The thing about Cam Ward that makes me most bullish on his ability to become a star in the NFL is his mind. When I sat down with Brian Callahan to recap the season and preview the offseason back in January, his emphasis on finding a QB with the right “Nervous System” really stood out in the moment. And as time has passed and the offseason has played out, it’s turned into a central theme of how the Tennessee Titans have approached their rebuild. That includes their new QB first and foremost.

Cam is immovably cool with everything that he does. Whether it’s on or off the football field, everything you see and hear about Cam Ward is that he lives life with an unshakably low heartbeat.

I heard national College Football Analyst Josh Pate tell a story from Cam’s time in Miami this week, and it perfectly encapsulates the mental element of his profile. “It's towards the end of practice, and so they're working towards the end zone” Pate began, setting the scene. “I'm standing back here. I can hear Shannon Dawson calling the plays in. I'm standing there watching them from behind the line of scrimmage, and Ward threads one for a touchdown.”

There’s the window-dressing on Ward that gets you in the door. He’s a baller. He’s productive. He does a lot of things at a high level physically. But what his coaching staff does to him next is what Brian Callahan and company hopes will set him apart from the rest:

"…and either Mario (Cristobal), Shannon Dawson, somebody just looked over at the officials who you have working practice and told them ‘just call a hold. There wasn't one, but just call a hold. Let's just see what happens."

The Miami coaching staff was trying to push him mentally. They wanted to press his buttons in practice to see how he’d react in a game. Sometimes in football, like in life, you just get screwed over. How you react is what makes you a winner or a loser.

“He loses it for a second, because he knows good and well it was a bad call” Pate goes on. “But they just regroup, and they go score again, and then they call another phantom penalty to negate the score because they just want to see how he's going to react. And he loses it again, composes himself again. They go down there a third time. They call a third penalty on him. They re-rack it again, go down there, score.”

Cam was some combination of unphased and motivated by the injustice. It’s hard to say which is a more powerful element in his mind, but whatever it is, he makes it work. Not just in practice, but all over his college tape. It’s what his new NFL coaches saw in him that got them really juiced up.

“This dude scores 28 points worth of red zone touchdowns over the span of probably 10 minutes of real time. When you factor in how long it took, all they were doing was pushing him mentally. So they're trying to figure out, yeah, we know he's got arm talent. We know he's incredibly mobile, but like neck up. Can we count on him? Live bullets flying. I mean, what's he going to do? Is he going to get penalties? Is he going to lose his mind, lose his cool?”

At almost every turn like this, Cam has answered the bell in the way you want to see. Sometimes the hole he’s in is of his own digging. Sometimes a teammate puts them there. And sometimes, things just aren’t bouncing your way. Sometimes you get jobbed. For Ward, it doesn’t seem to matter. He comes back swinging with a level head every time regardless.

“I was watching a lot of guys walk off the field” Pate concluded. "You got coaches looking at each other just smiling because they know, ‘all right, we learned a lot today. And none of it was physical.”