After dominating college football and winning a national championship with Texas, Vince Young’s NFL career was a major disappointment.
Young’s career started with the Tennessee Titans, where he and his coach, Jeff Fisher, didn’t get along.
In a feature with Sports Illustrated, Young told his side of the story about his relationship with Fisher, who he said purposely provoked him and treated him poorly.
Young describes an incident from November of his rookie season when he left his ID at home before a road game against the Eagles. As he tells it, he went to retrieve it and was then held up by a funeral procession en route to the team plane, so he called Fisher to say he would be two minutes late. Young had seen Fisher hold the plane for other players, but this time he did not. “I feel like Fisher did that s— on purpose,” he says. “I’m pulling in, seeing them pull the door down. I can hear the team yelling.” As Young stood on the tarmac, grounded, he could only watch as the team he was supposed to lift into the playoffs soared into the sky without him.
At McNair’s urging, Young chartered a private jet to Philly instead. In his defense Fisher cited team policy for not waiting. Young wasn’t having it. “Where I’m from,” he told the coach, “that’s like saying F you.”
Fisher told SI that was team policy. Young is also upset at how Fisher continued the narrative of what was portrayed as a suicide attempt by Young. Young said he just took a gun with him as he blew off steam, but Fisher didn’t stop the fueling speculation that Young was trying to hurt himself.
The incident spiraled from there. Young and (friend and former teammate Bo) Scaife both say they’d simply gone out for chicken wings, to decompress. Young’s gun was locked in his glove box, unloaded. Fisher eventually reached Young through Scaife and asked that he return to the facility, but when he did, Young says, eight police officers and a negotiator were waiting for him.
They asked for his wallet and keys. Young sat down with the negotiator. “He’s talking all slowly,” the QB recalls, “like: ‘Mr. Young . . . are you . . . O.K.? Do you . . . feel like . . . hurting yourself?’ ”
“I’m like, Dude, quit talking to me! And I’m looking at Fisher like, You can stop all this, all the suicidal talk. He’s sitting there, saying nothing. I feel like he was just laughing at that s—. The [TV] cameraman hiding in the woods—it all felt like a big setup. And now I gotta walk through the airport as the Suicidal Guy for the rest of my life.”
Even if Young was an immature player, and even if Fisher didn’t like him, Fisher doesn’t come off well here. Coaches are supposed to work with their supremely talented players to get the most out of them, and they’re supposed to try to find common ground with them, not alienate them.
I used to think highly of Jeff Fisher. However the more I’ve learned about him over the years has changed my thinking.