Go Titans! Hop on that bandwagon, boys! You finally earned a bandwagon! I’m on it.

So first off, a lot of crazy stuff happened this weekend (RIP Gus Bus, Jax got SAVAGED, which makes my comic about Brock Osweiler last week retrospectively timely), but because of holiday travels I must confess the 3 comics this week were pre-planned, so you’ll have to wait for a SAVAGED comic. I got lucky that I made a Titans comic that ends up going live right after they pulled off an incredible upset in KC. Go Tits!

This is the second comic I’ve made this year about the Titans in this format, so I’ve really already talked about how much fun this team is. It’s a good team to watch, and at this point they very well may be capable of beating anyone. They dunked on the Packers, and beat the Broncos and Chiefs in consecutive weeks. This team deserves your attention. So instead of re-hashing that, I want to take a moment and make an argument that maybe, just maybe…We were too quick and too harsh on coach Mike Mularkey. GASP!

If you’ve got the time, give Mularkey’s Wikipedia page a read. That’s what I did when the Titans kept winning, because surely Mike Mularkey can’t be a good coach, right? Well…maybe he isn’t that bad. Mularkey is best known for his previous stint with the Jaguars. A disaster that lasted a single season. A 2-14 crapfest of a year. That screams bad coach, until you go and look at that 2012 roster. Look at that final roster. Look at it. It’s trash. No coach is going to win 5 games with that roster. The Jags current roster is leagues better than that pile of horse dung, and Gus Bradley got 4 years and he got fired before he could match that 4-12.

So what about the rest of Mularkey’s career? What’s he done? His only other stint as a coach was 2 seasons with the Bills in 2004-2005. His first year started bad, going 0-4, but they managed to reach 9-7 and barely missed the playoffs. Taking the Bills near the playoffs is an accomplishment. His following year they went 5-11 (JP Losman is a bad QB) and the team was indefensibly bad. However Mularkey wasn’t fired, at least technically. He resigned his post, something Doug Marrone would do a decade later. Something about the Bills must really sap a man’s desire.

His time as a coordinator shines brighter. In Atlanta, he got to work with rookie Matt Ryan and together they made mostly beautiful music. He was named Assistant coach of the year in 2008 by pro football writers of America, and also received accolades in 2011.

I realize this isn’t a spectacular argument, but if you watch the Titans this year I think it becomes clear that maybe we shouldn’t have left them for dead the instant we found out they were sticking with Mularkey. This team is flawed but it’s working. It’s genuinely working, and I’m happy to see it.

Also the 49ers are a trash team