The Tennessee Titans have been losers for a couple of years now. There’s nothing personal about that, it’s just a fact. They have done very little winning. And everybody in the building is constantly busting their tails to change that, from the front office all the way down to the practice squad.

But they were not losers in the last game that they played. For the second time this year, they emerged from a Sunday victorious. And a big storyline in the aftermath has been how rookie QB Cam Ward has reacted to this rare win. He wasn’t exuberant in the postgame locker room; in fact, far from it. His comments could have fooled you about the winning nature of their efforts, and it led to an interesting discussion about how that is (and should be) received.

On Wednesday, having had a handful of sleeps to think about and move on from the game in Cleveland, we asked Ward about his mindset once more. And he didn’t flinch one bit… though he did further muddy his stance.

Cam Ward regrets nothing about his winning attitude in Cleveland

I won’t rehash everything he said on Sunday in this article, so I recommend you read the article linked here if you aren’t aware of what all he said. In that article, I argued that this is a perfect message from an imperfect messenger. And on Wednesday, Cam embodied that once again at the podium. The heart of what he said rings true, and good, and necessary for this team if they want to ascend. But his choice of words is, well, messy. And I think it opens him up to be misunderstood.

When first asked about his postgame mindset, Ward opened with this confusing line: “I mean winning and losing, they both got a price. They both got a price to pay. It just depends on which one you want to be a part of.” That… is bad. He shouldn’t have said that. It just doesn’t make any sense. Are you saying winning and losing aren’t actually all that different? That sometimes you’d prefer to lose? I mean… what?

But then he shared his perspective further when asked to elaborate, and he suddenly made all the sense in the world. “There’s a way to win games,” Cam said. “There’s a way to finish out games. There’s a standard that you got to play with every game to give yourself the best situation to win. But the biggest thing is you got to expect to win every time you step on the field. We played to a standard good enough to win. We didn’t play to our best standard. At times of the game we’re sloppy. Offensively, I was sloppy myself. And then defensively, we were, so we just got to continue to emphasize the good and we got to be real critical on the bad.”

Lead with that! This not only tracks a whole lot more than his first point, but it’s precisely what the Titans of the past couple years need: to be held to a winning standard. Small victories shouldn’t be something everybody is overly pleased by. They should just be the expectation. And yes, you have to crawl before you can walk. This team has a long ways to go, and each step forward is something to be encouraged by. I’m not saying everybody needs to remain depressed in the midst of wins or progress. But I am saying that in order to avoid taking one step forward and then two steps backwards, they need to have the right winning standard in place that informs everybody’s mindset. And this is why I appreciate the perhaps overly-critical attitude that Ward brings to the table. I think this franchise could use it.

So why does he keep discrediting himself with the opening lines of nonsense? He did the same on Sunday, when he began by saying that he didn’t actually need the win that badly… after weeks and weeks of telling us explicitly how winning is all that mattered to him. But in that instance as well, after saying something that made everybody’s head cock to the side in confusion, he followed it up with “I treat the wins the same. I treat the losses the same. There’s always something that I have to do better. It’s a lot of plays that I missed out there just from not giving my receivers a chance. And I really–I just–I wake up tomorrow, I’m going to do the same thing I did last week, try to get better.”

This appears to just be the way that Ward operates at the podium. He is contrarian by nature, and that’s a relatively common defense mechanism for people in this business whose words are often dissected in excruciating detail. Reporters lead the witness, and so Cam instinctively rejects your premise. It’s all an effort to avoid being painted into a corner. So if you ask about how great, or how bad, or how badly needed something was, he tends to begin by downplaying that (whether it makes much sense to do so or not). If you ask an “A” or “B” question, he’s destined to say it’s “a bit of both”. If you ask me, that’s why these confusing, seemingly stubborn or nonsensical things keep coming up at his pressers. I think that if you learn to speak Cam Ward, it’s clear to see what he’s trying to push on this team.