After bottoming out last year with a 3-14 record, the Tennessee Titans are busy trying to figure out how to end a three-year slide of failure as they enter the 2025 season.
The Titans have been in a prolonged funk ever since beating Green Bay on a Monday night game on the road midway through the 2022 season to go to 7-3.
At that point, even though it felt like then-head coach Mike Vrabel and his staff were finding success with smoke and mirrors, few could have projected the levels to which the Titans would tumble.
The early morning after that victory over the Packers, the offensive coordinator Todd Downing was arrested for a DUI.
Two weeks later, owner Amy Adams Strunk unceremoniously fired general manager Jon Robinson after the A.J. Brown trade came home to roost through a beat down in Philadelphia.
The Titans lost seven consecutive games after that win in Green Bay to fall out of the playoffs in a fashion few could have predicted. Quarterback Ryan Tannehill was lost with an ankle injury, rookie QB Malik Willis struggled and Vrabel plucked journeyman Josh Dobbs to try to salvage something over the final two weeks of that season.
When Vrabel and new general manager Ran Carthon could not fix the slide in 2023, the coach then got sideways with Adams Strunk. Soon he too was shown the door.
Carthon was the fall guy this past offseason as the Titans’ run of unproductive drafts that started in Robinson’s final couple of seasons continued. That, plus bringing in a wagon-load of veteran free agents, mostly past their prime and unable to stay healthy, sent Carthon to Adams Strunk’s guillotine as the latest scapegoat for the organizational failures.
Now the Titans find themselves under the triumvirate of president of football operations Chad Brinker, new general manager Mike Borgonzi and head coach Brian Callahan, who was retained despite the Titans’ struggles.
And while Callahan was unable to get second-year quarterback Will Levis to deliver with consistency, he gets a new opportunity to show that he can still be a quarterback whisperer with first overall pick Cam Ward at the controls of his offense.
Is the change real?
With so many changes and so little success over the past three seasons, is there any real hope for optimism from the Titans this season, beyond just a new quarterback and another round of newcomers added to the roster representing nearly a 50% turnover from 2024?
In the latest spin of the wheel of trying to get back to winning, the Titans drafted Ward to be the foundational piece of the rebuild.
And while outwardly, everyone in the Titans organization professes hope and faith that Ward can be the long-term answer at quarterback, both privately and even on the eve of training camp, those in the Titans hierarchy know that Ward’s ascent is likely to take some time. While a Jayden Daniels-type rookie season isn’t impossible, it doesn’t sound like the Titans are exactly expecting that type of renaissance this season.
“Nobody wants to hear that word patience. I get that,” Brinker admitted the day players reported to camp. “But the reality is we understand where we are as a roster. We got a lot of work to do. And we’re going to be relying on a lot of young players this season to carry this football team. And we need those veteran players as well to help those young players grow. So there will be some challenges.”
So while that statement might not play well with fans, who have grown impatient with a team that is 9-32 since that now-infamous win in Green Bay, it appears the Titans are finally embracing reality.
Many factors in the decline
The instability with coaches and general managers has already been chronicled above, as 2024 marked the third consecutive season that a coach or general manager was fired.
But it goes beyond that. The draft misses by multiple front offices and coaching staffs is the biggest culprit. There are no players from the Titans’ 2020 or 2021 drafts still on this year’s roster.
Roger McCreary and Chig Okonkwo are all that remain from 2022, and 2023 doesn’t look ripe with hope either with Peter Skoronski the only established starter from that draft class now that Levis has been replaced by Ward.
The almost inconceivable has happened to the Titans. Between injuries, terrible picks and lack of development, it has been six years since a Tennessee draft pick secured a second contract from the team (Jeffery Simmons and Amani Hooker, both in 2019).
Brinker put lots of players on notice as camp started: “We’re going to constantly be looking to upgrade this roster. If guys aren’t getting the job done, then we’ll get guys in here that will. So the top of the roster is just as important as the bottom.”
Making the switch
Another reason for the Titans’ decline – a reason that isn’t talked about as much – is the radical scheme change the team underwent in 2024 under Callahan. Callahan came from Cincinnati, where he brought his three-wide receiver, Kyle Shanahan/Sean McVey style offense with him to Tennessee.
And while that initially got fans excited after so many years of relying on 3 yards and a cloud of dust with a power running game, the transition was anything but smooth.
Consider this: For almost the entire time the Titans have called Tennessee home, they have been a power running team first and foremost. The only real exception being the ill-fated Ken Whisenhunt tenure. But whether the ball was being handed to Eddie George, Chris Johnson, LenDale White or Derrick Henry, that run-first mentality has been prevalent.
