Culpepper could succeed. Hard to ask someone who was “retired” to jump right into a poor situation and succeed immediately. Especially after they got rid of the only person who knew how to run an offense on that team in Martz. They’d be significantly better off getting their O-line together and having Culpepper playing for a couple seasons and getting a better prospect to groom later than they would with Stafford and having no line and no defense. If they did it the smart way, they’d completely fix one side of the ball, accept that they’re not going to be contenders this year and accept the record that comes with having a terrible defense and then getting one of the QBs next year and going defense defense defense.

And I don’t think Stafford is terribly overrated, but he’d be considered a bust on that poor of a team. The problem with the teams that are consistently bad is that they get a coach who wants to win that season so they draft a QB, a LB, a 2nd round this guy a blah blah blah and the talent isn’t working together as a machine. So you get good players surrounded by crap because these guys are thinking they’re going to lose their jobs if they don’t make the playoffs the next year and it becomes an endless cycle. Not many owners give coaches the opportunity that Cowher had in Pittsburgh. The assumption that the QB is what makes a team is normally completey wrong. The QB is the final piece to make a team finally come together after it has the players in place to support him.

Just look at the Plummers and David Carr’s of this league. Were they terrible QBs and busts? Nope. Were they on crap teams that couldn’t protect them, catch, or stop the other team from scoring? Yep. Same thing happened to Patrick Ramsey and Jason Campbell will probably be playing his final year as a Redskin. Even Peyton had a couple subpar seasons until the team was put in place around him. And Tom Brady benefitted coming into a team that was built around Bledsoe and took those years of suck in stride before getting booted to the curb.

I agree with the whole schedule thing, and that’s why I think the Titans will struggle a bit this year. They went from a 3rd place schedule to now playing a 1st place schedule and are now going to have at least 2 tougher games than they would have had last year because of that.

Titans have a great head coach and good overall talent, but with the loss of Haynesworth, a tougher schedule (in theory at least) and Kerry Collins returning to earth the end result won’t be as good as it was last year.