomplish, which is is to ramp up the level of competition, which should also then in turn ramp up the level of connection those are that that was kind of the core of what I was looking at over over the course of the leading
up to the off season program is that how do we do those things? How do we win football games? How do we take take command of the things that we can control, and then how do we connect our football team better? And a lot of that is going to be through competitive drills, competitive practices, competitive games for lack of a better term. And it really sort of occurred. I had a Peyton McCollum, who's who's our assistant wide receivers coach. He had came to me and said, look,
there's here's something you should here's the thought. And I take thoughts and ideas from everybody, and and he said, there's this. You know, there's a there's a coach that that I've kind of gotten familiar with over the years. Who's a guy named Anson Anson Durants who's the head women's soccer coach in North Carolina. He's written now multiple books and you know they've been North Carolina women's soccer has been one of the highest they're one of the
best programs in sports. And he was like, you should just breath this. It's pretty interesting on how they structure practice and how they compete, and so I kind of dove down this rabbit hole of all the things they did there and it's super fascinating. They do an unbelievable job. And then I come to find a lot of it can from Dean Smith, who was obviously legendary coach for North Carolina men's basketball, and how they charted and uh tracked practice. Uh So there's there's a whole and act
kind of like that's really fascinating. Well, how do I how do we do something? Here's all the things I want to do, here's some ideas, and how do you meld them together? That's sort of how the whole thing was born. And it was again a lot of thought
and effort and time and energy put into it. But that's how we divided our That's the first step was dividing the locker room back into into not just by position groups, so we weren't siloed in the positions, because that's where we spend all our time is with our position.
So I mixed the whole locker room up, and then I said, well, let's mix the whole team up and So the idea was this, we come up with these eight different teams they have captains, and now you have eight captains, and then you have a bunch of guys that are competing for something other than just an offensive
defensive win. You know, in practice, so an offensive player might get a point for a touchdown, but he also might have a defensive player on his team that he's playing against that has a negative because he just had bad leverage and he gave up the touchdown. And so there's this sort of points back and forth that really the guys as it went on, they really bought into and the competition amongst the players that wasn't just offense and defense. That was truly about they wanted their team
to win. And so we again points, we points are assigned for a million different things. But the idea was is how do we how do we connect more through that? And I think it was a really cool offseason program. Again, the players will probably tell you their perspective on it, but for me, it felt like the intent of what we wanted to do we got out of it. And that's that's encouraging and exciting for me as a head coach.
I think for our football team is that we found a way to get all of those things kind of packed into a very short amount of time, and I think we got value from it and we're better for it because of the of how we went about our business. So I know that's a kind of a long roundabout way of talking about the whole process, but I think it's important to have the context in the background of
where it came from and why we're doing it. And at the end, the one of the first videos I showed the team and the team meeting was a video from Steve Kerr from the Quarter Gold documentary, which is really fantastic about all these other, you know, the other basketball teams for the Olympics, and Steve cur said he'd been around a bunch of winning, He's won a lot, he's you know, first and foremost good players. That's part of it, he goes, but there's two things that matter most,
and what wins its joy and its competition. And then the third part is it's the joy in the success of others. And that sort of was like, that makes sense to me, And I think that's what we got out of our off season program, is that was those quite a bit of joy and a whole lot of competition, and I think we're better for it.
It's interesting because conventional wisdom would say there's a five in line when instilling competition in something where you want guys to compete, but not compete to the level where you then fracture a locker room like you go too far. But it seems like throughout this whole off season you've done a really good job of minding that line and getting peak performance and peak competition. So you're right at the top of that curve.
Yeah, anytime now there's when you're competing for something there you're always risking that that you're tipping over the edge right where it goes a little bit too too far. We haven't had that issue, I think partly because it's not it's not just a offense defense competition that there's that there's more involved in it, and there's more things that they're competing for with their team of guys as
opposed to our side of the ball. Because then you do sides of the ball sometimes and it just becomes it becomes almost irritating and personal. Is that they just they just want to beat the hell out of each other, you know what I mean? Right, This wasn't that This
wasn't that style of competition necessarily. It was more about the connecting and the building up of the players and the building of the relationships with guys maybe they hadn't been around a lot previously, and I think that's what kept it from being more than what we were looking for.
So in your first year, you build a foundation to your football team what it's going to be. In your second year, you're adding this layer of connecting, of competition and kind of establishing that this is going to be the expectation going forward, that we handle ourselves in this way. What are you hoping that that creates in your team as you go through training camp and beyond through the season.
At the end of the day, you're trying to create You're trying to create your culture of what you want your team and you're building to look like and act like to the point where what you hope happens is you get to you get to a spot where you bring somebody in and they do something that isn't, you know, kind of in line with how we operate, and people go, you know, we don't do that here, you know what I mean, that's not how were that's not how we
do business here. That's what you're trying to get to, is you're trying to get to something that's so ingrained in the locker room in the building that that's what's expected, that's your that that is what your standard is. Now, we got to go earn our standard. You know, you don't. You don't just get to say what your standard is.
