SI.com - Writers - Overwhelmingly overlooked - Thursday August 21, 2003 9:34AM

Fisher Outtakes

NASHVILLE -- What steps does a coach take to turn a season around from 1-4 to 11-5 and an eventual berth in the conference title game? Here are some of Jeff Fisher's observations about the 2002 season, when he pulled his Tennessee Titans out of their early doldrums and won 10 of 11 games to finish the regular season:

"I think we proved last year that we are a one-week-at-a-time team. We've always done that. We didn't really do much different. We stayed the course. There was a lot of talk about going back to a physical style of play, but you're always going to play physical every week.

"We did put some pads on one day on the practice field, on the Wednesday after the Washington game. I basically told the coaches not to look at their watches. I said we're going to play some ball here today. You hope that mentality carries over. But that was a one-day thing."

Fisher also convened a meeting of eight veteran team leaders in his office that week.

"I brought eight guys in that I respect on this team, and I said, 'OK, gloves are off, doors shut, have at it. What am I doing wrong? What are you doing wrong? What do we need to change? How do we get out of it?' And nobody says a word.

"I said, 'Good. No problems. We're fine. Out. I'll see you on the practice field.' No one said a word, and this is an open door environment and they can say whatever they want. So it's not like they weren't going to speak their mind. I just felt like everyone had to be held accountable for what they were doing and just work a little bit harder and things were going to turn."

"Nobody panicked here. The players didn't panic. We knew we were good. We just had let some games slip away that we were supposed to win and should have had a chance to win. ... If you have a philosophy and have a plan, you stay with it. If I change, what I'm saying to them is, 'Guess what? I might have made a mistake and we are doing things wrong.'

"I knew once we got back to .500 at 5-5, people would say, 'What did you do differently the last five weeks?' If I said, 'Well, I did A, B, and C,' they'd say, 'Great. Why didn't you do that at the start?' So you stick with your plan."

On his attitude the day after dropping to 1-4 and seemingly being second-guessed by Titans owner Bud Adams:

"Well, I was a little upset. I was upset, but it had nothing to do with Mr. Adams' comments. At all. Because I talk with Mr. Adams all the time. That wasn't the issue. The issue was what we were not doing on the field. When you tell a particular player, 'I've got a pretty good feel for what you're going to get the next play,' and explain to him how to play it. And then he gets it and he chases the post and they throw the corner route for a touchdown, well, there's something missing there.

"There's not much you can do but what we did, which was to keep working through it and not panic and get a win. Then I asked them to just imagine a few weeks from now when we get back to .500. I said you're going to look back and say this was not hard. So we just spoke from a positive perspective."

-- Don Banks

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Somehow it has become the catch phrase of choice in sports -- sadly, more so every year -- even though 99.7 percent of the time it's utterly contrived hogwash and as transparent as a Don King news conference.

But once in a great while, and we can't stress that qualifier enough, the painfully tired "no respect'' cliché actually rings true. Every now and then, a team like last year's Tennessee Titans comes along and reminds us that every success story isn't impossibly over-hyped.

In 2002, while we were fixated on the Jets' and Giants' season-saving turnarounds, the coronation of Michael Vick and the Falcons, and the train wreck that was the Rams' demise -- juicy subplots all -- the Titans went on the quietest 10-1 season-ending run in recent NFL history.

Forgot, didn't you? Somehow, when our attention was elsewhere, Tennessee started the season 1-4 but came within a 13-12 late-November loss at Baltimore of rolling into the AFC Championship Game against Oakland with a 12-game winning streak. That game, in that scenario, would have been played in the Titans' Coliseum in Nashville rather the Raiders' in Oakland, by virtue of Tennessee's AFC-best record.

As it was, the 11-5 Titans traveled to 11-5 Oakland, grabbed a 17-14 lead just before halftime, then fell apart to lose 41-24. The Raiders went on to the Super Bowl smorgasbord of hype, and the Titans went home, not really caring much that the NFL nation all but missed out on one of the season's most remarkable sagas.

"That's the thing, nobody really knows what we did and what we accomplished,'' said Tennessee's Keith Bulluck, whose own stealthy emergence as one of game's best young outside linebackers last year mirrored the Titans' season. "In the last 11 games of the year, our backs were to the wall. We were 1-4 and facing elimination from the playoffs in early October, and we battled back and got all the way to the AFC Championship Game. That's doing something.''

Something, and then some. Compare for a minute the Titans' experience of last year to the Jets', then decide who had rightful claim to feel disrespected, snubbed or overlooked:

• Both AFC teams were three games under .500 at one point in the season, with New York starting 2-5 and Tennessee 1-4.

• Both teams were resilient, brilliantly coached, and rallied to win their divisions.

• Both teams earned one home playoff game, won it and moved on to face Oakland on the road in the next round.

