Cam Ward’s Titans have a ‘bookmark’ moment with win over Chiefs creating two storyline paths

The Titans just traded in their draft status for a rare win. Was it worth it?

Easton Freeze — Tennessee Titans Beat Writer
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Dec 21, 2025; Nashville, Tennessee, USA; Tennessee Titans quarterback Cam Ward (1) greets Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Chris Oladokun (19) after a game at Nissan Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Steve Roberts-Imagn Images

Strange but true: the Tennessee Titans are 2-4 since their bye week. Their latest win came this past weekend in a Week 16 stomping of the Mahomes-less Kansas City Chiefs, who put on a fascinating illustration of just how critical a top-flight QB can be to an otherwise sneaky-dysfunctional offense.

This win was their third of the year, elevating them out of the pool of remaining two-win teams. Just the Las Vegas Raiders and New York Giants remain in that club. And the Titans, still holding (though, tied for) the hardest strength of schedule in the NFL, fell all the way to the back of the three-win club in the 2026 NFL Draft order. The dream of back-to-back first overall picks is all but dead. But if you ask the players on this team, they couldn’t be happier to have killed it.

Titans think winning trumps top draft pick

Talk to anybody who has been in or around the NFL for long enough, and they’ll tell you just how miserable it is to be in the building of a team that can’t find a way to win games. The season is long, the stakes are enormous, and it’s really difficult to keep morale high and all the troops rowing in the same direction. Having spent a long time in the Titans building the past couple seasons, I can vouch for that first-hand. The stench of dysfunction is palatable when the vibes are on the floor. There have been many recent Mondays where I’ve showed up for press conferences and the supernatural funk of losing is felt the minute you walk inside. So I can only imagine how that impacts the coaches who are giving everything they’ve got to power through and fix it.

“Yeah, I mean, guys have really stayed in it, man” LG Peter Skoronski said proudly after the win over Kansas City. “We’ve had some lows, some low lows. The guys have come to work, guys have worked hard. Guys were trying to find solutions on how to be better, and guys are continuing to get better. So, just proud of the group of guys. Man, when you hit these moments and you’re losing a lot of games, I mean, it just feels low. It’s hard to be motivated, but this group has really stayed in it.”

There’s no doubt that these players value winning each week over the team’s draft status in April. For the veterans who may not be here next year, that of course makes all the sense in the world. Why should they care?

But what about the rookies and foundational veterans who are guaranteed to be around for the next couple years of rebuilding? Shouldn’t it cross their minds?

Well, winning now might matter to that crowd even more than those who aren’t long for this roster. “It’s fun, especially when we all contribute” QB Cam Ward said after Sunday’s win. “A lot of our work pays off, and I think the biggest thing for us as rookies is we just want to win football games. We all don’t care about how we win, it’s just we all have the will to win.”

Winning is everything to these guys. It matters so much more than draft stock. Even games like this one are invaluable, where your opponent is severely hampered and it’s arguable if they even mentally got off the bus to play.

“I think it means a lot to them” cornerstone defender Jeffery Simmons said of the young players on Sunday. “I think as a team, when you walk into that building, those young guys — sometimes you could, I mean when you’ve been on the team, when you been in the league for a minute, you know how sometimes young guys think. You kind of feel it at times where like these guys — they’re going through adversity, this is one of the things where they’re going into a shell. I would say starting with Cam (Ward), Cam hasn’t changed. Us as a team, we know how close we’ve been. We know how vital it is for us to do the little things better. And I think that’s when we come in and watch tape and we get the correction from the coaches, we see that and our young guys see that. This rookie class is pretty good, and they come out there, and they’ve been coming to work with the right mindset. And like I said, it starts with Cam. He was pissed off when we came in when we got the victory last time, and I was messing with him in the locker room. I was like, don’t be the Grinch today. So, he was he was happy today and shout out to the young guys and this is just showing what we could be in the future. And those guys, they’re going to play a big part of it.”

Are they right, though? Do these wins actually mean anything? And do they mean anything close to as much as the draft pick? There’s a fair historical argument to be made about teams who have won “meaningless” games at the end of failed seasons and bumped themselves out of range for better players in the first round. Especially when a team is about to bring in a whole new coaching regime next season, how much can really be carried over from wins at the end of this season to the beginning of next?

The thing that I think matters most here is the young core of this team learning how to win. That’s something you can’t do without, well, winning. It’s about how you handle yourself during the week to build on successes. It’s about how you handle adversity in a game, what you do when you get punched in the mouth. It’s about learning how to come out of the gates hot, and to finish strongest in the 4th quarter. It’s about developing the habits and mindset to be clutch in the biggest moments.

All of those things are learned through experience. And while this Titans team will have a whole new coaching staff and a bevy of new veterans in the building next season, they also have an unusual number of young building blocks who genuinely benefit from winning now. Cam Ward, Chimere Dike, Elic Ayomanor, Gunnar Helm, Kevin Winston Jr, Femi Oladejo, Cedric Gray, JC Latham, T’Vondre Sweat, perhaps even Jackson Slater; these guys are the future bones of this roster. They won’t all be stars, they won’t all be multi-year starters. But they’re the workmen on this roster who will at the very least make up the new depth, and more importantly, set the culture and the tone for the next generation of Titans. For them, this matters immensely.

One last thing, to the point of where the draft positioning actually ends up. The Titans had a guaranteed top-2 pick in the draft if they’d lost the rest of their games, thanks to the Raiders and Giants playing one another in Week 17. In this two-QB class, that would have yielded a serious return in a trade. But now that they’re almost certainly out of the running for those picks, it frees them (and fans) up to go for broke and try to win out the rest of the year. Stack winning experiences, and finish no worse than 9th overall (that’s their official floor with two weeks to play).

The historical reality is that beyond the first overall pick (and for trade purposes in this particular draft, the second as well), the value of picks in the first half of the first round are largely random. Turns out the 13th overall pick has yielded the second-best crop of players in the modern era! Then fifth, then sixth, and then second. We’ll inevitably look back on this years from now to see what they could have had if they’d landed a top-2 pick, and it’ll be debated forever. But that possibility is gone now, so finish the season strong, and then look up to see where the chips have fallen.

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