Cam Ward avoids making nightmarish QB history with first divisional win over Colts in Week 6, but joins a far stranger list in the process
The Titans’ comeback in Indianapolis kept Cam Ward off one list no quarterback wants to be on. It also put him on a second, far stranger one alongside four very different names.
The Tennessee Titans finally have an AFC South win with Cam Ward under center.
Sunday’s comeback over the Indianapolis Colts was strange from start to finish. It also carried some historical weight for the Titans quarterback. Ward avoided one piece of NFL history in Week 6, and he joined another in an odd way.
Cam Ward gets off the… Troy Aikman track
This storyline was building all week, and it bears repeating now that it’s over. ESPN’s Adam Schefter posted the numbers on X before kickoff, and they were not what any Titans fan wanted to see:
That is not a great crew to be part of! Aikman is a Hall of Famer, sure, but the rest of that list is not a group you want your franchise quarterback lumped in with.
Ward made sure he won’t be. The victory snapped an 11-game divisional losing streak for Tennessee, which is now 1-11 against its last 12 division opponents. And Ward avoids this ugly list.
Ward joins an eclectic group of low-yardage winners
So that’s how Ward avoided history. Here’s how he made it, in a different not-so-flattering way. Fox Sports’ Ben Arthur posted this stat on X shortly after the game:
That’s different company, and it’s all over the board. Three of those names (Young, Nix, and Williams) are young quarterbacks who’ve dealt with real struggles for stretches of their careers.
Then there’s Hurts. A lot of people outside of Philadelphia have always held suspicions about him, even when he was winning Super Bowl MVP. The knock is that he’s more of a trailer quarterback than a tractor quarterback, someone getting pulled along by an awesome roster rather than dragging his team forward.
For what it’s worth, I think the eclectic nature of this group is the real takeaway. A performance like Sunday’s, where you aren’t just a trailer quarterback but the traileriest quarterback on the field, comes in all shapes and sizes. It happens to young passers figuring it out and to Super Bowl winners alike.
Winning ugly made the record books, too
Ward’s stat line wasn’t the only quirky number from this one. Next Gen Stats noted that Tennessee beat Indianapolis despite being outgained by 213 total yards. That’s the Titans’ worst total yardage margin in a win since Week 15 of the 2006 season, when they were outgained by 298 yards against the Jaguars.
The other note hit closer to home for me. The Titans scored 26 points in the second half after being shut out in the first half. That’s their most second-half points since Week 13 of 2020, when they put up 28 after halftime in a 41-35 loss to the Browns. I was at that game as a college kid. It had a COVID-restricted crowd, and Dolly Parton was supposed to be the legend of the game and do the Titans sword thing. She fell through and Vandy female kicker Sarah Fuller filled it. It remains one of the weirdest Titans experiences of my life, and the vibes on Sunday felt similarly strange.
The bottom line is that Tennessee can’t go back to this particular well every week. A win is a win, and getting the AFC South monkey off Ward’s back matters. But if 100-yard passing days become the norm, Ward will become the quarterback whose stat lines get passed around for all the wrong reasons.
