Seeking to revitalize a struggling secondary, Alontae Taylor reveals how the Titans became his premier free-agent destination after his time with the New Orleans Saints came to an end.
The Tennessee Titans retooled their secondary this offseason with the additions of Alontae Taylor and Cor'Dale Flott.
After the shape the secondary was in last year, it needed reinforcements badly. L'Jarius Sneed had injury issues for the second straight year, and then the Titans traded Roger McCreary and Jarvis Brownlee Jr. at the deadline.
After that, the franchise scrambled for suitable corners. Darrell Baker, Micah Robinson, Kevin Winston, Marcus Harris and Jalyn Armour-Davis all started for the Titans at cornerback.
Despite all of those players seeing time there, the Titans couldn't fix their pass defense. Tennessee allowed the seventh-most passing yards per game last season (248.3).
As Taylor said on the podcast "In The Bayou With Tyrann Mathieu," he was brought to the Titans to fix the defense, which has underperformed in recent years. He also shed light on what drew him to the Titans in the first place.
Taylor was last with the New Orleans Saints and played with Tyrann Mathieu for three seasons there. The Saints decided not to re-sign him, and Taylor hit the open market.
He shared that when he was weighing his options in free agency, the Titans were a no-brainer because of Robert Saleh's reputation as a defensive-minded head coach.
"Man, I think being in the league, you kind of see, you go against other teams," Taylor said. "You kind of see different defenses being a defensive guy. You kind of see how they're playing and stuff, and you know there's also a couple of coaches you wanna play for. Coming into this, man, I always heard about Robert, Coach Saleh. I've always heard about the players, the success rate, and seeing guys succeed under him. I always said that's a coach I wanna play for one day. So, when he got the head coaching job at Tennessee, I knew there was a chance. So, going through the whole process, obviously in free agency and stuff like that, I knew once that opportunity came, and I knew they were an actual contender team that I could go to, I leaned into it a whole lot."
Other than his head-coaching stints, Saleh has had stops with the San Francisco 49ers, Jacksonville Jaguars, Seattle Seahawks, and Houston Texans in defensive assistant roles.
This goes back to the culture shift that can be seen around the building for the Titans. We heard Tyjae Spears' comments about the confidence that the team is going to turn things around.
It appears that things are trending in the right direction with the Titans being a free-agent destination. Many of the biggest moves that the Titans made in free agency were on defense, with John Franklin-Myers, Taylor and Flott leading the charge.
Hopefully, this will influence more free agents to seek Tennessee as a new landing spot in the future.
