On the A to Z Sports Gameday Show, we sum up each game in a “One Word” segment.

In the wake of the Titans’ humiliating 3-26 loss to the Texans, my one word is “how.” As in, how am I supposed to talk about this football team right now?

This wasn’t your average NFL loss

I am a football analyst. I do some reporting and some journalism, but “Big J” Journalism isn’t my primary lane. I evaluate football.

I love talking about football even when teams lose. Some of the best conversations happen after losses. I haven’t been asking the Titans to hop on a big winning streak, and I’m not so impatient as to say this team is unwatchable until it wins a game. I know plenty of fans feel that way, and I understand why. But that’s not where I’m at. A team can lose in plenty of ways that still leave a story to follow, a common thread to pull on.

There’s a Grand Canyon of difference between winning that game in Week 5, and what Tennessee actually did. The Titans could have lost it a billion different ways that wouldn’t leave me wondering how to talk about this team. But they didn’t.

This goes way beyond the binary of win or lose. It was a complete and total beatdown that you rarely see at this level. It was a Saturday kind of loss, the kind you flip past on your television on a college football Saturday and wince at. Who is watching this?

How the Titans fell apart in Week 5

This Week 5 26-3 loss was an overall failure to launch. In the first half, the offense couldn’t get going, but they could cough the ball up on a pair of turnovers. The defense was doing its darndest, but it eventually broke after a half of football with absolutely no help from the other side of the ball.

Then the floodgates opened in the second half. Suddenly, the defense couldn’t get off the field. The offensive line (one of the only genuine bright spots of the entire season) turned into the worst version of the Titans’ line you can remember from the past five years. Where did those guys come from? The pocket was a sieve, and Cam Ward was taking a beating back there by game’s end. Nothing went right.

I just don’t know how you talk about that game.

The Titans are making this impossible to bear

I’m not even asking you to win. I am asking you to play in a way that lets us talk about football. Tennessee has done this too many times over the past couple of years, and every time, it isn’t just that the team lost. It’s that they made analyzing the game practically impossible.

Most Mondays, I spend two or three hours pouring over the film, clipping plays, posting them online, and building ideas for conversations. The goal is to dig into who did what and why, figure out what’s trending up and what’s trending down, and find the sneaky through lines that are worth doing more of next week.

I don’t know what I’m doing with the rest of my day today, but it’s not that. Because what is there to say?

If you want to find an alternative way to get your fill of Titans football this week, might I recommend our shiny new A to Z Sports Trade Simulator, which is live now! The trade deadline is less than a month away, and at this rate you can bet the Titans will be involved.

The beauty of the NFL is that every 6 days, you get to try again. There’s a ton of season left for the Saleh/Ward Titans. Melodrama Mondays are often fleeting. But until the Titans get another chance to get back on the tracks next Sunday, I keep landing on the same word to summarize this game: How?