Titans-Broncos Winners And Losers: Turnover day betrayed by redzone failures, a big rookie question answered, coaching failures

The Tennessee Titans lost 20-12 to the Denver Broncos in a sloppy, low-scoring Week 1 bout. If you’d told folks before kickoff the Titans would cover (just the third time in the Callahan Era, by the way) and lose by one score, nobody would have been surprised or particularly enraged. This was supposed to be a manhandling of a worse team on the road. And yet, by nature of just how they managed to lose, anger wins the day nonetheless. How is that so? Here are the winners and losers from this one that tell the full story:

Loser: Coaching Decisions

Brian Callahan’s coaching mistakes in this one are a very big story out of the gate. He made a couple, by my count, and both were ugly. I wrote at length about both of them, and what it means for the rest of this season. Click here for the attention this “loser” topic deserves.

Winner: Turnover Margin

The Titans came into this game knowing that winning the turnover margin would be critical to them standing a chance. They also made turnover generation on defense and prevention on offense key focuses of their offseason program. And to their credit, they did very well in this department.

Now, the caveat is that they did very little with the turnovers they got. We’ll get to that more in a moment. But Tennessee won the turnover battle 4-2. Bo Nix threw two interceptions to Roger McCreary and Xavier Woods, was strip sacked by Jeffery Simmons, and WR Marvin Mims muffed a punt the Titans recovered. The Titans only suffered a Tony Pollard lost fumble, and a Cam Ward strip sack on the final offensive play of the game in desperation time.

Capitalizing on days like these is obviously the critical next step. But doing as well as they did to win the turnover battle in the first place is a fantastic start for a group we hope to see improve.

Loser: Red Zone Efficiency

The Titans simply must learn to capitalize when they get the ball. The were officially 0-2 on trips inside the redzone. They found themselves in Broncos territory seven times on Sunday, four of their drives beginning there in the first place. Facing such a brutal Broncos defense was tough sledding, and it felt like K Joey Slye’s range was a constant consideration on every snap inside enemy territory. Aggression was not the name of the game for the Titans today, and it showed. They wanted to muddy up the game, keep it low scoring, play the field position and turnovers game, and get out of town in one piece. I can absolutely appreciate that mindset, especially given the context of Cam Ward’s first game. But you simply can’t be this inefficient, nor can you be this devoid of aggression. That is, if you actually wanted to win the game. This isn’t all on the coaches either, mind you. The Titans put themselves in 1st and 20 and 3rd and longs far too often with their failure to execute. The players have to play better, and the coaches have to coach better…

Winner: Chimere Dike

A rare bright spot! Rookie WR Chimere Dike was a topic of scrutiny coming into this game since he was named the starting punt and kick returner after very little preseason practice doing either. But he stepped up to the plate and handled both jobs like a seasoned veteran.

He fielded three punts, fair catching two and returning the third for 12 yards. And he returned four kickoffs, twice for 24 yards, another for 25, and his shining moment of the day was a 71 yard return right before half. It’s what set the Titans up to save face with a last-second field goal after allowing a Broncos touchdown with 27 seconds left on the clock. If he performs like this all year, the Titans will have no problems to speak of in the return game. It may sound minor, but based on recent history, it’s a serious relief.

Loser: A Disastrous Day Of Penalties

There’s not much more to say about it: the Titans committed 13 penalties for 130 yards. To get 130 yards against you without a big pass interference chunk is genuinely difficult to pull off. It’s the most penalty yards in a Titans game since Derrick Henry broke his foot against the Colts in 2021. It was really, really bad.

In his postgame presser, here’s what Brian Callahan had to say about committing so many Self Inflicted Negatives (SINs) in Week 1: “I was disappointed in that. I didn’t foresee that being the reason that would make the game really challenging. So, yea, disappointed. I thought we would be better than we were, but we weren’t. So we’ve got some things to clean up and we’ve got to get ready to go for the next one.”

These SINs were the focal point of their offseason program. They did so much work and so much preaching on not shooting themselves in the foot. And in Week 1, they did so far too often. If they don’t get really buttoned up really quickly, they could have a very ugly September.