Titans most disappointing struggle vs Broncos fits a recent quote from a national champion college football coach

Coming into 2025, a lot of people’s hopes for the Tennessee Titans were tied to the remodeled offensive line. Rookie QB Cam Ward was and is the headline, of course, but even the best rookie signal callers need help. The Titans stable of weapons has a lot of questions and youth, and I’d argue nothing buoy’s a young QBs chances more than good OL play.

The Titans have invested a ton of resources into renovating that unit. The seventh and eleventh overall pick in recent drafts have gone towards it, as well as a $50,000,000 and $82,000,000 contract in recent free agencies. I wrote over the summer about how past Titans trauma shouldn’t discourage fans from boldly proclaiming reasonably high expectations for this groups improvement in 2025.

Then in Week 1, they allowed the most sacks in the entire league. What happened?

Final Exam On The First Day Of Class

On the opening weekend of the college football season, LSU beat Clemson and it led to some notable postgame quotes. Clemson Head Coach Dabo Swinney made waves in the news by comparing the game to taking the final exam on the first day of class. “They made a 65, we made a 58. Neither one of us were great” he said. Now, that became big news because LSU head coach Brian Kelly shot back that week and disagreed with Swinney’s assessment of his football team.

If you asked Sean Payton about his Broncos in this one against the Titans, though, there’s no way he’d take issue with that assessment. These two teams both disappointed, particularly on offense.

Cam Ward was absolutely a bright spot, mind you, but it was despite the rest of the things going on around him. This is where we get to the group that was most disappointing on the stat sheet to me: the offensive line. This was supposed to be one of the best units on an otherwise shaky team. And in Week 1, they allowed a league-leading six sacks of Cam Ward in his debut.

Now, Ward himself was credited with taking two of those sacks. And his only truly youthful (derogatory) moments in this game came on the backwards-spinning attempts to evade collapsing defensive linemen. The pressure came in a hurry, which is a mark against the offensive line. But those back-to-back failures to evade defenders that led to loss of yardage all the way out of field goal range are the kinds of lesson we see just about every rookie QB learn the hard way: you used to be more athletic than these guys in college. You could ballerina-spin your way out of most jams. In the NFL, these cats are different. Some of them are even faster than you. You can’t do that.

The other four sacks fell at the feet of the protection. Tony Pollard let up a sack with a failed assignment in pass pro. RT JC Latham was credited with one sack and one pressure allowed before he left the game with a hip injury. And backup tackle Oli Udoh was credited with one sack and one pressure as well. The final sack was graded as a coverage sack.

The rest of the offensive line isn’t off the hook, though. RG Kevin Zeitler and C Lloyd Cushenberry allowed two pressures each, and LT Dan Moore was graded as allowing four. LG Peter Skoronski was the only lineman who avoided specific blame on the stat sheet.

This level of protection isn’t going to fly in 2025. It will get Cam hurt if they aren’t careful, and it will certainly stunt his development. He has to be given time to work back there, and that was the promise of this group when it was constructed. They have 16 more games to get it together. However, there is an important bit of perspective working in their favor.

The Broncos Defense Caveat

All of that being said, there’s a whole lot of season left. A brutal start for this unit isn’t enough to change my expectation of what they can become, not yet. And it’s important to remember what we expected this to look like heading into the game: a potential Broncos bloodbath, led by perhaps the best defense in the NFL.

Here’s the Week 1 chart for offenses across the league. You’ll notice the Titans in an embarrassing league of their own.

Let’s not take anything away from the Titans offense being dysfunctional, which it unambiguously was. But I’d bet big money that two months from now, this Broncos defense has an impressive collection of charts similar to this one. I thought coming into this season that they’d put a lot of teams in hell, from Mahomes and Herbert all the way down to the lowly Titans. We’ll see if that comes to fruition, and if it changes our perspective on this Week 1 disappointment. But at the end of the day, I think it’s fair to point out how this was supposed to be a mismatch and a brutal spot for the Titans offense, and that’s what it proved to be. Now they have to show improvement.