The Tennessee Titans have been one of the NFL’s most injury plagued teams over the last few seasons.
While fighting off the injury bug, the Titans set an NFL record by fielding 91 different players during the 2021 regular season. In 2022, they came close to that mark once again. In 2023, key players like Ryan Tannehill, Treylon Burks, and Jeffery Simmons missed serious time.
Getting healthy needs to be a priority moving forward. New head coach Brian Callahan is taking that mission seriously. The Titans are bringing a new training staff and new approach to keeping players healthy into the 2024 season.
At the NFL Owners Meetings in Orlando, Callahan spoke to Titans writer Jim Wyatt about the Titans’ new training staff - which was recently finalized with the hiring of Zac Woodfin as Tennessee’s Director of Sports Performance.
Through Woodfin’s expertise, the staff he is bringing with him, and a total expansion of the department, Callahan and the Titans are hoping to have a more “robust” approach to strength and conditioning than the previous regime.
“That was a really important hire and I waited until the end of it so I could really spend all my attention focused on who the best person for that role would be, and Zac [Woodfin] has knocked it out of the park. He's fantastic. A ton of really interesting experiences," Callahan told Jim Wyatt of TennesseeTitans.com about the organization's most recent hire. "What I think is really cool is the guys that he brought with him. We had two people with Haley [Roberts] and Brian Bell that I think are really fantastic coaches and people that we wanted to keep. He had a couple of guys that he wanted to bring with him. I think we’ve done a really good job of dividing that department. We have someone that’s going to do the sports science, we have someone that’s going to do the speed, we have a head coach. I think we’ve made that program a little bit more robust with adding some more pieces and some more knowledge to try to do the best we can to keep those guys getting stronger, faster, and stay healthier."
Callahan plans to use the data collected by the strength and conditioning staff to structure in-season practices. The speed and intensity at which you practice can have an effect on a player's ability to recover. By tracking every player individually and catering practice plans to the player's needs, the Titans are hoping to have a relatively clean bill of health.
"I think a lot of it has to do with what you do in practice in conjunction with that strength and conditioning and training room," Callahan told Wyatt regarding injury prevention. "I think the approach will be good. We’ll do everything we can to be on top of the science part of it and the load management. Then how we schedule practices will be a huge part of trying to keep guys healthy."
The Titans have been busy this offseason. They've added talent on both sides of the ball to fill roster holes. The team has improved on paper, but still lacks depth. If Tennessee wants to make some noise in the AFC South in 2024 and establish the new culture, they can ill afford to be riddled by injuries once again.
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