EAST RUTHERFORD:The Tennessee Titans (2-2) were an objectively bad football team on Sunday. A hapless New York Jets (1-3) franchise found ways to take Mike Vrabel's team out at the knees.

Sound familiar?

In Week 8 of the 2020 season, Tennessee went to Cincinnati and a one-win Bengals team. The Titans, a 5-1 football club at the time, lost by 11 to a rookie Joe Burrow and looked dismal doing so. The specter of that game loomed large all week long in preparations for New York. A 27-24 overtime loss to the Jets harkens back to last November in some ways.

This failure, however, feels different. In fact, it should feel worse.

What exactly are the Titans right now?

That is the question many of the Nashville media were asking as we walked back from Mike Vrabel's postgame press conference in the bowels of MetLife Stadium.

The Bengals debacle was problematic, but the blueprint for improvement was clearly there. Defensively, Tennessee was not going to give you enough to keep themselves in the game. The Titans offense, however, was due for a sluggish outing and could (and did) easily rectify that day's issues.

Four games is a legitimate sample size, but is it for this 2021 team?

Therein lies the issue. Tennessee's roster has been brutalized by injury early on and is a completely legitimate excuse. Wide receiver Josh Reynolds was featured heavily in New York because both A.J. Brown and Julio Jones were ruled out with hamstring issues. The free-agent addition this offseason wore a simple black t-shirt to his postgame media availability that had only the word "absent" written across the right side of his chest.

It was not meant to be ironic, but it spoke to the state of the current roster.

Jones, Brown, first-round pick Caleb Farley, star pass rusher Bud Dupree, punter Brett Kern and defensive lineman Larrell Murchison were all ruled out against the Jets last Friday. Offensive linemen Taylor Lewan, Rodger Saffold and Ben Jones, tight end Tommy Hudson, corners Kristian Fulton and Chris Jackson and Reynolds himself all went out with injuries throughout the course of the day.

Hudson (ankle) and Saffold (concussion) did not return.

"I’m not concerned," Vrabel said of the the Titans collective health. "We’ll find somebody. We’ll find 22 guys, 11 guys on offense and defense and special teams. It’s all part of it, it’s all part of the job, but I’m not going to sit there – nobody is going to feel sorry for us, nobody."

Vrabel's assessment is correct. No one will pity Tennessee, and rightfully so. This was billed as the year that the organization was pushing all of their proverbial chips to the center. This was the team that would no longer play down to inferior opposition.

These were not supposed to be the same old Titans.

Vrabel and Co. have three quarters of a season to clean up the injury report and correct the mistakes. If that occurs, it is entirely possible that stumbling against New York will be long forgotten or viewed as a mere blemish on an otherwise impressive resumé.

Derrick Henry is still a force. Tennessee was in the game until the bitter end. Ryan Tannehill got sacked seven times, and still found ways to move his team effectively up and down the field.

All of those things can be so.

That is the difficulty with the Titans: they string fans along like a toxic ex-lover. Tennessee gives you a taste of how good life can be with them, then let you down mightily when you least expect it.

Very few are disciplined enough to resist that "You up?" text.