The unpopular truth about the Titans handling of the L'Jarius Sneed injury

Sneed heading to IR is the result of horrible luck, not Titans mismanagement.

Easton Freeze — Tennessee Titans Beat Writer
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Tennessee Titans head coach Brian Callahan announced on Friday that star CB L'Jarius Sneed would be put on IR this weekend. Plenty of fans are frustrated by the situation, and wondering if the Titans botched their management of his injury.

They did not. This is an instance of terrible injury luck, not incompetence. In order to explain why, let's first get the timeline straight.

Recapping Sneed's Injury Timeline

After five game played to begin the season, Sneed left the Week 6 Colts matchup with a bruised quad. It was a result of taking a helmet to the leg, and it occurred at some point in the game and lent to a pretty brutal finish from Sneed in the loss. He's been rehabbing and M.I.A. since then, missing practice and games for the past 5 weeks.

During these 5 weeks on the mend, many Titans fans wondered aloud why Tennessee didn't put him on IR. If he was hurt enough to miss more than 4 games, that's what you usually do, right? The team updated the media on his condition a couple weeks ago when he had gotten an MRI which revealed more about the nature of his compound bruise/sprain, which complicated his injury. Still, he remained on the active roster as he tried to work through it.

Last Wednesday, Sneed spoke to reporters in the locker room about his health situation. When asked about what work he was able to do, L'Jarius merely said he'd been in the film room. He made no reference to any kind of physical work he'd done in his recovery.

Then this Friday, Callahan said this about why Sneed would no be headed to IR:

"We thought he had a quad bruise. A pretty significant quad bruise, but it didn't get better very fast. Turns out after some scans on it, he had a pretty significant quad strain on top of it," said Callahan. "Those things generally are a couple of weeks. We felt like we had a chance to get him back. He has not progressed. It's been complicated. More complicated than a normal strain would be, so the rest is the best thing for him at this point."

Poor Luck, Not Poor Management

There are plenty of reasons to be frustrated with the 2024 Titans. The misfortune of Sneed's injury luck itself is, while the fault of nobody in particular, extremely frustrating! But being mad at the Titans for "botching" how they handled Sneed and when they chose to send him to IR is not one of the things you should be mad about.

The function of the "Injured Reserve" designation is to make space on your active roster to have healthy players available to you without having to get rid of good players who are hurt. You aren't required to move somebody who will be out for a month or more to IR. You don't receive bonus points for putting a player on IR. Players do not, in fact, heal faster when they're on IR. All it does for you is allow you to keep the hurt guy, but fill his spot on the active roster temporarily with somebody who is available to contribute in the meantime.

Teams get up to 53 players on their active roster during the season, but you can't make them all active for gameday. Shortly before kickoff, each team announces a list of "inactives", which is the list of guys on the active roster who won't be available to play in that game. During an actual game, you get 47 active players unless you'd like to make 8 offensive linemen active, in which case you can keep a 48th suited up.

This means that unless you have more than 6 or 7 hurt players on your active roster, you aren't actually missing out on a gameday roster spot for any healthy player by failing to move somebody like Sneed to IR.

The Titans simply don't have anybody at that depth on the roster who they've missed out on having available for a game the past five weeks. Put another way, Sneed taking up an active spot on the roster the past five weeks hasn't prohibited a healthy contributor from helping this team.

Him not being on IR has done nothing to the Titans. It didn't matter, not once.

So why move him now? Two reasons. The first is that the medical team has clearly decided that since the bruise isn't healing well, he's certain to need at least one more month of total rest. Until this latest announcement, a big part of why Sneed wasn't put on IR was that there was hope he could return soon.

The second reason is that the injuries are finally starting to pile up for the Titans, and due to their record, they're at a point where churning the bottom of the roster and getting more depth guys into the mix is what's needed for them.

So Sneed will miss at least 9 weeks in total, if not longer. It's a failure of a debut season for the latest highly-paid Titan. It's not his fault, that's just the reality. But the idea that the Titans botched their handling of his recovery is foolish.

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