When the Tennessee Titans 2024 season finished in early January, the coaching staff knew they needed to make some significant changes to the way things are done around here. They knew another total failure of a season would not only be unacceptable, but would lead to them losing their jobs.

So they stuck their heads together in February and got to work devising the first step to their revamped way of life: a one-of-a-kind offseason program.

You can read more about the finer points of the program right here, but essentially they gamified a hyper-intensive system of grades and points from practice that holds everybody in the building accountable to one another in a quantifiable way. They also set things up in such a way that fosters leadership at every level of the team—from top leaders in the locker room, to leaders in each facet of the game, to leaders of specific position groups—to blossom and grow amongst a richer and more unified group of men.

The goal was to stop being coworkers and begin down the road towards becoming brothers. As many coaches and players pointed out this month: all the best teams are tight. And the implication is that last year, the Titans weren’t.

On the final day of mandatory minicamp, Head Coach Brian Callahan gave a state of the union on how the program had progressed through OTA’s:

“I just appreciate their attendance, I appreciate their buy-in, the work that we put in. We're a better football team now than we were when we started. And I'm excited about getting ready for training camp. The guys have really—it's been competitive, it's be intense. We've gotten a lot of great work in over the course of the off-season program. And that ultimately doesn't guarantee us anything. And so, we've got a lot of work still ahead of us. We've got a whole training camp to go, but I like where we're at. I'm appreciative of the effort that's been put in and excited to wrap this up today. We got three teams—maybe a fourth team—sort of in the running on this last day. Two teams are only separated by a point here with one to play. So it should be pretty competitive for those guys trying to finish off the offseason on a high note.”

At the top of the agenda with this program was eliminating what the Titans call S.I.N.s: Self-Inflicted Negatives. They did a ton of background research into their performance in 2024, and at nearly every turn was a different bullet in their own toes, fired by their own hand.

And the good news that Callahan shared with us at the end of minicamp is that as they’ve tracked these things through the offseason, they’re already seeing progress:

“Yeah, that's a good question because I just hit it today, this morning with the team. What we started to see over the course of the offseason, particularly with this last probably four or five practices is the things that—the S.I.N.’s that we can control, which for those that don't know this, we call them S.I.N.'s; they're self-inflicted negatives. So false starts, operation procedure problems, pre-snap penalties, all those things that just indicate sloppy play in all phases, those have sort of trended down as the weeks have gone by. And so, the only real S.I.N.'s—yesterday was a great example—the only like major S.I.N.'s that we had were more the physical ones and those happen, so we can live with those. But we've trended down on eliminating all the things operationally that we can control. It's been cool to watch that process play out and you see the effect. As the old adage goes, you get what you emphasize. And we've emphasized it pretty dramatically and I've seen the improvement from it. Now again, it's June. We've got to keep seeing that improvement. But I've been pleased with what it's shown over the course of the offseason.”

S.I.N.s are pre-snap penalties, drops, holding, exchange issues, fumble, and sacks. The Titans believe that if they can minimize those six things, which they did a ton of in 2024, that alone will make them a significantly better football team.

Now, they have a lot of things beyond just this to fix: other penalties, negative plays, incomplete passes, and interceptions just to name a few. But what makes S.I.N.s different is that they’re almost entirely in Tennessee’s control. And they believe that step one to returning to competency is controlling the controllables.

“We sort of tweaked all along, we found out some things” Callahan said of the learning curve with this new program. “Especially like points. How are you dividing up points for the offensive line, for example? It's really hard for offensive linemen to get positive points. They don't have TFLs, they don't—kind of linemen just do their job and that's their job. So how do you award points for that? And so we tweaked some of how we awarded some points to the guys up front. We've tweaked a little bit of the process as it's gone. It's sort of a little trial and error, not anything dramatic, but just little things that would come up, we'd maybe make an adjustment here or there. But I'm really happy with how the program went. And again, I think you can ask the players how they felt about it. But I think it kept our competitiveness high. I think it kept our focus on the things that matter. The intent of what we're trying to get done was sort of on our minds all the time. I hit it every day in the team meetings from practice, things that showed up that we needed to cover. So I think, it's made us a better football team at the end of the day and that's what the goal was. And again, we got another—whole lot of work ahead of us. But for the program in and of itself, I thought it was, for the most part, successful.”

Tennessee has a long way to go to be a good team again, but their painstaking effort to improve already hasn’t gone unnoticed by the players or by those of us watching on.

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