The Tennessee Titans opened the 2026 NFL season with a 23-10 loss to the New York Jets, and the game wasn’t nearly as close as the final score suggests. Tennessee didn’t find the end zone until quarterback Cam Ward connected with wide receiver Elic Ayomanor with just 2:42 remaining in what was already a blowout. 

New logos, new uniforms, new coaching staff, new players, same result for a fan base that went home early and angry.

Former Titans first-round pick Kevin Dyson, the man who scored the Music City Miracle touchdown, now serves as a sideline reporter for Titans Radio. On his long-time regular gig with Titans Talkback on 104.5 The Zone alongside Zac Lyons and Stoney Keeley, Dyson offered a troubling eyewitness account of what he saw from the Tennessee sideline as the game slipped away.

The score was within reach. Tennessee trailed just 10-3 at halftime and received the ball to start the third quarter. Even after the Jets pushed it to 17-3, the Titans had more than nine minutes left in the third to respond. Instead, they went three-and-out again. New York kicked a field goal, Tennessee managed seven plays before another Jets FG made it 20-3. Then the game was toast.

Dyson’s sideline view paints a bleak picture of the Titans’ energy

Dyson compared what he witnessed to the Texas-Ohio State college football game from the day before, where Texas looked dead in the water before flipping the momentum and pulling off an epic comeback. His point was simple: that same opportunity existed for the Titans, and nobody grabbed it.

“It just seemed like Texas was dead in the water. Yet, all of a sudden you get a momentum shift, and now Ohio State can’t figure it out. And that’s what I’m saying, the score was within reach (at 10-3). And if you show life, you get a play here, you do something there, you might be able to switch that energy and get the momentum from them because there was still time. They could never get over the hump, they could never switch.”

“(I’m) sideline reporting, and I can see the offensive line. There was a point in there where I can see guys really trying to amp guys up. I would see Latham, he was like, ‘let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.’ And then, and then it just seemed like it kind of fizzled. It was almost like the energy level was just like decimated. It was just like they just went to the sideline, sat on that cool bench, it was like, when is our turn again? It was just like low energy. There was a point in there where Cam was like “beep-beep-beep-beep, I’m tired of this, 3 and outs, we gotta do something, starts with me, but y’all gotta do this’. He really tried, and it’s just like everybody’s kind of looked at him like, okay.” 

The team’s slogan of “fast and violent” will continue to be shoved in their face if this is the product they keep rolling out there to the public. 

“I didn’t go down and watch the defensive line and see, but just kind of watching them, I didn’t see that same fire from (Jeffery Simmons) either.”

Complementary football and the bigger problem for coach Robert Saleh

Dyson’s comparison to the Texas-Ohio State game carries weight because of the underlying principle: complementary football. One side of the ball making a play to wake up the other side. That’s how you flip momentum. That’s how you come back when you’re trailing by two or three scores at home.

“I don’t know if it was the heat,” Dyson added. “I don’t know if it was just the way the game was going, fatigue. I mean, it’s the first game, it’s hot as heck, and y’all really hadn’t played any reps other than practice. Then you’re doing 14-minute drives, you’re done, they’re cooked, they were tired. And I saw, like, talking to (Saleh) at halftime was like, ‘did a lot of you guys need IVs halftime? He’s like, no, we’ll be fine.’ They weren’t. They were tired.”

Now, yes, it was hot. But the Titans trained in that heat through the entire month of August and the end of July in training camp. The Jets came from New York, where it’s less humid and less hot overall, and they had no problem with it.

It never happened for the Titans. The energy was sucked out of the building, sucked out of the sideline, and the Jets and their fans took every ounce of it. Adam Schefter noted on Monday that the NFL was on pace for record-high scoring in Week 1 since the NFL-AFL merger in 1970, with teams averaging 25 points per game. 

Tennessee accounted for three points through the first 57 minutes of their game, and the other seven came in garbage time.

It’s disheartening. It’s defeating. And it’s a problem Robert Saleh has to fix. The Titans had energy during training camp. That was gone by the second half of Week 1.