So a hard switch away from that came with pain. An offensive line that was porous to begin with was made to look even worse when asked to pass block more than they could handle.
Levis – and Tannehill before him – had his best success in play-action, able to take advantage of a stacked box trying to stop Derrick Henry. It allowed him to find one-on-one matchups in single coverage. Deep shots were Levis’ strength, especially when he had use of play-action.
But a rhythm- and timing-based offense like Callahan installed, was more than Levis or the offensive line could handle, and the young quarterback struggled to maintain any consistency.
Also, consider the receiving corps, which added a speed element in Calvin Ridley, but other than that had a group of guys who had been preached to by Vrabel that they would either block for Henry or not play.
Some of those same holdovers predictably struggled when their job then became making some sort of move in 2.5 seconds to try to create separation to give Levis a window to throw into.
Callahan seemed to be intentionally vague when asked about that subject, but in a round-about way acknowledged that having the right type of players should make matters better.
“There’s probably a lot more layers to that question. Generally speaking, I think we just need as many good players as we can find, and it’s my job to find a way to put him in position to be successful,” he says. “While we had spurts of it last year and we’ve tried to do the best we could with everything that we’ve had and we had some deficiencies, clearly, we needed to do a better job with that stuff.
“And, hopefully, as we’ve got some new players and some young players and different skill sets of guys, then we can find different ways to use them, too. So I said, there’s probably a lot to that question from top to bottom. But I think at the end of the day, it’s my job to find a way to get an offense that can score points.”
Callahan is excited that the Titans have added some much-needed speed at receiver with rookies Chimere Dike and Elic Ayomanor. They desperately need one or both of them to emerge quickly to give Ward another solid option at receiver.
“He’s pretty adept at throwing the ball down the field. That’s something he did really well in college. And he’s not afraid of being aggressive with the football, which is a good thing,” Callahan says. “And then you add some of the players we’ve added and some of their traits that they have with their young players and some of the veteran receivers we’ve added that have the ability to stretch the field, too, that we’ve got some – there’s no secret we have a lot more speed now at receiver than we’ve had and that’s exciting.”
Of course, the offensive line – a major factor in the team’s three-year slide – will have a big say in just how successful Ward can be as a playmaker in this offense. The line has been reshuffled yet again with Dan Moore getting a big contract to play left tackle and Kevin Zeitler coming to firm up the right guard spot. Center Lloyd Cushenberry is still out with an Achilles injury, and JC Latham, last year’s first-round pick, was shifted to right tackle to make room for Moore.
This group simply can’t be worse than what we saw last year, can it? It should be better, but then again, we were told that the 2024 line would be a drastic improvement over the disaster of 2023. It didn’t happen.
Other areas
While the Titans are still in transition on offense, and in some ways back to square one with a rookie quarterback, the defense and special teams are areas that have their uncertainties.
The defensive line, anchored by Simmons and second-year man T’Vondre Sweat, would appear to be the strength of the team.
Thus far, Cody Barton, a free-agent pick up from Denver, has looked solid at inside linebacker, with defensive coordinator Dennard Wilson still trying to figure out who is going to start alongside him. James Williams is the early frontrunner, but others are in the mix, as well.
The edge, which was a question a year ago, is even less certain with the loss of Harold Landry as a cap casualty. The Titans have to hope that second-round pick Femi Oladejo, who has flashed during the early part of camp, continues to build on that and gives Wilson someone who can consistently get after the quarterback. Beyond him, there are just journeymen like holdover Arden Key and newcomer Dremont Jones to go with back-of-the-roster guys like Jaylen Harrell and Ali Gaye.
The secondary has issues, too, and it could be a long road to find some answers at cornerback, especially if L’Jarius Sneed can’t stay healthy. Sneed was the Titans’ big acquisition a year ago, but injured his quad initially and played in just five games. Then in the offseason, he had his troublesome knee scoped and remains on the Physically Unable to Perform list.
After Sneed are some solid players – namely McCreary, second-year man Jarvis Brownlee and Darrell Baker. None of them are stars, but at least they are solid. Depth is a major concern. If Sneed can’t start the year, it would leave the Titans one injury away from being in trouble at corner.
The mission before them
With so much going on, Brinker and Borgonzi know asking the 2025 Titans to suddenly jump into contention with a roster completely in flux would be the tallest of asks. Ward seems to exude confidence, and the Titans have to hope he doesn’t get rattled in this rebuild that could take a while to complete.
That will all be unfolding even as the Titans continue to tinker and try to find ways to improve while building a new culture of winning in the process.
“There’s going to be urgency to improve every part of this roster,” Borgonzi says.
And that process will no doubt come with growing pains.