If I had to sum up Cam Ward‘s practice on Tuesday at Titans OTA’s, I would use two words: “struggle” and “clunky”.

He finished practice strong in the final 15ish minutes. It wasn’t all bad, and the bad moments were hardly a disaster. He just wasn’t really separating himself out there.

Those two words are what I used to describe his practice on Monday as well. So it was a second consecutive below-average showing for the Titans QB1. The usual suspects are going to use this to double, triple, and quadruple down on panic for Cam Ward being a bust in… early June. I’m entirely unmoved by this. What I am moved by is some of the context surrounding his struggles, and what it may mean for how (and when) we can see the tide turn.

Change around Cam Ward seems to be showing in OTAs

In the case of this quarterback, volatility is the enemy of progress. Incremental progress is what we come to summer practice to see from starting quarterbacks in particular. For a guy who showed plenty of flashes as a rookie, we want to see slightly better technique. We want to see better accuracy. We want to see a better mastery of the sport. These are the things we look for in a year two leap, which begins right now.

But after a rookie year that might best be described as “survival”, Ward is surrounded by a ton of newness. He has a whole new coaching staff. He’s learning a whole new offense. And he has a lot of brand new teammates. Each practice I’ve attended so far, that newness has shown through in some negative ways.

It’s not all been bad. There are elements about Brian Daboll’s offense that are clearly different and exciting for the Titans. But I think you can describe the negativity as natural growing pains, and I think Cam Ward is really going those right now.

That was made especially clear to me when backup quarterback Mitch Trubisky joined practice for the first time on Monday. As a veteran of the league and a veteran of this Brian Daboll offense, you can feel his experience jump off the field. He seems to have a better grasp of what’s going on. That’s a nice measuring stick to use up against Cam Ward throughout the offseason.

In a way, it’s unfair that we ask a young quarterback in this situation to take a Year 2 leap when he’s still working on mastering a new offense and the new people around him. But that’s what the money is for, and in the NFL, nobody cares. You have to figure it out.

One specific connection I feel demonstrates this well is with new WR Wan’Dale Robinson. For a portion of Tuesday’s practice, Ward and Robinson were really trying to get on the same page. Cam continued to push the ball to Wan’Dale in team periods, and a lot of the time they just weren’t on the same page.

These are some of the things in a practice that I think are up to the discretion of the viewer. To me, what a lot of people may describe as an accuracy issue the past two days reads more like miscommunication. On many of these incompletions, it feels less like balls that are a touch off target, and more like balls intentionally placed in a position the wide receiver is not expecting. Is that on Cam Ward, or is that on his receiver? It’s a case-by-case basis, and without talking to them, we can’t know.

The bottom line is that communication in this offense is key. We’ve heard Brian Daboll talk about the choice route element of his offense and how the quarterback and receiver have to be thinking the same thing for it to work. I don’t know how much of that the Titans are doing right now, but it’s something I’m thinking about as I’m watching Cam seemingly throw to the wrong spots.

He finished the day well, so it wasn’t all bad. It was more of an up-and-down outing than anything, and he ended on a high note. But in the middle portion of practice, he continued to fail to connect. He was throwing balls more vertically when the receiver was shallowing them out. He was throwing to the boundary for his receiver to work back to the ball through the defender, but the receiver was separating downfield instead. These are the kinds of plays that make me think they’re still a clunkiness to the operation of this offense. It’s not a well-oiled machine yet, and that makes sense in June.

One other note about what Cam is doing differently than the other quarterbacks right now is that it seems like he’s trying to get the ball out faster. Will Levis and Mitch Trubisky both had pretty solid days on Tuesday, but there were a handful of “plays” they made that were really sacks.

It does seem like Cam Ward is trying to pull the trigger as quickly as possible, which isn’t an excuse for being innaccurate or being on the wrong page. But as the guy who’s actually going to be out there on Sundays, he has to know that his internal clock has to be sharp. And I can feel that coming through on the practice field as well.

There’s a lot of off-season practice left to go, and what actually matters is that Cam Ward worries about his climate. The weather of his day-to-day practice report is more interesting than it is impactful. The climate, or the way in which he is trending over time, is what I’m looking at. I want more data points. He would do well for himself to finish this early session strong and pick back up where he left off once training camp starts.