The Tennessee Titans’ Week 1 loss to the New York Jets sparked immediate panic about the offensive line.

Social media erupted with familiar refrains about Mike Borgonzi’s inability to fix the trenches, and the postgame reaction painted a picture of a unit that had somehow gotten worse. I certainly was down on the way they looked.

After watching the tape, that narrative doesn’t really hold up. The Titans’ offensive line played fine on Sunday. Not great, not perfect, not even good; but fine. The real concern coming out of this game is quarterback Cam Ward, who looked nothing like the player this franchise is banking its future on.

The offensive line earned a fine grade

Let me be clear: this is not a situation where the offensive line gets off scot-free. There are some genuinely bad reps on tape. Will McDonald put Dan Moore in a turnstile blender and nearly forced Cam Ward into taking a safety. Fernando Carmona got big boy’ed a couple times. They could have been so much better than they were.

But the idea that came out of Sunday’s postgame, that “here we go again with an offensive line that keeps getting worse no matter what Borgonzi does”, is not the reality from this game. They were not getting worked all game. That’s just not what the tape showed.

JC Latham had the best day of anyone on the Titans’ offensive line for my money. One of his holding penalties may have stemmed from a miscommunication with Carmona, and he dominated the outside track pretty much all day. It helped that he was matched up against rookie David Bailey, the 2nd overall pick who did not exactly look the part in his NFL debut. But you don’t get to take away the fact that Latham handled him so well. The narrative that Latham can’t defend speed around the edge took a hit on Sunday, because that’s exactly what Bailey’s game is built on, and Latham shut him down.

Was Latham a top tackle in the league on Sunday? No. Was he near his ceiling? Also no. But he looked good. Dan Moore had two or three stinker plays, including a pull block that’s going viral for all the wrong reasons. The pad level was too high, the forward lean was poor, the effort was lacking. From a pass protection standpoint, though, Moore was fine. Everyone else on the line fell somewhere around that level too.

The defensive line, on the other hand, remains in timeout. Jermaine Johnson looked about as unimpactful as a player can look. Femi Olaidejo showed some encouraging things in the run game, but that unit as a whole was nowhere close to where it needs to be. More on that as the week goes on…

Cam Ward’s ‘nothing football’ is becoming a real problem

Here’s the thing about Cam Ward right now. What he’s doing isn’t actively bad. It’s just bringing nothing to the table. And that distinction matters because it’s fundamentally different from the Will Levis episodes of the 2024 season, when you could point to two hilarious turnovers some Sundays and jump off the train pretty easily. Cam didn’t do that stuff. The funniest thing he did Sunday was execute a fake reverse toss that looked ridiculous, but that’s on the play caller, not the quarterback. He did what he was taught to do on the play!

The numbers paint a bleak picture. Ward posted a 59.4% completion percentage, 23rd in the league in Week 1. He threw for 140 passing yards. The Titans’ longest offensive gain on the day was 14 yards.

There were moments on tape where Ward simply wasn’t seeing it in my opinion. The deep ball to Calvin Ridley up the right side that he never found. The Carnell Tate over route where Tate was gaining separation across the middle and Ward bailed from the pocket instead. These aren’t five-alarm fire disasters individually, but collectively they painted a picture of a quarterback who just didn’t look enough comfortable. He seems to think he’s playing in a phone booth consistently, and sometimes he is, but sometimes he’s not. He has to embrace the moments his offensive line affords him and take some shots.

The coaching deserves scrutiny here too. Multiple instances of punting while trailing at home against the Jets felt in dubious analytical circumstances made for some, in my opinion, unacceptably conservative decision-making. Saleh claimed at the podium that at least one of those decisions wasn’t supported by their internal model, but the public models are crystal clear on that kind of thing. I’d love to see the Titans’ numbers and understand why they’re so dramatically different.

That raises a question I keep asking myself as I rewatch the tape: is Cam Ward having conservatism beaten into him, or is he just scared to make the big mistake right now? We want him to be safer with the ball, of course. But there’s a line between being safe and being too safe, and Ward is now on the wrong side of it through one game.

What needs to change by Sunday

I’m not out on Cam Ward by any stretch of the imagination. On the whole of his NFL career so far, the game is not too fast for him. He gets it. He sees the field the way he’s supposed to.

But the level of vision Ward showed on Sunday was not up to his own standard from last season, and that’s the thing I think is completely reasonable to demand improvement on this week.

The antidote is simple in concept: he needs to settle down. He does not seem settled in this offense right now, and until he does, the Titans are going to keep getting this version of nothing football that leads nowhere.