Titans’ former touchdown leader has to regret leaving Tennessee and signing somewhere it’s going horribly for him

The Tennessee Titans’ wide receiver situation has been a bit of a wasteland since trading A.J. Brown to the Eagles, which seems like forever ago at this point.

We’ve seen aging veterans pass through with inconsistent success. And the youth movement taking place with Chimere Dike and Elic Ayomanor is a work in progress, naturally. They’ve lacked much of anything resembling stability for their quarterbacks, who have themselves been unstable in recent years. Deficiency begets deficiency in this department, at least to some extent.

But up until this year, the Titans had one constant in their WR room who broke out in a surprising way in 2024. His name was Nick Westbrook-Ikhine, and he finished the year tied for ninth in the NFL with nine TD receptions. Down the back half of the season, he was good for a score seemingly every week.

Then, the otherwise disastrous campaign came to an end, and he skipped town as a free agent. Checking back in on him today reveals a less-than-ideal start to his time in a new system, which may come to an unceremonious end soon.

Nick Westbrook-Ikhine probably regrets signing with the Dolphins

The Titans were interested in bringing NWI back this past offseason, but their offer was meager. He’d just played the 2024 season on a small one-year deal and was surely looking to parlay his career-best season into some more financial security. He ended up signing with the Miami Dolphins on a two-year, $5.9 million contract, but my understanding is that the Titans offered him a deal very similar to it. It sounds like he left at least in large part because he wanted to be somewhere else.

On one hand, it’s hard to blame him. The Titans were and still are a dumpster fire. And he was born in Florida. So he got out of dodge and went somewhere more familiar, which makes sense.

But when you consider what was best for his career, I find it hard to justify leaving Tennessee, where he had an established role and wasn’t being pushed out by a deeply crowded WR room anytime soon, for this Miami offense. His skillset doesn’t really lend itself to a timing-based, vertical passing attack like the Dolphins employ. And through the month of November, the reviews down south aren’t exactly glowing.

I reached out to A to Z Sports Miami Dolphins writer Kyle Crabbs for his detailed perspective on the NWI tenure so far. Here’s his two cents:

“To call Nick Westbrook-Ikhine’s tenure in Miami a disaster would be an understatement. In Sunday’s win against the Saints, Westbrook-Ikhine failed to line up on the line of scrimmage, producing an illegal formation penalty, and then, in the final moments, jumped out of the way of an onside kick that was eventually recovered by the Saints. New Orleans trailed by four at the time before Miami’s defense thankfully turned the Saints over on downs in the final minute.