You have to earn it right, and and you earn that through At the end of the day, you your culture and your standards and your expectations are are ultimately built through winning, because that's what we're all trying to
get done is win football games. But there's a whole other part of that that as you as you win and you build through the culture, through the things that you're emphasizing and expecting, you hope that that's ultimately what takes hold and then it becomes who you are, It becomes what your organization is, your football team is that when you walk in that locker room, there's no there's no confusion on what's expected and what works for us here.
And if you're not a part of that, if you don't buy into that, then you won't be here.
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of the Tennessee Titans. Now back to the OTP. This team looks very different in twenty twenty five than it did in twenty twenty four. A lot of new faces. This roster has just experienced a lot of change. So I'm going to make some sweeping generalizations about this team and you can let me know if I am heading down the right path here. The first one is that one of the main characteristics you guys were looking for in free agent acquisitions over the twenty twenty twenty five
offseason was durability. Is that correct?
Yeah, it's it's hard to It's hard to go out and pay players that you don't know if they're going to play seventeen games for you, because you're at the end of the day. It's, you know, you to take a step back from the personal side that you look at the business part of it. It's you know, it's you're you're making an investment in in a player, and you're making investment in in performance. And it's hard to
perform if you can't play. And when you're when you're investing money and you're spending the money of the organization to upgrade your football team, you look at how does this how does this player impact our team? And when
they're healthy, they are impactful. But you know this player acts only played forty of his games and player be as played ninety and so you're you're essentially betting on the durability and that they're going to be there to help us longer more often than you know another play that maybe isn't that's not part of their strengths. And
so we invested heavily in availability. You know, guys that have been available and performed at a high level over time, and you want as many of those guys as possible because there's also a mental toughness and a character, a defined character to guys that are available, if that makes sense, Because it's hard, it's very hard. It's hard to play that many snaps over your course of your career because
it's a physical it hurts these guys. But there's part of there's part of what drives these guys to continue to suit up on Sundays. And you want as many guys like that as you can find.
All Right, another broad generalization, but this rookie class is one of the most sure groups of rookie football players that has ever existed.
It's a really impressive class when it comes to professionalism, maturity, those things. It's they've they check all of those boxes. That was intentional, I know. I know Mike was very adamant about it. The same with Chad and even for me, I like him back at some point in the draft process to really what turned you know, you just your
your product of your experiences. And so a lot of my experiences with building of a team was through Cincinnati when I was there, and I thought about the draft class that sort of flipped our football team, and it was our twenty twenty draft class, and that was it was Joe Burrow and T Higgins and Logan Wilson and Keem Davis gaither those guys that were I think of that draft class. I think seven of the eight picks were captains. They were super high level character players. They
became the foundation. That draft class and that free agency class that we signed that year became the foundation of of what was back to back AFC championship games and a lot of success over two seasons. Mike had similar
experiences in Kansas City. And so when you when you go when you and you were very intentional about the character you're drafting, and you do all the work and making sure that these are the kind of guys that love playing football, that are intelligent football players, that have people. When you draft a player and everybody you talk to at the school says, this is this is the guy, this is this is and maybe it's not their best player, but it's like that's the guy. Like that's the guy
that's going to succeed. And so you you bet on those characteristics that that's going to allow them to succeed. Uh. And what is ultimately very challenging and difficult profession to succeed in. And that the class in and of itself has been fantastic when it comes to those things, But it was all very intentional. We we sought out those characteristics and players, and we drafted guys that fit that profile for us, and uh, it has certainly paid off.
We've made it this far without saying the name cam Ward, which feels pretty impressive.
Just for us.
So this feels like the appropriate time to ask what has surprised you the most about cam warden the time that you've been.
Able to work with him? Nothing?
Really, he is as advertised.
Yeah, nothing is surprised me. Because the more when we went back to the beginning and we start watching this tape, I would say that we were probably we were probably pretty early on the process because we knew we were picking first, so we kind of jumped into that maybe a little more in depth than some teams would have at the moment. And the more you watched him, you're like, man,
I think this guy's got real talent. And what matters most in playing quarterback in the NFL, though, is the rest of it?
Exactly.
