The Tennessee Titans kick off the NFL season against the New York Jets this week, and the preseason narratives surrounding this roster are finalized. From rookie offensive lineman Fernando Carmona’s surprising rise, to Cam Ward’s uneven preseason, to Carnell Tate’s disappearing act in exhibition games, Titans fans have plenty to chew on as Robert Saleh’s first regular season approaches.

But which of these narratives deserve your full investment, and which ones need more evidence before you cash the check?

Here’s the thing about preseason: it creates impressions that can stick for week whether those impressions are earned or not. As the Titans prepare for a Jets hate week loaded with former connections on the coaching staff, it’s worth pumping the brakes on a few of the loudest storylines from training camp.

Fernando Carmona is the real deal at right guard… right?

Carmona has been the most pleasant surprise of Titans training camp, and I’m not here to be a hater. The fifth-round pick out of Arkansas has far-exceeded expectations. Coming into July, the collective expectation was that he would be a long-time learner on the outside looking in of the actual competition between Cordell Volson and Jackson Slater. He was supposed to be a nice depth addition on Day 3 of the draft, not a Week 1 starter.

And yet here we are! Carmona has been running with the ones for weeks and hasn’t stopped. By kickoff against the Jets, that’s over a month of first-team reps at right guard. He won the job because Volson was terrible and got cut, and because Slater simply got passed. Coaches and teammates keep mentioning his nastiness, his intelligence, his humility.

But he’s still a rookie fifth-round lineman for a reason. There are going to be rough edges. He comes from an Arkansas team that was one of the more forgettable squads in the SEC last season. It feels like the Razorbacks scored 40 points a game and gave up 45. There was no Iowa-style offensive line brand working in his favor, no award-winning unit boosting his draft stock. I need to see what his September looks like in real football for more than three drives a game before I’m fully investing.

Cordell Flott is bad?

This is a narrative I’m pushing back on. When the Titans signed Flott back in March, the reaction was positive: a 24-year-old with length, ball skills, and an LSU pedigree coming off a strong season. The 49ers were genuinely upset to lose him, which is always a good sign.

Flott had a rough first impression in the preseason, and that impression stuck with the fan base louder than anything he did after it. But the issues weren’t so much with being in position as they were with finishing. He was finding his way to the spot and then bricking some layups, to borrow a basketball metaphor. Defensive backs are the easiest group of players to hate on because they get individually exposed in ways that other positions don’t. How many times is the ball not going to Flott’s side because he did his job well, and you’ll never see it on the broadcast?

The Titans have a history of this cycle: a DB starts slow, fans learn to hate him, he develops a reputation as the devil, then plays well, and nobody appreciates him until he’s gone. Malcolm Butler was that way for most of his time in Tennessee. Jackrabbit Jenkins started slow, fans hated him, and by the last game of the year everyone realized he wasn’t bad. I could see the same thing happening with Flott.

Cam Ward is going to disappoint in year 2

The perception of Ward nationally is not good right now. He had a rough preseason, and the phone calls I’ve had with national friends at ESPN and the Ringer over the past two weeks all start the same way: “Man, seems like Cam is bad. What’s happening?”

My answer is simple: I’m not buying it yet. The 49ers preseason game was the worst stretch of practice-or-game reps I saw from Ward across all of training camp. But if I’m judging him on joint practices alone, which I believe are far more important than preseason games for starters, I feel significantly better about him. The Warren Sharpe stat showing the Titans dead last in preseason motion usage at 18% tells you everything about how vanilla the scheme was. We watched practices with far more motion than that. This was the most vanilla of all vanilla flavors.

Ward needs to clean up the intentional grounding penalties and the sack-fumble nonsense. But I’m not anywhere close to buying that he’s going to be bad. That said, I’m also not predicting a Caleb Williams or Drake Maye year-2 explosion. I do think he’ll be better than 15 touchdowns, 7 interceptions, and 3,100 yards from last season.

Austin Schlottmann and the center question

The sneaky concern I keep coming back to is Schlottmann at center. We came into the offseason asking who would start at center and right guard, and both questions got answered relatively quickly. But now that Carmona has claimed the right guard spot, I’m back to wondering whether Schlottmann is the biggest liability on this offensive line.

He’s drawn praise from teammates and coaches for his mental command of the position, and the fact that we forgot about him during camp is genuinely a good thing. But think about how quickly we could be reminded. My comparison all offseason has been Corey Levin: same class of vehicle, different model. Levin was solid when he wasn’t being relied on as a 17-game starter. People privately questioned whether his level of play would hold up over a full season. The same question applies to Schlottmann, who started a career-high three games with the Giants last year. For what it’s worth, Schlottmann is bigger than Levin, which could help with durability. But let’s see what he looks like by Week 10.

Carnell Tate is underwhelming

This one I’m dismissing almost entirely. If you watched only preseason games, you’d think Tate is going to struggle. But the historical data tells a different story. The top 10 wide receivers drafted since 2021 were all somewhere on the “unremarkable to bad” spectrum in their respective preseasons: Travis Hunter had 2 catches on 2 targets. Marvin Harrison Jr. didn’t play at all. Ja’Marr Chase caught 1 of 4 targets because the ball didn’t have stripes on it. AJ Brown had 2 catches for 10 yards as a rookie.

Tate caught 7 balls against the Bears in joint practice, and it felt like he caught almost every target thrown his way. Of the targets that weren’t caught, at least one was a miss by Ward that could have been a touchdown and another was a legitimately good defensive play. The joint practice tape is what I’m banking on here, and it looked excellent.

The Titans have real questions to answer this season, and these preseason narratives will evolve rapidly once actual football begins. Tennessee kicks off against the Jets this week, and by this time next Monday, every one of these conversations could look completely different.