Ditching traditional caution, Tennessee’s head coach prioritizes heavy starter reps and rookie growth to accelerate learning curves through meaningful hardship before the regular season kicks off.
The Tennessee Titans haven't always leaned toward using starters in the preseason.
In fact, former head coach Mike Vrabel was actually against it for most of his tenure in Nashville. Brian Callahan was a little more lenient, but not to the extent Robert Saleh is with starters.
While most teams that play starters in the preseason only use them for a couple of drives, Saleh has been playing them for most of the first half.
He's even said he plans to keep the starters in for the first half of Saturday's game against the Bears.
Saleh has been willing to take chances on the younger players too. Fernando Carmona has been given a lot of responsibility as a rookie. Carnell Tate has been with the starters, and Anthony Hill Jr. just had a breakout performance against the Seattle Seahawks.
Saleh hasn't been shy about his stance on the preseason and was asked about what he wants to see from the starters playing a full half.
The head coach wants to get the players valuable experience and go through hardship in the preseason to make them better players once the real football starts.
"Well, that's a good one," Saleh said. "We're a very, very, very young football team, and we need as many reps as we can possibly get. Like I said, what you see today is our floor. This team's only going to get better. But the only way they're going to get better is if they see it. And they've got to see it a million times over if we want to accelerate the learning curve."
We saw this after the mishaps the starters made against the Seahawks. The Titans' defense allowed two touchdowns on the two first offensive drives the Seahawks had.
The first was a blown coverage that led to a touchdown catch by tight end Elijah Arroyo. The other was a 69-yard touchdown run by Missouri State rookie Jacardia Wright, who was almost untouched on his way to the end zone.
Saleh was open about how glad he was that those mistakes were made in the preseason. This is because he can work on correcting them before the regular season hits.
With Saleh, his stance on the preseason has a purpose. He wants to find correctable mistakes with the younger players on the Titans.
Even though he doesn't have very much longer to evaluate talent, Saleh will no doubt be searching for those correctable mistakes on Saturday night when the Titans face the Chicago Bears.
