Ken Whisenhunt Faces Tall Order Turning Around The Tennessee Titans

Ken Whisenhunt is a Super-Bowl-caliber coach, having lead the Arizona Cardinals within sixty seconds of taking home the trophy behind future Hall-of-Famer Kurt Warner. The Tennessee Titans, however, are a long ways away from duplicating that kind of success.

The Whisenhunt-led Titans helped their cause last weekend by defeating the Jacksonsville Jaguars 16-14 on a late second field-goal block. Their own kicker Ryan Succop added three field goals to help the Titans prevail. According to News Observer, Ken dished to reporters that he didn’t have positive feelings they would pull out the victory, just before the pivotal block:

“I had a sense of foreboding. I’m just glad we made a play at the end to win the game,” admitted Titans head coach Ken Whisenhunt. “I’m glad to get the win today. It’s what we needed.”

A sense of foreboding isn’t the only thing Coach has been feeling since taking the job with the Titans in the offseason. According to Pro Football Talk, Ken believes he may have overestimated the talent level of his club before taking the job after boasting that the Titans could turn things around fairly quickly:

“You know, I guess that’s the problem saying those kind of things. You go on a stretch where you have a couple games and you don’t play well, and those are the kind of things that, hey, I still believe that, I still believe we have a team that’s good enough, that’s better than what we are playing right now. But we have to look at what we are doing, how we are doing it. We have to look at everything.”

When asked directly by Jim Wyatt of the Tennessean whether he overestimated the team that he has at Sunday’s post-game press conference, Whisenhunt simply replied, “Maybe. Maybe, Jim.”

Not helping matters for Ken Whisenhunt is the injury to his starting quarterback Jake Locker. Locker was hurt (again) in the second quarter of an eventual loss to the Cleveland Browns October 5th. Since then, journeyman Charlie Whitehurst has had to fill in for Jake at quarterback. And while the Tennessean notes how Locker generally responds to return from injury with positive performance, the road to the playoffs (let alone the Super Bowl) is going to be a long one for Whisenhunt, even with Locker back.

What do you think? Can Ken Whisenhunt lead the Tennessee Titans to the playoffs again? And will he eventually lead the team to the Super Bowl?

[Image courtesy of CBS Sports]