1 Winner and 16 Losers from Tennessee Titans’ brutal Week 1 loss 23-10 to the Jets in home opener
Embrace the shellshock with this comprehensive recounting of just how poor the Titans looked against a pedestrian Jets team to kick off the Robert Saleh era:
The Tennessee Titans fell to the New York Jets 23-10 in their home opener, and the outing was about as bad as you could have asked for. Outside of escaping without a catastrophic injury, there was almost nothing to feel good about for a franchise hoping to revive the spirit of its fan base after years of turmoil. An extremely slow start is the most generous way to put it.
This is going to be the most unusual winners and losers breakdown you’ll maybe ever read, because it is as lopsided as the Titans’ performance today. Without further ado, here is 1 winner and 16 losers from Titans-Jets Week 1.
Winner: Rookie LB Anthony Hill
To the surprise of some, rookie linebacker Anthony Hill was the fill-in for Cedric Gray, who suffered a concussion in a UTV accident over Labor Day weekend and was unable to clear concussion protocol in time. Cody Barton was in his typical role, and the expectation (at least mine) was that James Williams would be the other spot starter. But the coaching staff gave Hill the nod.
He finished with 2 solo tackles and 14 assists and did so flying around the field, especially in the first half when the game was still competitive. From an eye test standpoint, he was one of the only bright spots on the entire Titans roster today. He was out there earlier than expected and looked like a dude for the future, which is something to feel good about.
The rest of the team was largely bad! Here are 16 losers.
Loser: The dropback passing game
Tennessee managed 140 passing yards on 32 attempts. Cam Ward went 19-of-32 with an average of 4.4 yards per pass, was sacked 3 times for 13 yards, and threw 1 touchdown at the very end of the game in what could only be described as garbage time. It was clunky all day. The best way to explain it from a vibes standpoint is that the Jets offense was operating in space with room to breathe, while the Titans offense felt like it was playing in a phone booth. That won’t fly when you have so much invested in these weapons and in this quarterback!
Loser: The run game
A lot of that phone booth feeling was brought on by the inability to establish the run. The Titans were a below-average running team today, especially in the first half. As the Jets defense loosened up, Tennessee found a little bit of rhythm on the ground, but it was too little, too late. The team finished with 14 attempts for 68 yards at 4.9 yards per carry, which feels much better on paper than it looked in real time. I believe this team largely wants to run to set up the pass, and when the run game is a non-starter, the passing game suffers accordingly.
Loser: The offensive line
The collective Titans zeitgeist was starting to feel pretty good about this group toward the end of training camp. Some of the biggest question marks appeared to be better than anticipated heading into the regular season.
So it was a real bummer for the offensive line to get as consistently manhandled as it did by a good (but not great) Jets defensive front, including former Titan T’Vondre Sweat, who was effective on the interior. The line struggled in both run blocking and pass protection, and the performance feels a lot closer to early season pessimism than to the late-camp optimism. Show me an offense where the offensive line is straight up bad, and I will show you in almost all instances a team that is not going to be effective on offense.
Loser: The pass rush relative to expectation
This was my biggest disappointment of the day. As I’ve said all offseason, the only unit on this team where the expectation should be finishing well above league average is the Titans’ defensive front. Robert Saleh has had effective fronts for the entirety of his NFL coaching career. They were rotating full hockey rotations, 4 men on, 4 men off, which meant Jeffery Simmons and John Franklin Myers weren’t on the field as much as you might have guessed. The result was zero sacks on the day, and a pass rush that was pretty non-existent. That has to change, fast.
Loser: The run defense
The run defense started all right. As Simmons told us in the locker room, the Jets were getting 2, 3, 4, maybe 5 yards a pop early — effective but not game-breaking. Then the floodgates opened. Breece Hall finished with over 100 yards rushing and a touchdown on 22 attempts. Braelon Allen accounted for 40 yards on 10 attempts. At one point in the first half, a single Jets drive consumed 15 minutes of game clock, leaving the Titans with just 3 offensive drives in the entire first half. When you have Simmons, Franklin-Myers, Keldric Faulk, Jermaine Johnson, and eventually a healthy Gray back in the rotation, there is no excuse for this team not to be an extremely strong run defense. They weren’t that on Sunday.
Loser: The secondary
The secondary does not get off the hook just because I have higher expectations for the defensive front. The front was not doing them any favors, and there were too many instances where the Jets had far too long in the pocket. But especially in zone, Jets receivers were able to sit 10 to 15 yards beyond the line of scrimmage in the softest pockets you’ll see in the NFL. You can’t have the Adonai Mitchells of the world sitting down with 7 yards of space in every direction for an easy toss and catch from Geno Smith. That dog is not going to hunt when Smith is getting zero pressure. A 40-yard bomb to Garrett Wilson to get the Jets inside the 10-yard line on a potential drive-ending play was another ugly moment. Amani Hooker was entirely too late to react, and you knew well before the ball arrived that the play was a big problem. Those kinds of opponent explosives were too abundant against this team.
Loser: Cam Ward’s tablets
If you watched Netflix’s Quarterback season 3 this summer, you saw the montage of Cam Ward smashing NFL-provided Microsoft Surface tablets as a rookie. Well, he did it again Sunday, and he had every reason to be angry.
But that routine is going to get old eventually if the team doesn’t turn things around. The offensive line is what keeps me from going in too hard on him today. And there is nothing any team or player can do in Week 1 that will make me come close to a conclusion. It establishes the narrative, but it is not the final narrative. I won’t be making any sweeping assessment on Ward until Halloween at the earliest, we need more sample. But today was a very bad first step. My number one complaint is simple: I just want to see more of Cam Ward. Please.
