With Mike Vrabel gone, it's hard to see Derrick Henry back with Tennessee Titans | Estes

To Tennessee Titans fans holding on to hope of running back Derrick Henry playing another season in two-tone blue: Time to start letting go.

Pay attention to what the King is saying.

Henry, while careful not to rule out anything, keeps warning fans to not expect him back. That's probably because he doesn’t expect to be back — especially after the past couple of weeks.

The same day the Titans fired Mike Vrabel, Henry recorded an interview for the “Bussin’ With the Boys” podcast hosted by former teammates Taylor Lewan and Will Compton. They asked Henry about his future with an expiring contract and if staying with the Titans was still a possibility.

“I’m not saying it like (the door) is closed,” Henry told them, “but I just feel — like I said earlier — like they’re going in a different direction. And I feel like today (with Vrabel’s firing) definitely solidified that. And that’s OK. That happens. That’s the nature of the business. We want something to last forever. Nothing does, especially in this business.”

Sounds like Henry is moving on, just like it did when he grabbed the microphone at Nissan Stadium after the season finale.

Sounds, too, like Henry has made his peace with a departure, and I’d advise Titans fans to follow his example. I know that isn't easy. Parting with an all-time great never is, and this is made more difficult by the fact that Henry, at age 30, can still play. He just ran for 1,167 yards behind one of the NFL's worst offensive lines. Which showed he's still plenty durable, too. Henry played in every game this past season and led the league in carries. His best performance? In the final week.

Yes, he'll be a highly effective player somewhere else. He’d still be effective for the Titans, too, but that’s not the point.

Henry is telling us that he can't go home again. It wouldn't be the same Titans, anyway. In his "Bussin’ " interview, he stressed how much the team “just felt different.” He said the Titans were “close” to trading him during the season. They didn't, but players could sense a pending directional change anyway.

And then . . .

“With Coach Vrabel getting fired,” Henry told Lewan and Compton, “it’s kind of like the book closed.”

An astute observation by Henry. That’s exactly what this was. Titans owner Amy Adams Strunk flipped to a blank page by calling it quits on Vrabel's chapter in franchise history. What's next is anyone's guess, but it won't be more of the same.

And no one — not even the coach himself — embodied the Titans' Vrabel era better than Henry.

He represented a bloody-nosed mentality that, while old-fashioned, will never go out of style in a game of bravery and toughness. It’s the belief that the shortest route to success isn’t around or over an opponent. It goes right through them.

For years, Vrabel’s Titans enjoyed a lot of success by being tougher than an opponent, and the reason wasn't complicated: They had Henry, and everyone else did not.

Somewhere during the 2018 and 2019 seasons, the Titans finally realized that if they kept handing Henry the ball, a defense didn't like that. That defense might get demoralized and wear down late in games. Then Henry’s early 2-yard runs would turn into big gains, and the Titans — so long as the score was close — could own the fourth quarter. Not much the other team could do to stop it.

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For three winning seasons, that’s often how it went.

When it ceased working in 2022 and 2023, though, the Titans were stuck with an outdated offensive approach, still overly reliant on Henry and unable to adjust on the fly for sustained success. That's how an NFL team goes two full seasons without scoring more than 28 points in a game.

An autopsy of the Vrabel/Henry era would show the primary cause of death to be offensive line failure. With unwise draft picks and poor free-agent decisions, the Titans didn't take proper care of the one area that needed to be right for them to be able to play the way they wanted. Ended up, much of the time, they were beating their heads against a wall by trying.

Wasn't Henry's fault, but he paid for it all season in bruises, getting few victories in return.

You'd likely be ready for a change, too.

Had Vrabel stayed on as Titans coach, approaches and personnel and schemes could have been tweaked. But the core identity wouldn’t change that much. I'd suspect that Vrabel, were he still in the building, would have been the biggest advocate for re-signing Henry. Coaches like having great players, and that coach loved having that great player.

For the past half-decade, when outsiders looked at the Titans, they saw Henry. And they saw Vrabel.

With one of them gone, it's difficult to believe the other won't be, too.

Reach Tennessean sports columnist Gentry Estes at gestes@tennessean.com and on the X platform (formerly known as Twitter) @Gentry_Estes.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: With Mike Vrabel gone from Titans, Derrick Henry likely will be, too