Mike Vrabel has been honored as the NFL's Coach of the Year for the 2021 season.

The 46-year-old is the first in Tennessee Titans history to receive the award. This comes after they finished 12-5 and earned the top seed in the AFC playoff field.

Entering the year, a 12-win season and an AFC South title wouldn't have felt like monumental achievements for the franchise. The Titans went 11-5 and clinched a division title in 2020 and reached the AFC Championship Game in 2019.

But Tennessee's season wasn't looking good after Derrick Henry suffered a foot injury in a Week 8 win over the Indianapolis Colts. That was the star running back's last appearance of the regular season.

To that point, Henry had run for 937 yards and 10 touchdowns, not only putting him on pace to lead the NFL in rushing for the third straight year but also insert him into the MVP discussion.

Without Henry in the backfield, the Titans still won six of their final nine games. D'Onta Foreman and Dontrell Hilliard combined to run for 916 yards and five touchdowns over that stretch.

Henry wasn't the only notable player to miss time, either. A.J. Brown and Julio Jones were unavailable for stretches. Taylor Lewan missed four games. Kevin Byard, Harold Landry and Jeffery Simmons were the only players on defense to start all 17 games.

By November, Tennessee had already used more players (86) over a single season than any other team in NFL history.

Things could've unraveled when the Titans dropped their second straight game—a 36-13 loss to the New England Patriots—heading into the Week 13 bye. Instead, they returned to action with a shutout of the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Under no circumstances do you want to give Vrabel and his staff more time to draw up a game plan.

In terms of outperforming preseason expectations, the Cincinnati Bengals' Zac Taylor might have exceeded Vrabel. His team won 10 games and claimed its first AFC North title since 2015.

But using that as the sole barometer in the Coach of the Year race ignores the number of hurdles that were thrown in Vrabel's way. He unquestionably did enough to put himself atop the field.