Loser: Robert Saleh’s Jets revenge
This was supposed to be the big emotional revenge game for Saleh, taking one to the team that fired him after his first head coaching stint. Instead, he got pantsed by the Jets in his own house. I will commend him for his composure at the podium. I have been around him enough now to tell that he was filled with fury inside. But he contained himself well enough to get off answers that were satisfactory enough to move on to Week 2. A really tough scene when the victorious return of Saleh turned into a blowout loss to the team that decided to fire him early in 2024.
Loser: Game management
Now I must be less charitable to Saleh here. I’m not sure his sentiments toward the analytics community on game management decisions are the most accepting in the world. He may be a little bit resistant as a defensive coach to leaning into the numbers on some of these calls, and there were a couple of times in this game where his decision-making was far too conservative in my opinion. He addressed one after the game, essentially saying their model didn’t show a huge edge. Maybe that’s the case, but I don’t know why their model is so demonstrably different from the publicly available models built by really smart folks with league-wide data.
The Surrender Index on Twitter, an automated system that measures the cowardice of punt decisions, put the Titans in the 100th percentile of cowardly punts this season when they punted from the Jets’ 43-yard line on fourth-and-9 with 1:12 remaining in the third quarter while losing 3-20. More importantly, it ranked in the 96th percentile of all punts since 1999.
Tennessee also punted on fourth-and-5 while down 17 in the fourth quarter. It does not seem to track analytically. I’ve heard from too many smart people about Saleh’s approach to this kind of decision-making in New York to not be at least skeptical of his process, and how much he leans on conservatism versus the numbers. It doesn’t seem like good process to me.
Loser: Tyjae Spears
Spears was targeted 4 times, caught 2 balls for 12 yards, and flat out dropped one that hit him in the chest for a potential first down. Toward the end of the game when the Titans were trying to play catch-up, he made a couple of athletic plays and flashed what has made me a big proponent of his breakout potential this season. I’m not giving up on Spears by any means, but when I hyped him up in the preseason as somebody who could be a gigantic element of this offense, for him to be a minimal impact as a runner and unable to bring in a critical third-down target, that’s a bad start.
Loser: WR Chimere Dike
I talked to Dike and special teams coordinator Bones Fassel last week about his return duties, asking both of them after such a stellar All-Pro rookie season what the coaching points were going to be this year. Fassel told me that his message to Dike was to not press, to not try to force it, to take what’s there and make the most of it.
Today it felt like he was forcing it. He fumbled and gave the ball back to the Jets in Titans territory on a first-half kickoff, putting the defense in a bad spot and keeping the Titans offense off the field even longer. He also fielded a bouncing punt he could have stayed away from, tried to gain the edge, and ended up losing yards. It wasn’t what we were used to seeing last season.
Loser: The Fernando Carmona feel-good story
The offensive line was bad collectively, but Carmona in particular was somebody the Jets went after. I’m not going to say this is massively surprising, at least to me. He is still a Day 3 rookie draft pick starting for the first time in the NFL, and I talked a good deal last week about the possibility of growing pains. But they were significant growing pains. The Jets’ interior is good, Sweat is quite good, and Carmona was getting blown up too much to call it a tenable level of guard play. He’s going to have to improve in a hurry. I’m not sure he’s necessarily at risk of losing the job anytime soon, but he has to play better than that if the Titans’ offensive line is going to stabilize.
Loser: Punter Tommy Townsend
Townsend had a couple of punts beyond the 50-yard line, which are supposed to be green-light chip-shot punts you work on specifically for coffin corners or pinning a team inside the 10, maybe even inside the 5. He had 2 in particular that were really pretty looking, but as soon as the ball hit the ground, it bounded into the end zone. Part of that falls on his special teams teammates needing to get down there more effectively, but if Townsend is going to be an elite punter, he has to put the right spin on the ball and have better touch.
Loser: Titans executives’ mental health
This is a team that desperately needs to quiet the apathy that this fan base has been tempted to embrace for the past 2 seasons. Tennessee has now won just 6 games in the last 35 outings, with a new stadium (literally) looming over the situation, surrounded by rebranding materials to sell. There is a spirit of this franchise to sell to fans, an investment and mental buy-in to bring people back into the fold. Days like Sunday are a real wear on both the football and business sides of the organization.
Loser: Owner Amy Adams Strunk’s pocketbook
She spent 9 figures on free agents and draft picks this offseason. She has not been greedy in any way with emptying the checkbook to make this team better.
One result is one result, and Week 1 is often a liar. There is a lot of football left to play. Even if Week 1 isn’t a liar and this team is this bad right now, that does not mean it can’t improve markedly as the season goes on. They are very young, they are very new.
But all of that being said, this kind of performance is a really tough look when you’ve spent 9 figures on this football team. this year.
Loser: Titans fans
Titans fans everywhere. I don’t even exclude media from this one, because at this point we are all entirely over it as well. It is easy to walk out of Nissan Stadium and think the Titans can’t possibly be real. I get it! I’m somebody who is a lot more patient than that by nature. I won’t be throwing my hands up until I’ve seen at least a month, probably 2 months of football. I need trends more than single data points to feel a certain way about a team.
But I completely understand how brutal this is. I tweeted during the game, and I meant every word of it, that I don’t know what drowning feels like exactly, but my best guess is that it feels like watching the Titans in a game like this. I am sorry to Titans fans who are mad, who are apathetic, who feel like they have been cheated financially because they spend their money on this stuff. I am sorry the season started this way.
I will say that I do expect it to get better. How much better? I don’t know. But I do think this team is young and new, and I am a lot less shocked today than a lot of folks seem to be, because I believe extremely strongly in continuity being the key to sustained success in the NFL. When so much constantly changes with an organization, I think it’s pretty impossible to just hit the ground running. I’m going to give them time. But today we are all losers, and for that, I’m sorry.
