Titans critics distracted by summer camp vibes and missing the real work that's being done to fix last year's catastrophe

But whether you love or hate the summer camp vibes the Titans have going on right now, I think we're missing the forest for the trees. What's the primary point of all of this? Brian Callahan told us in that presser. It just kind of got lost in the shuffle.

"Focusing a lot more on the things that win and lose you football games at the end of the day" he said immediately after talking about the games and points. "The penalties, the negative plays, the turnovers, those are the things that we're focused heavily on and trying to make sure we do a better job executing those things in the moment. There's a lot more to it, I could talk about it, probably take up the whole press conference probably. But definitely changed a little bit of the philosophy and formula and hopefully that pays off for us."

This answer was followed up by a question about how much progress you can make on combating things like penalties and negative plays at this point in the calendar. "You just emphasize it like crazy" he said. "We spent a lot of meeting time wise where we went wrong last year. We did the self scout portion of it, the technique of things. But it's just the emphasis of it making guys aware. At some point I can take you guys through—now probably isn't the perfect time for it, but just how we've set up the off-season program. I think guys are really bought into it... So to your point, Paul (Kuharsky), about how do you teach it? Well, if you jump off sides in a group drill, those are negative points for your team. And so it's emphasized every day. We look at it. We talk about it. It's on our players' forefront of their minds every time we step in the building. So those are the things we have to get better at for sure on top of the scheme, but I'm excited about what we've done and how we've done it and we'll see if it pays off.

The main point isn't the arbitrary points, or the team competitions, or the camaraderie. Those things are all good, and do matter. And the hope is that those things have many positive side effects on the unity and strength of this team. But the real point of all of this is to fix what made the Titans so impossibly bad last year.

It's one thing to be a bad football team, which the Titans certainly were, and another thing entirely to be bad in such an extraordinary way. Plenty of bad teams win 5, 6, and 7 games each year. That's the nature of the league, the margins of victory are very narrow and there's always a healthy dose of luck that leads to a handful of plays determining massive outcomes. To win 3 games and have the first overall pick, you have to be extraordinarily bad. It's not just that you have a weak offense and a porous defense; you also suffer from inexplicable penalty issues, high turnover rates, aborted snaps, critical mental errors, negative plays, and general poor effort.

Those details of the game are the things that get you beat in the NFL. Those are the things that got the Titans routinely beat in 2024. And that's what they're attempting to address right now, in May, in a creative and aggressive way. In a lot of spring programs, these kinds of mistakes might be brushed off, or result in getting chewed out by your coach in drills. There's a general understanding of "that better not happen in the fall!" The Titans are trying to do more than bank on that being cleaned up by the time real games roll around. Because while those mistakes may not mean something in May, they mean everything in September.

So the games and the points and the teams aren't meant to make everybody have a little extra fun in spring practice: they're designed to make critical errors mean something to each and every player on the team. Suddenly, those mistakes you make in spring ball aren't something you just shake off: they actively hurt you, and they hurt your team. Just like they will when the bullets start flying in the fall.