Taylor Lewan told a story on Bussin’ with the Boys recently that adds a layer to the Isaiah Wilson disaster for the Tennessee Titans in a way I didn’t expect. Wilson still, in my opinion, is the biggest draft bust in Titans history and maybe NFL history.

But Lewan’s comments about Wilson’s actual potential make the whole saga sting even more.

The Titans selected offensive tackle Isaiah Wilson 29th overall in the 2020 NFL Draft out of Georgia. He played four snaps for the Titans. Four. 

His headlines came from off-field legal troubles, plural. Wilson’s selection kicked off a 2020 draft class that was an unmitigated disaster from start to finish by general manager Jon Robinson… None of those picks worked out. 

And it all started with the first-round pick who got arrested for drag racing on Charlotte Avenue in Nashville.

Lewan says Wilson had Trent Williams-type tools

Here’s the part I never expected. Lewan described Wilson as the full package. 

“Dude was a specimen. Shoulders like this,” Lewan said, holding both hands wide in the air. “He was the same size waist as me, giant legs, nimble, had all the tools to be like another Trent Williams. He had that type of ability.”

Another Trent Williams? A massive bar to clear. Williams was just ranked the second-best tackle in the NFL by ESPN’s poll at 37 years old.

Lewan also shared that Wilson would show up to the Titans facility smelling like booze from the night before. We had sources telling us the same thing during that 2020 season. I felt like we had Buck Reising on top of the A to Z Sports’ Isaiah Wilson beat during COVID when there wasn’t a lot going on outside the games themselves in a limited capacity. The Titans’ first-round pick constantly had phone calls coming our way about things he was doing.

“I just remember being around this cat dude,” Lewan shared. “He would fall asleep anywhere. He would go out late at night. He’d come and smell like booze.”

But Lewan added a detail that caught me off guard. Even when Wilson would fall asleep in meetings because of the partying and the booze, he’d then wake up and know all the information. Know the assignment. Know the playbook. That’s pretty wild.

“The weird thing is his retention was incredible,” Lewan said. “He’d be asleep in meetings. And then our coach would wake him up and be like, ‘Hey 19 Zoro, what do you have?’ He’d be like, ‘Uh double to the mic.’ And left all of us like how the [expletive] did he? How do you [expletive] know that? (Coach is) like, ‘What front is this?’ (Wilson would) say, ‘Over front, Sam’s on the ball.’ And it’s like oh my god.”

Wilson was (somehow) traded to the Miami Dolphins for a seventh round pick after the 2020 season. There might be two NFL places worse than Nashville for the partying Wilson to be sent too, and Miami is ABSOLUTELY one. He never played for the Dolphins and was out of the league.

“When he was having a bunch of issues, I was like, “Uh, share your location with me on your phone.” And so, he shared it with me and for like two, three years after that, I still had his location at times. So, I’d check, he’d be like on a little island next to Miami or something like that. He was traveling all over the place,” Lewan said.

Wilson bamboozled the entire Titans organization

The bummer in all of this is that Isaiah Wilson was a complete disaster of a human being once he got money. He bamboozled the entire organization. I think you can connect the dots back to the COVID draft process. In a normal year, Wilson comes to the Titans facility for a pre-draft visit. Instead, every interaction happened over Zoom, and we were all learning Zoom together in 2020 after never really needing it before. It’s easier to fool people over a screen.

Wilson bamboozled Mike Vrabel. He bamboozled former general manager John Robinson. He bamboozled that entire scouting department. Whether the Georgia coaching staff, which included former Arkansas head coach Sam Pittman as the offensive line coach, also propped up their prospect to mislead the Titans, or whether Wilson just did enough at Georgia to pass by with those Trent Williams-type tools . . . either way, Tennessee got burned.

Now that I see Lewan’s account of Wilson actually being smart and knowing all the assignments, I can at least understand what Robinson was trying to do. It makes Robinson sound a little less irresponsible. Still, what a swing and a miss.

The Titans are still paying for the Wilson pick

The close second for biggest Titans draft bust might be Caleb Farley, for completely different reasons. But Wilson’s impact on the franchise stretches far beyond one failed pick. I will argue right now that the Titans are still paying for this miss.

That Wilson whiff turned into a miss on Dillon Radunz. That turned into a miss on Nicholas Petit-Frere. That turned into JC Latham being the 7th overall pick to play left tackle, then moving over to right tackle when the Titans signed Dan Moore in free agency. 

You could say Isaiah Wilson should be Tennessee’s starting left tackle right now. Maybe Latham was the 7th overall pick to play right tackle. Or maybe the Titans would be in a completely different place if Wilson didn’t flame out as the worst draft pick in franchise history.

That 2020 draft really started the downfall of Robinson as Titans general manager, and the ripple effects from the Wilson pick are still showing up on the roster six years later.