Unless the St. Louis/Los Angeles Rams and the San Diego/Los Angeles Chargers (or perhaps the Oakland/Inglewood Raiders) develop a conscience or are deterred by a lawsuit, the cities of St. Louis and/or San Diego/Oakland are going to be without a National Football League franchise next season or 2017 for the first time in decades.
Put that way, perhaps the frustrated fans of the Tennessee Titans are lucky. The Music City still has a team, even if it's one that seems obsessed with hitting far too many sour notes these days.
But could this past weekend's decision to remove the "interim" tag from head coach Mike Mularkey's job description actually hint at a potential Titans move to St. Louis, San Diego or Oakland? In the musical chairs the NFL may be about to play, wouldn't hiring the mediocre Mularkey make more sense if the Titans owners were about to sell the team?
Titans president and CEO Steve Underwood attempted to dispel those rumors during a Monday news conference for Mularkey and new general manager Jon Robinson. But if you were 100 percent committed to improving the Titans in Nashville, why didn't you interview former Philadelphia Eagles coach and new San Francisco coach Chip Kelly, who runs the offense that best suits Titans quarterback Marcus Mariota?
And if not Kelly, why not New England Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels or Carolina defensive coordinator Sean McDermott? It wasn't like anyone else had Mularkey on a short list.
Then again, why bother investing a bunch of money in a coach capable of big things if you're about to sell? On the flip side, what really good coach would want to sign on with a team that might already be on the double-secret auction block? Would any self-respecting coach with a wife and kids take a job in family-friendly Middle Tennessee if he suspects he'll soon be moving to San Diego, Oakland or St. Louis?
To be fair, Mularkey quite possibly did exactly as controlling owner Amy Adams Strunk may have instructed him to do: lose. Nobody lost as often as the Titans this season, which means they'll have the No. 1 overall pick in this spring's NFL draft after taking Mariota with the second pick in last year's draft.
Mariota showed more than a few moments of brilliance when healthy this past fall, but he was often banged up and the offensive line might need three or four overall No. 1 picks to become average.
Nor would fixing the offense cure all ills. These guys gave up 30 points or more in each of their final five games, four of which were losses. Mularkey was 2-7 in his nine games as interim head coach after Ken Whisenhunt was fired following a 1-6 start.
Having reached the Super Bowl at the close of the 1999 season, having produced a 13-3 record in 2008, the Titans have become arguably the league's worst franchise and almost certainly its worst run this side of Cleveland.
Yet what was Mularkey's pep talk to a fan base that hasn't seen the inside of the playoffs since the 2008 season, a fan base clamoring for anything to excite it past which country music flavor of the day is scheduled to sing the national anthem each week?
Said the former head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Buffalo Bills: "It's not the same old from last year - 2015 (with the Titans) is over, 2012 (Jacksonsville) is over, 2004-05 (in Buffalo) are over. There are going to be changes for this team to go in the right direction."
Really? When you're voluntarily bringing up past failures, aren't you pretty much telling folks to at least fear, if not expect, the same old same old?
When you say to those frustrated fans, "All I ask is that they give us a chance," aren't your words alone reason for any cynical citizen of Titans Nation to give you no chance? Shouldn't begging for patience and unwavering support before the first exhibition game be beneath anyone who wishes to project a positive persona?
Instead, this all comes across as a franchise about to start a billboard blitz along the lines of: "Please come cheer the Titans. We're not as bad as you think!"
Or maybe they don't care what anybody thinks because they're on their way out, off to St. Louis or Oakland or San Diego, or any other soon-to-be former NFL city. Perhaps that's why Strunk was the only NFL owner to skip its recent owners meetings. Why bother when you're about to become a former owner?
It's all rumors and speculation at this point. As is the long-whispered notion that the Adams family would like a new playpen to replace Nissan Stadium. Maybe not the $1.85 billion palace that helped lure the Rams back to L.A. from St. Louis, but something more lavish than the erector set squeezed between the interstate and the Cumberland River.
Perhaps sensing that Nashville has no interest in that, the family has decided to move elsewhere or sell. Or both.
There is also this, as many of us at this newspaper discovered 18 years ago: The descendants of a business's founder don't always share the same passion for that company as the founder. After "Mister Roy" McDonald died, many of the third-generation McDonald family owners took current owner Walter Hussman's money rather than hang onto a Chattanooga News Free Press they no longer wished to run.
You couldn't blame them. And if the family of late Oilers/Titans founder Bud Adams isn't as enamored with the NFL as the franchise's passionate patriarch, you can't blame those folks, either.
But however much they deny it, each time the Adams family hires or promotes someone that no one else in the NFL covets, you can't help but wonder if the next Music City Miracle will be Nashville holding onto the Titans past the winter of musical chairs.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.