Titans get major surprise gift to boost NFL Draft order and trade ammunition in the 2026 draft

The Titans got one last draft gift in Week 18.

Easton Freeze — Tennessee Titans Beat Writer
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The Tennessee Titans are picking fourth overall in the 2025 NFL Draft.

That’s where they’ve landed now that the dust is settled. It’s the position they came into Week 18 in, and after a handful of results pushed them up and down the list, it’s where they landed back at the end of the day.

But one seemingly innocuous late afternoon result made a sneaky big difference in where the Titans will be drafting throughout the process later this April.

Titans’ draft order finalized with one final upgrade

Step one on Sunday for the Titans to not fall down the draft order was to lose in Jacksonville. And after Cam Ward “won” 7-0, he got hurt, and backup Brandon Allen lost 41-0. It was one of the least entertaining football games I have ever watched.

Then they got a gift from the Giants, who hilariously beat the Cowboys. Did you know the Giants have just eight wins in their past 38 games, and half of those eight wins came in meaningless Week 17 and 18 games to tank their draft stock? What an awesome, deeply unserious franchise.

Anyways, that win bumped the Titans up to the third slot. But Tennessee also needed a majority of a handful of games to break in their favor to keep their Strength of Schedule (SOS) worse than the Cardinals. They did not get enough of them to move them up in the order, so the Cardinals and Giants swapped positions on either side of the Titans.

And since the Jets and Cardinals lost handily in the late window, the fourth spot is where the Titans are stuck.

But here’s the gift they got in that late window: The Raiders won! No, it didn’t impact where the Titans pick in the first round. The Raiders had actually already locked up the first overall pick by the time their game got started, but the win does impact where the Titans pick in each round after the first.

If you remember last year when the Titans had the first overall pick but didn’t pick first in the subsequent rounds, you may be picking up on what I’m talking about. When teams have the same record at the top of the draft, the tiebreaker is SOS. But to mitigate the unfairness of having the same number of wins and losses, teams of like records rotate in each round.

Since the Raiders, Jets, Cardinals, and Titans all finished 3-14, their SOS dictated that they would pick in that order in the first round: LV, NYJ, ARI, TEN.

But then in Round 2, everybody moves up a spot, and the first pick moves to the back. It will go NYJ, ARI, TEN, LV. It rotates like that in each round. So, the Titans will have the fourth pick of Round 1, the third pick of Round 2, the second pick of Round 3, and the first pick of Round 4.

This isn’t nothing! It’s the difference between pick 35 and pick 36 at the top of the second, where premium prospects can still be found. It’s the difference between 66 and 68, and the difference between 101 (the first pick of Day 3) and 104. And since the Titans own all of their natural picks in each round but the seventh, they’ll reap the benefit of this rotation in all but the final frame.

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