L’Jarius Sneed’s disastrous Titans history repeats itself with latest injury news, making trade with Chiefs look even worse
The Titans signing of L’Jarius Sneed just got a whole lot worse.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Tennessee Titans top cornerback L’Jarius Sneed is going to miss some time with a quad injury.
If you’ve been around longer than one (1) year, you know that this is a movie we’ve already seen. And the plot is increasingly infuriating. On Thursday, Tennessee announced Sneed would be heading to IR with the quad injury he suffered in the middle of their loss to the Patriots. It’s just the latest development in what has become a terrible trade with the best team in the league.
The Chiefs fleeced the Titans for L’Jarius Sneed
This tragedy began in March of 2024, when Ran Carthon’s front office decided to send the Kansas City Chiefs a 2025 third round pick and a swap of 2024 seventh round picks for the privilege of signing Sneed to a shiny new contract. Four years and $76.4 million dollars is what they handed the standout corner, with $55 million guaranteed. It was an aggressive move at the time, but Sneed was young and had a reputation as one of the best and feistiest corners in the league. It elevated the Titans secondary tremendously on paper.
In 2024, he got knocked out for the season after Week 6 with a quad injury. Now in 2025, he’s been knocked out for at least the next four games after Week 7 with another quad injury.
Since joining the Titans, Sneed has played 629 of the 1,441 total defensive snaps the team has played. That’s 43.7%, and it’s about to go down with him missing at least the next four games. He missed 12 games in 2024 before slowly easing back into the lineup at the beginning of 2025. So, yeah, it’s a tragedy. Because L’Jarius didn’t ask for this injury luck. But the brutal reality is that he’s been a giant waste of money for the Titans so far, and it doesn’t look like he’ll be available and around long enough at this point to possibly change that.
There’s a potential team “out” on his contract after this season that costs them $8 million in dead cap in 2026 and $4 million in dead cap in 2027. A small price to pay when it keeps you from having to eat a pair of $20 million cap hits those seasons to keep him on the payroll on his current contract. With how things have gone so far, for a guy who wasn’t even an acquisition of this regime, I don’t see a world in which they don’t take this off-ramp.
His availability alone has been disqualifying. But this year when he’s been on the field, he’s been awfully up and down on top of it. It hasn’t all been bad, but he hasn’t looked like the premier player they signed up for either. Whatever the reason for it, he just hasn’t seemed like the guy he was at his peak in Kansas City. Sumer Sports’ database has him as the primary coverage player on 21 targets this season, allowing 224 yards and 3 touchdowns.
He’s been a starting-caliber cornerback for the most part, but not the shutdown player he once was. The only thing shutdown about Sneed’s time in Tennessee has been him.
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