Mark Madden: It's time for Titans' season to end as NFL forges on

The Tennessee Titans have wrecked their season.

The Titans defied an NFL mandate and had two unauthorized practices. Their coach, Mike Vrabel, lost institutional control. As of this writing, 23 players and staff members have tested positive for covid-19. Last week’s home game against the Pittsburgh Steelers was postponed. Sunday’s game against visiting Buffalo was moved to Tuesday if no more Titans test positive.

That counts on the outbreak in Nashville stopping dead in its tracks. Good luck with that.

This is nobody’s fault but the Titans’. It’s not bad luck or a random result of the pandemic. No other NFL team is in nearly the same mess. The Titans were reckless and stupid.

But making them forfeit games doesn’t seem right.

Kicking them out of the NFL for the remainder of the season does.

Forfeits don’t work. If the Titans end up forfeiting the Buffalo game, why didn’t they forfeit the Pittsburgh game? What if a team that gets a forfeit makes the playoffs because of it? Does the NFL really want that determined off the field?

But if the Titans’ season is declared null and void, it’s a clean slate.

The Titans are 3-0. That’s convenient for this purpose. Wipe those losses out. They never happened. Finagle the schedule so their AFC South opponents (who each play Tennessee twice) play just one less game. No team should play less than 15.

The standings would be determined via winning percentage. It’s not ideal, but nothing about booting a team from the NFL figures to be ideal.

It’s more radical than fining the Titans millions, taking away draft picks, or suspending their coach and general manager. (Those things should also be done.)

It’s also equitable to everybody else involved.

Everybody else involved should be of much more concern than the Titans, because the Titans screwed up to the detriment of everybody else.

The owners lose money. Too bad. The players and other employees don’t get paid. That’s also too bad. Those responsible are the ones who should absorb damage. Like Steelers tight end Vance McDonald said, problems arise “if one team’s blunder is another team’s misfortune.”

The fans in Nashville would feel hard done by. But innocents occasionally catch shrapnel.

The Steelers weren’t too inconvenienced by the NFL adjusting their bye week to reschedule their game at Tennessee. (Visiting Baltimore the week after the Ravens get their bye stinks, though.)

But it didn’t stop there. The fiasco in Nashville kept growing.

It might soon be time to put the situation out of its misery.

The NFL Players Association would have a conniption. So would Titans ownership. Ditching Tennessee’s season would doubtless result in legal action. But the NFL shouldn’t let that threat prevent doing what’s best for the league.

Extending the regular season to Week 18 would be OK. (The NFL should have had the foresight to plan for 18 weeks from the get-go.) If that ultimately needs to be done to play the Buffalo-Tennessee game, so be it. (The Bills were supposed to host Kansas City on Thursday. That got pushed back to the following Sunday. One team’s blunder is another team’s inconvenience.)

But if the Titans’ situation doesn’t stabilize, and they can’t play their Oct. 18 home game against Houston, their season should be abandoned as described above.

Don’t have a Week 19. Don’t keep rearranging the fortunes of those who take the pandemic seriously to accommodate those who don’t.

Once is OK. Twice is too many. Forget three times.

There’s nothing unfair about that.

The Steelers have taken an approach both professional and adult. As McDonald said, “We knew what we were supposed to be doing from day zero. We don’t want the finger pointed at us.” Coach Mike Tomlin’s daily reminder, says McDonald, is: “Let’s not be those guys.”

Here’s how outside linebacker Bud Dupree describes his daily routine: “Practice and go home.”

The Steelers put football first.

The Titans think they put football first via their unauthorized workouts. God forbid routine should be disrupted or practice missed.

But by then, it was too late to put football first. All the Titans did was dig the hole deeper.

Abandoning Tennessee’s season would be the most extreme punishment ever levied against a team (not an individual, or group of individuals), comparable only to Southern Methodist University’s football program getting the death penalty from the NCAA in 1987.

But it’s what the Titans deserve, especially given their transgressions and when forging ahead with the NFL season is a whole lot easier in their absence.