Titans first step in the right direction they won’t stand a chance vs Rams without fixing is easy diagnosis, hard fix in Week 2

The Tennessee Titans spent a massive chunk of their offseason focused on eliminating what they call S.I.N.s: Self Inflicted Negatives. The 2024 team was a weekly perpetrator of far too many avoidable mistakes, and the coaching staff rightly emphasized how important it would be the clean up their act if they wanted to be competitive in 2025.

Football is a complicated sport. But there are certain fundamental truths that are as simple as they could possibly be. A couple of those truths are penalties and turnovers. Winning the turnover battle is one of the easiest ways to win the game. It takes impressive and uncommon failings elsewhere to lose anyways, like the Titans did in Week 1. And self-inflicted penalties are simple: make more of them and lose, unless you’re the rare elite team capable of overcoming them (see: 2024 Ravens). The Titans are no elite unit right now, and their consistent penalties continue to kill them. After an entire offseason focused on stopping them, here’s how things started so wrong anyways.

Preseason Trend Down The Drain

The Titans finished this year’s preseason proud of the way they’d built momentum heading into the real games. I wrote all about head coach Brian Callahan’s statements on the matter linked here. They were hitting the cleanliness benchmarks they’d worked tirelessly in the offseason program to achieve.

In their Week 1 loss at Denver, though, all of that work felt like it was for naught. The Titans were flagged 13 times for 130 penalty yards, the most in a game since Derrick Henry broke his foot against the Colts in 2021. I cannot over-emphasize how hard it is to get 130 yards of penalties in a single game without a big chunk of it being a deep pass interference. It’s equal parts impressive and downright unacceptable.

Callahan’s initial reaction this week was disappointment, with a touch of bewilderment and steadfastness. “We’ve got to do a better job in that area” he said plainly. “Some of the things were disappointing, but some of the penalty stuff you’re at the mercy of who’s throwing flags, and what they see, and how they see it. And we’ve got to make sure we’re playing within the rules.”

One of the best players on the field in Week 1 was also responsible for a pair of costly penalties himself: Jeffery Simmons. He came out and owned his mistakes in no uncertain terms immediately after the loss:

“It’s the penalties, man… myself… dumb s*** that hurt the team. And the penalties I had could’ve been avoided. Cody (Barton) had him wrapped up… you know, it’s just dumb s***. There’s no excuses for that. I take full accountability for that. Even with all the freaking penalties we had, we still were in this game. We had a chance. But when you have 130 yards in penalties, you’ll never win a game like that, especially on the road.

What’s happening here? Can we quantify where the disconnect is between a heavy offseason focus and in-game results? Well, I can try.

How The Titans Finally Turn The Penalty Tide

Here’s one more quote for you, which does a good job outlining step one in the cleanup process. Here’s what TE Chig Okonkwo told me in the Denver locker room:

“It’s very frustrating because it feels like stuff we’ve been talking about all this time. And we wanted to come out and look differently from what we put out there. But we put out the same stuff that we’ve been putting out, so for us, we’ve just got to get back now, get back in there and watch the tape. And just make some real… everybody needs to really look themselves in the mirror this week because we’ve got to create a dub.”

The first thing to effect immediate change is for each player to look himself in the mirror and decide to double-down on the focus. The coaching staff can’t not commit penalties for them at the end of the day.

The rest is a mix of diagnoses, with fixes that are easier said than done. For one, the youth turnover on this roster is going to naturally lead to more penalties. Less experienced guys are more prone to screwing up, simple as that. Another cause in my opinion is the play-style of certain starters. I think a handful of brutal penalties from Jeff Simmons each year is in his nature at this point. He’s often the best player on the field, and also prone to doing something that hurts the team every once in a while. That’s who he’s been to this point in his career. The same sentiment goes for somebody like Jarvis Brownlee Jr. Here’s a whole article on his journey to clean up the penalties from this week.

The third thing I’ll point out is that as this team gets better players on the roster, I think the penalties will go down accordingly. That’s not a perfect science, as evidenced by good teams around the league who commit a lot of penalties too. But I think it’s fair to say that in general, bad players commit penalties at a higher clip. It only makes sense that you’d get caught cheating more often when you’re at a disadvantage most of the time. So, Titans: get better!

That’s all diagnosing, though. What’s the prescription? In a word, time. That’s as un-sexy an answer as I could possible provide, but I think it’s the truth. For starters, we have to measure penalties in terms of climate, not weather. One horrible game to start the season can’t define the cleanliness of this team. If they still stink in this department a month or two in, it will officially be a new level of DEFCON on penalty watch. The other reason time is required is because young players and bad players can’t stop being young bad bad overnight. It takes reps. It’s a common theme for this Titans season: measure in terms of trends, not black-and-white results. That’s just how rebuilding seasons work.