There's plenty of guys that got talent, it's just the rest of it. How do they process, what's their ability to relate with their teammates, how do they lead? What's the toughness like all the other things? Is what really matters in quarterback play, and at every point that we met with Cam, we learned more and more about him as a person. And the more people you talk to
you learn about him as a player. In the locker room and everything that we heard and all of our own experiences, and once we got him here, everything was exactly as advertised when it came to those things. And that's what I mean by like nothing has surprised me, because he's incredibly focused. He loves playing football. He only cares about playing football at a high level. He works, his work ethic is off the charts, and then his
ability to connect and relate to his teammates. He's got an easy way about him, but he is He's also highly competitive, hates to lose in anything he does. So all these things are all things we knew about him in the process, and then once he got here, as you get to know him better, it's all real. That's who he is. And so that's why nothing about Cam has surprised me, because I feel like we had a pretty good idea of who he was, and then he's shown that to be accurate.
Throughout the offseason. But specifically, I think it was the most pronounced during the mandatory mini camp. You could tell that cam Ward was going to do cam Ward things, and the defense as a whole collectively was determined to remind everybody that he is still a rookie. Yeah, do you like that? I know you're an offensive guy, and I know you're a quarterback guy, but is that what you want to see on your defense?
That?
All right? Cool, we appreciate your eighteen in a row completions. We're coming for you now.
Yeah. That's what he needs, That's what our team needs. And I think the mark of a good football team is when you do have You do have back and forth. You have offense has good days, defense has good days. Defense makes plays. Offense makes plays because you're competitive. Uh, if the defense is consistently beating you drill the drill day to day, that probably means you're not very good on offense and vice versa. And so that competitiveness and
back and forth, I think is is great. And at the end of the day, all the defensive players want to know is is this a guy that we can count on? And is this a guy that's gonna gonna do what we think he can do? And they're testing him. They want to find out because I think the ultimate mark for pro football players is it doesn't really matter where you come from, doesn't really matter what what anybody else thinks of you when you walk in the locker room.
The players in the locker room want to know can you help us win? And that is ultimately what they're trying to find out. And that's why they they test and they poke, and they prod and they and and they don't care. They're not They're they're not trying, No, They're just they're just trying to find out if this guy's for real. And that goes the same way for for for Elk and Strepo and Chim and all these young players. They're just trying to find out are you
Are you going to be able to help us? And they're going to find out are you made of the right stuff? Do we think as veteran players and older players or defensive players that all these young players are able to help? And they go through their own process of finding out. And that's really what you saw sort of in real time, is that they're trying to find out if these guys are up to the task.
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to the OTP. Is that why it was so important to do as many joint practices with other teams as you could to get that experience, to get that adversity.
Yeah, that's exactly what you hope for. And it's good because you get tired of playing against the same scheme. You know, we've played all spring against an Arnge defense, and he's played all spring against us, and you get tired of just the day to day back and forth, and it's like, you just want to go play something different. You want to play different players with a different color jersey on and a different scheme and then see where
you stack up. And I think I got a lot of respect for Todd Bowles and what he's done in Tampa and the defense style that they play there and how well they've been able to build that offense, and they've went through a couple of different iterations because obviously Tom was there Brady and they had some success and had some They've had success with Baker. I just think they do such a great job and so to go compete against a team like that is something I'm very
much looking forward to. And then you know, Atlanta's got a ton of young talent, they got a young team or Hem Morse is I think a really fantastic football coach and so it's a and does things the right way, and so you want to go practice against people like that, and I'm excited for it. I think it's going to be great for our football team as as a as a barometer for us to see where we're where we're at. It's going to help us get ready for September. And
it's also going to be hard. It's going to be hot, uh, and we're on the road and we're not coming home, and that's going to be a whole part of the process. It's all very intentional, but that's why we do it.
How do you turn this you, I guess You've been working so hard to infuse as much competition in every situation that you can for months. Now, how do you turn that off for these next four weeks.
I hope we don't. I hope. I mean, I'll everyone want to take a step back because it's been it's been a really good, hard offseason. It's been great. Guys have bought in. I'm appreciative of their effort. I'm appreciative their attendance, their their intensity, all those things. And so it's an eight week program, and and now we got, you know, roughly five ish weeks before we go back
for the real thing here the end of July. The the idea is that this really isn't a vacation, it's a break, and they should take a little bit of
time because they've they've earned that. But you know, fourth of July weekend, a little bit after that, we should we should be ramping back up, and guys should be ready to come report in shape, you know, not losing any of the things that we accomplished over this offseason program and being able to hit the ground running right back at it when we come back, when we come back at the end of the month. So that's The idea is that this this really isn't it's a break,
but it's not a vacation. You know, this isn't like end of the season where you just like go away and unplugs. I will unplug, I'll rest and I'll but my mind is always on what's coming. When you get to this point and you rest.
If you don't unplug, though, how how do you slow it down?
You have to miss You have to try hard.
If you're trying to rest, are you resting?
No? No, not really No. I try to take a little bit of time and just kind of step back. But you know, I get to I get to get to the fourth of July, and it's kind of like you can just feel it coming and and and and my mind gets is sort of always on it from that point on. So I try to take a little bit of time, but it's it's to me, it's already it's here, so it's in it now.
