Titans Fan Rooting Guide: Week 13 teams to pull for that could make Tennessee’s path to the first overall draft pick so much easier

Here’s who to root for if you want the Titans to get the first overall pick.

Easton Freeze — Tennessee Titans Beat Writer
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The Tennessee Titans are 5.5 point home underdogs to the Jacksonville Jaguars in Week 13, the first of their two meetings with the divisional foe. QB Cam Ward is coming off of his best performance as a pro in a very high degree of difficulty game vs. the Seahawks last week, his second consecutive game with positive EPA/play. The vibe around this Titans team is that of tepid optimism, and it’s being driven by they young pieces on this roster.

Meanwhile, they still hold the first overall pick in the 2026 NFL draft if the season ended today. They are the only team in the league with only one win so far, but their strength of schedule is the very highest in the NFL too. This means that if they get a second win, they’ll fall all the way to the back of the line of two-win teams. It’s a blessing and a curse, in a sense. So with that in mind, here are the other games around the NFL this weekend you need to keep an eye on if you’re invested in the Titans getting the top pick:

Teams the Titans need to pull off upsets in Week 13

There are really two healthy ways of mentally approaching draft pick watch if you’re a fan of a dreadful team. Because as nice and clean as it is to just say “I hope they lose out!”, that’s completely missing the immense value of young cornerstone players learning to win. This is especially true when there’s a month-plus of football left to play. We aren’t talking about one or two more weeks yet, people!

One healthy approach is to just metaphorically close your eyes to the standings, live in the moment each week rooting for Titans progress, and then look up at the board when the dust has settled at the end of the year. Let the draft chips fall where they may, in a sense. This is a popular approach by those actually in the front office, experiencing this conflict of interest on a personal-professional level. The other healthy way, as far as I can tell, is to root for the Titans to win and for all of their bottom feeder opponents to win too. As long as the other crappy teams steal a couple wins down the stretch, there’s latitude for the Titans to win some as well. So here are the games to watch and the sides to root for, roughly in order of importance:

  • New Orleans Saints (+5.5) WIN at Miami Dolphins
  • New York Jets (+3) WIN vs. Atlanta Falcons
  • Las Vegas Raiders (+9.5) WIN at Los Angeles Chargers
  • Cleveland Browns (+5.5) WIN vs. San Francisco 49ers
  • Arizona Cardinals (+3.5) WIN at Tampa Bay Buccaneers
  • Washington Commanders (+6.5) WIN vs. Denver Broncos

The Saints, Jets, and Raiders are the two-win teams the Titans would fall behind should they be the only bottom-feeder to win this week. The Browns, Cardinals, and Commanders all have three wins. One more rooting interest I would recommend, though it has no draft implications for Tennessee, is the Houston Texans to win at the Indianapolis Colts. The Colts are uncomfortably tight with the Jaguars and Texans atop the AFC South right now with both of their matchups against those two divisional foes left on their schedule. In other words, the AFC South title is totally up for grabs down the stretch. And it would be objectively funny to see the Colts fade down the stretch and lose playoff positioning after pushing all their chips in so aggressively at the trade deadline to acquire CB Sauce Gardner, implicitly marrying QB Daniel Jones for the foreseeable future.

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