• True, the Titans finished 11-5 and two games better than the 9-7 Jets in the regular season, and they survived a week longer in the postseason, but honestly now, which team was more celebrated for its tenacity?

Obviously a New York turnaround is worth at least twce as much as a Tennessee turnaround when it comes to media attention in the NFL. That's just the reality of the Gotham myth-making machine and market demographics. But almost all of us missed the boat on Tennessee's accomplishment, and I for one am proffering an apology. Never again will I let Jeff Fisher, Steve McNair and Co. lull me into inattentiveness.

Never again will I stay quiet while the Titans are snubbed come Pro Bowl time, as they alone among playoff teams were last year (defensive end Kevin Carter was later added by Fisher as a "need'' player. And if you're wondering, the Jets had two representatives in Honolulu). I'm willing to go as far as to suggest a new rule: Henceforth, if McNair isn't named one of the three AFC quarterbacks, that year's Pro Bowl should be canceled due to irrelevance.

"There comes a time when you don't even care about the national attention,'' Titans running back Eddie George told me last week, sitting in the team's cafeteria at its Baptist Sports Park complex. "Because at the end of the day, we still ended up in the AFC Championship Game. The Jets started slow, we started slow. But they got more attention, and that was for finishing 9-7 and not being a factor in the homefield advantage race.

"We have some outstanding players on this team, but if we don't start off fast, then we get lost in the shuffle because of the size of our market and the fact we're not on national TV a lot. You're just not going to hear a whole bunch out of us.''

Don't look now, but it could be more of the same on the TV exposure front for the Titans in 2003. Thirteen of Tennessee's 16 games this season are scheduled to be played before regional audiences, with Sunday 1 p.m. ET kickoffs. There's one Sunday nighter and one Monday nighter in prime time, with a 4:15 p.m. ET doubleheader start at Atlanta in late November thrown into the mix. Even if the Titans sell out every home game, that's the NFL equivalent of being blacked out nationally.

C'mon now, Park Avenue. Is that any way to treat a team that's tied with St. Louis for the best overall record in your league in the past four seasons? The Rams and Titans are 44-20 in that span, with three playoff seasons and one seven-win aberration apiece.

"I think it's always going to be that way here,'' said Fisher, the Titans' coach who trails only Pittsburgh's Bill Cowher in terms of continuous service with one team, and is the league's winningiest coach since 1999. "We get the little mention down in the corner, and that's OK. That was the whole Pro Bowl thing. But I knew we had some Pro Bowl candidates on this team.''

The irony of course is that Fisher and his staff wound up coaching the AFC Pro Bowl squad, a dubious honor if there ever was one, given that the assignment goes to the team that lost the conference title game. But the fact that Fisher got his left-for-dead Titans into position to lose the AFC championship is one of last season's truly under-appreciated feats.

After defeating Philadelphia in the 2002 opener, Tennessee lost to Dallas, Cleveland, Oakland and Washington in Weeks 2-5, suffering galling home losses to the Browns and Redskins. Rock bottom was when Washington rookie quarterback Patrick Ramsey picked the Titans' defense apart 31-14, dropping Tennessee to 1-4. Coming on the heels of 2001's 7-9, with Titans owner Bud Adams quoted as saying it appeared his team had been out-coached against Washington, Fisher's team looked shell-shocked and eons removed from its 1999-2000 heyday.

"That Monday after we lost to Washington, that's when everything hit the fan,'' George said. "But instead of succumbing to the environment at that particular time, it was more or less, 'What are we going to do to make this thing turn around?' We decided we had a lot more football to play, and what a story it would be if we turned it around and made the playoffs. And we did just that.''

When the Titans opened training camp last month, their roster featured just 12 holdovers from their 1999 Super Bowl team. But included in that bunch were cornerstone names like McNair, George, defensive end Jevon Kearse, cornerback Samari Rolle, receiver Derrick Mason and tight end Frank Wycheck. Tennessee doesn't have the depth it once had -- who does in this salary cap era? -- but its top 22 players match up well with any Super Bowl contender. Make that any other Super Bowl contender.

This time around, we're not taking our eyes off the Titans. Fool me twice, shame on me.

"From where we started last year and where we ended up, things are definitely on the upswing around here,'' George said. "But it's up to us to build on that. There are no guarantees. This team has seen everything. We've been to the Big Show and lost. We had the best record in football and lost in the first round. We've had our down season, and we got in the championship game and lost.

"The only thing left is to win and win it all. It's not a Super Bowl-or-bust situation, but we feel our time is coming. Because we've pretty much done it all.''

Perseverance like that deserves a little respect. Which in Tennessee is all they ever seem to get.

Don Banks covers pro football for SI.com.


	SI Media Kits \| About Us \| Subscribe \| Customer Service Copyright © 2005 CNN/Sports Illustrated. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Read our privacy guidelines.

Overwhelmingly overlooked

Looking back, the Titans received little recognition for their about-face