The Tennessee Titans begin Phase 3 of OTA’s this week, which means the most “football-y” portion of spring football is upon us. They’ll get a chance to compete offense vs. defense in 7-on-7 and 11-on-11 drills, executing the playbook they’ve been learning against one another for the first time this year.
Last week Head Coach Brian Callahan and a handful of vets on the team spoke with the media about how things have been going, and they outlined the unique nature of the Titans offseason program. The coaching staff spent immense time and effort in the winter designing this bespoke program, which to their knowledge, is the first of its kind. Even though the pads won’t come on for another couple months, everything everybody on this team is doing is already being tracked. And when I say tracked, I mean tracked meticulously.
Eliminating self-inflicted mistakes is at the heart of this system. And the means through which these coaches are emphasizing that is by tracking performance every day and competing with a points system. Each player has been broken up into 8 randomized teams, with a pair of prominent team leaders captaining and co-captaining the factions.
Whether it’s drops, touchdowns, how you hustled throughout practice, or how you performed in post-practice team games, everything is being graded off the tape and tallied for the whole building to see. Team scores are posted throughout St. Thomas Sports Park.
The aim is to set the tone now in order to establish a way of life by the fall, to develop leadership on the team, and to build camaraderie as a larger group than just by position or locker neighbors. The group of vets we spoke with last week had glowing things to say about the program, which is so much more than a series of Field Day games after practice to make things a little more fun. You can read more about that here.
One Titans vet we hadn’t heard from yet this offseason is star WR Calvin Ridley. He spoke with ESPN’s Turron Davenport at his youth football camp at Lipscomb Academy on Saturday, and had nothing but glowing things to say about the new program:
“Competing!” Is how he summed things up. “We're competing in everything we do at work right now. And I think it's great. I think it's so fun. I'm a captain on my team. I got my boys behind me. And we're, I'm telling them every day, I’m even messing up sometimes, but I tell them every day, man, we're trying to win! You know, we're trying to win, we're trying to win, we're trying to win.”
Fostering a team in the truest sense is one of the biggest aims of Callahan’s efforts here. The honest truth is that last year, the Titans were a group of too many new guys who weren’t as comfortable with one another as they feel they needed to be. And according to Ridley, this is working: “...it's only just making us closer, I swear. It's really working. Yes, that's right. We're competing in everything we do at work.”