Yeah, do you physically have to go to a different place or can you just go home or be in Nashville and still like feel like you're stepping away.
I try to go I try to get away a little bit, but really where being my kids are in some camps this summer that that they that they wanted to be in and so we're just kind of hanging around here, which actually for me is one of the usually I like take off for the summer and we go family and all that stuff. It helps it. You know,
my mom and dad are here, which is nice. Yeah, but we don't we aren't going to do a lot this summer, and I'm kind of hopeful that that that does help a little bit where it's just you're not kind of on the go for a couple of weeks. I'm just here. I'm at my house, I with my kids and and just hanging out and join Nashville a little bit. And that's we'll see if that helps. But then I'll take a little bit of time and I'll go see my in laws and my wife's family. They
have a place up in Lake Georgia, New York. So little lake life. Yeah, go jump on a boat and puts around, and that's sort of that's sort of like my one escape that I usually take.
So your parents are here, your dad's on your staff. Do you guys, are you able to have conversations and not talk about work? Yeah?
Not for ver long.
Okay, there it is. Yeah, not for.
Very long, but yeah we can. Yeah, and a lot of it's usually centered around the kids and I'm brothers and sisters and all that stuff, but yeah we can. We can do it for a little bit, but inevitably it always kind of like leans right.
Back into the years into it. Well, I mean because even when you're like close friends with co workers, when you get together socially, you usually end up talking about work anyway, always, and so I would imagine that it's the same thing. You're at a family barbecue. You you're all grilling, but you're also kind of talking about work.
Yeah, that's pretty much how it good. Yeah, it's not. It's no. And when you're in this profession too, like it's it's just sort of all you ever think about. You know, there's not a whole lot of like I'm just going to leave this away for a while, Like it just doesn't work that way.
Yeah. Yeah, there's not a lot of not a lot of separation, but still some time to relax, some time to rest. And then everybody comes back for training camp and we get this thing going. What is your number one goal or priority for the first week or two of training camp.
The first week or two. The first week or two has changed so much because you've got to go through this acclamation period and so there's there's limits on we won't even put pads on until we've been practicing for almost seven days eight days. So you just sort of you're more focused on ramping back into football. And and what I mean by that is even OTAs isn't it's football, but it's not. You're ramping into like padded practice and real physical, hard football. And that's the ideas. You're trying
to get to that point. And then once you hit that point, the process, the intent is to be hard. You want you have to do hard things. I mean, that's part of it. Like you're trying to manage your team and your roster so you're healthy for seventeen games and you're and you got to load manage some guys through training camp. But the idea is that the way that our practices are scheduled is we come off our off days. We have a jog through day, which is sort of like a primer to get back into it
after an off day. It's not as intense, it's a little more mental. We're just moving around a little bit, and then we have two back to back days and pads and that's sort of our four day block works. It's off day jog through two days and pads with the intent of when we hit those two days and pads, those are long, hard physical practices and the expectation is that we are at full hill for two straight days and then we break and then we start to cycle
over again. Yeah, and it gets you hardened and ready for the football season, but it also manages the load to the point where you're you're not losing guys hopefully too often to injury, and you're managing that process the
smart and scientific way, which is what we do. But like, you need football pads on your body and you need to play football, and that's that's training camp, and it should be hard, and it should you should be sore and you should feel tired because you're trying to harden your team and you're trying to toughen your team for what's to come, which the regular season is is a grind and it's it's hard, and so you're trying to get yourself ready for that.
But it seems like that cadence very similarly mirrors the cadence of the regular season where you have some down days, but you have some really really hard days, including Sunday.
Yeah, and that's that's the idea, is that it should we the rhythm should mirror it to some degree because really you look at a jog through day sort of like our Wednesday practice and then our Thursday practices and pads. This is during the season, Thursday practice and pads. It should be long, it should be hard, and then Friday sort of back it back down again. So it's kind of like this, there's these undulations in effort and intensity, and that's scientifically the way that you should be doing.
It shouldn't be this like max velocity for days at a time. There should be it should be ebbs and flows. And so that's the intent of it is that there's this idea of bursts of effort and back downs and bursts of effort and back downs, and that's how training camp schedule that it mirrors how we schedule our regular season weeks. And then again you max out on Sunday, Coach.
That's for sure the first time the word undulation has ever been said on this podcast, and we've had we've had this podcast for seven years, so that's pretty impressive.
Well, I'll take the win.
Yeah, we've gotten a lot of words on this podcast. That's the first one for Undulation. Good coach Callahan. We so appreciate the time. We hope you get some time to relax and sort of unplug. Yeah, and then we'll see you again and train here. I can't wait for Brian Callahan. I'm Amy Wells and this has been the ot P H m hm