‘Don’t listen to Cam’ — Titans veteran uses team plane intercom to address Cam Ward’s polarizing postgame energy after beating Browns

The Tennessee Titans won just their second game of the year in Week 14, but if you only listened to rookie QB Cam Ward at the postgame podium, you may not have realized it. Titans fans, media, players, and coaches alike seemed to be caught off guard by the way he talked about the game after a surprisingly thrilling 31-29 win over the Browns on the road, and it’s been a polarizing topic of discussion. Is this poor leadership? Immaturity? Diva nonsense? Or is all of that an overreaction, missing the point entirely?

It’s interesting to me just how differently everybody seems to be taking his postgame behavior on a victory Monday. So, I talked to as many people as I could about it. From coaches, to players, to an interesting anecdote from team media on the plane ride home, here’s what I think Cam Ward’s attitude means.

Making sense of Cam Ward’s polarizing attitude after Week 14 win

On 104.5 The Zone’s morning show, Ramon & Will, Titans sideline reporter Will Boling shared this quick story from the team plane ride home Sunday evening. “On the play ride home,” Boling told cohost Ramon Foster, “Arden Key gets on the intercom and says ‘You all enjoy this! Don’t listen to what Cam (Ward) said! You all enjoy this! It’s hard to win in this league, enjoy it!”

Boling emphasized that Key, resident comedian on this roster, was just giving Ward a hard time. But there’s truth in every joke, so where is this coming from? What did Cam say after the game to harsh the good vibes?

Well, if you watched his postgame press conference, you have a pretty good idea of the mood he was in after the win. Ward himself had a meager box score in this game: 14/28 for 117 yards, 2-1 TD-INT, 4.2 yards per attempt. So perhaps his somewhat sour energy stemmed from selfishly wishing he had played better, or at least put up bigger numbers. That’s the least generous read on it, and to be fair, it’s the way a lot of people (both important and unimportant) took it.

But it doesn’t land that way for me. I think the spirit of what Ward is bringing to the table here is exactly what this sorry Tennessee Titans franchise needs right now. Ward isn’t blameless though, because it’s absolutely fair to say he also needs to work on his delivery. It’s a perfect message from an imperfect messenger.

So what’s the message? When initially asked about the game at his postgame presser, Ward said “It feels good to win. But, you know, winning still hides stuff. There’s a lot of flaws that we’ve got to continue to get over personally, and then just as a team. And we’ve just got to come next week with the right mindset.”

So he acknowledges that at least a portion of his discontent is coming from his own play. But it’s also about the team and their mindset. It’s about having a standard.

“Playing good enough football for three quarters” is what he attributed the victory to. “We didn’t play our best ball in the fourth quarter, and that’s just something that, as players, we’ve got to hold ourselves to that standard. We’ve got to not have a play off here and there. We’ve got to continue to communicate at a high level in all three phases.”

Perhaps the most surprising comment of all came last, and this was his greatest misstep. Mostly because according to his own previous comments, it’s not actually true. For weeks Ward has been telling us verbatim that winning is all that matters to him and to this team. It is the simple, singular goal they strive towards each week. But when asked after this win about how badly they needed it, he said “I really didn’t need it. 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.”

The bar to clear to feel good about this team right now is prohibitively low. That’s the harsh reality of the situation. It’s not the primary reason they’ve been so dreadful, the roster is. But it’s a poisonous element of team culture that creeps in when you’re this bad for this long, and it’ll keep you from ever ascending back into contention. Somebody has to fix it.

That’s why I see the spirit of what Cam seems to be bringing to the table here being precisely what they need. A new competitive standard eventually needs to be set. Maybe now isn’t the perfect time for it, and maybe he’s going about it slightly wrong. He’s a rookie, I don’t expect him to be the world’s perfect leadership messenger already. But I think his heart is in the right spot: maybe what should’ve been a comeback overtime from the lowly Cleveland Browns isn’t a win that you rest your laurels on. A badly needed tick in the win column you absolutely should not apologize for, but also not near the standard of football you want to hold yourself to.

Mike Vrabel was great at this. He often employed the mindset professional golfers will notably emphasize on a hole-to-hole basis: Neutrality. When things get down, you lift them up. When you’re riding high, you push humility and room for improvement.

The Titans don’t have a leader in place like that right now. And if Cam Ward is expected to be the catalyst for change on the field that will get this team back to the adult table in the NFL, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be the leader in terms of setting a standard and driving home a message too. He needs to refine this, and know the right time and place for it. He’ll eventually learn to enjoy wins a bit more, I’d imagine. And any element of this that is selfish or immature must be struck from the record and avoided going forward. I’m not in his head, and I only hear behind-the-scenes things secondhand. So I can only speculate on how much of that this is.

But the heart of the message is something these Titans need to adopt if they’re going to climb.

Titans players and coaches react to Cam Ward’s attitude

Enough of what I think about all this; what do Ward’s teammates and coaches think? Here was Interim Mike McCoy on Monday when asked about Ward’s mindset:

“Yeah, you want to enjoy every win in this business. It’s never easy. It’s tough to win in the NFL week in and week out, but it just — he’s a competitor. And Cam (Ward) wants to be great. He wants to play great every week.  And there’s times where if you don’t play the way — he’s not going to sugarcoat, sometimes, what he says, and how he plays and his opinion on things. But it’s about winning, that’s the number one thing.”

Rookie CB Marcus Harris spoke for the young core of the team on Monday, saying “what we’ve been preaching as a rookie class when we meet together is that, yeah, we have two wins now. The record’s not what we want it to be, but we’ve got to treat this the same way and remember this if we were a 10-win team. So I think that mindset Cam had, it was a good mindset. But then as you know, some of the other guys were expressing how difficult it is to win. And that’s another part that we understood. But I think it was just holding ourself to a high standard. That was all that was.”

And a third perspective comes from veteran S Xavier Woods. “Oh, I definitely understand where he’s coming from” Woods explained. “He’s a quarterback. Just speaking on the defense, we didn’t win the full (fourth) quarter. . . We didn’t close it out to where we wanted to. So that was kind of the disappointment. I think that was a sentiment that he was trying to relay.”

But the balance needed is something he emphasized. “Then we also told him wins are hard to come by in this league. You celebrate all of it, no matter who it is or who it’s against you celebrate all the wins. . . There’s no such thing as a sorry win. A win is a win at the end of the day. But I definitely understand the sentiment that he was coming from. We didn’t win where we wanted to, we didn’t close out the game to where we wanted to.”