NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains and whoever was calling the defense -- coordinator Jerry Gray or senior assistant/ defense Gregg Williams -- didn’t call plays off a script during the first practice of the Tennessee Titans' minicamp Tuesday.
Mike Munchak and his coaches decided that the three final practices of the offseason won’t be scripted. Coaches and players will go into them with a sense of what they want to do. And in what appears a very healthy exercise, the playcallers and players will be tested on the fly, just like they will be on fall Sundays.
“Whatever you call, you call and the players have got to make their adjustments off of it,” Gray said before practice. “So we’re really going through a bunch of game-type situations: You’re in two minute, you’re in four minute, you’re in goal line, it’s first-and-10. All they are going to do (on offense) is tell us personnel. Then we are going to treat it as a game …
“Not only does it help me, it helps Dowell, it helps the head coach get a chance to see what we like to call in certain situations, and the players do, too. You can script and say hey, ‘I can always have the pen last and win.’ You’ve got to make the call from what you are looking at, what you’re thinking, what’s that going to do to you, because that’s how the game is.”
After practice quarterback Jake Locker talked of the real situations the offense faced and said he thought the offense did well, hitting on some big plays and consistently getting positive yardage. Those big plays included a great play on which Kenny Britt took a pass away from Coty Sensabaugh and stayed in bounds, and a long catch-and-run touchdown by Kendall Wright against coverage by rookie cornerback Blidi Wreh-Wilson.
Munchak said that while the players benefit from the lack of scripts, it’s as much of an exercise for their bosses.
“That’s as good for the coaches as anybody, to make them have to think how to try to attack each other and not be able to pre-plan everything we are doing out here,” Munchak said. “Once we had everything installed, once we spent the first nine OTAs getting everything in and doing it at a teaching pace where we felt they had a good understanding, then to me this is the best thing we could do.
“You can’t tackle, this is as close as you get to playing real football, at least mentally. I just thought this would be a nice change for these couple days. Let it flow, let it happen and create some situations."