Titans entire defense could hinge on the one player we haven't seen, haven't heard, and have the most questions about in 2025

We’ve already done a ton of talking about a Tennessee Titans player this offseason that we’ve seen absolutely nothing from yet: CB L’Jarius Sneed. And that talk is going to continue whether he’s back practicing yet or not, because the fate of the Titans defense might rest significantly on his shoulders.

The more I think about and watch this team, the more I see Sneed as a linchpin for the entire unit. He’s still rehabbing his chronic injury, a knee, and the acute injury that took him out a month into the 2024 season, a quad. He’s also working through an ongoing legal issue involving an alleged shooting attempt at the end of 2024. He wasn’t involved in on-field work for the Titans at all this spring, but he was around the facility rehabbing and meeting with the team.

Every time we speak with his coaches, they emphasize how impressive he is when he’s in the building. Here’s what Head Coach Brian Callahan had to say about him before heading into summer break:

“I think everything that he's shown us when he's here has been fantastic and there's a track record of success as well from what he has been as a player, but he's also got to prove that here too. He hasn't done that yet for us. There's a little bit of that as well. We're waiting for him to show us the player that he's been. He hasn't reached that level of play for us and so we're waiting for that opportunity to occur, and I think he'll be ready for it when it comes. His track record of success and what he's been as a player is pretty well documented. We just hope we need to get that version of him out here for us.”

Dangerous Defensive Dominoes

Watching the defense in practice gets a lot easier and more productive once the pads come on in August. But from what we’ve been able to see so far from this unit, OTA’s and mandatory minicamp didn’t exactly inspire additional confidence for me in the shakier position groups.

I think the Titans are set up like a house of cards at CB, LB, and EDGE. Now, they were set up this way last year too, and they came out of the gates looking good! It all fell apart midway through the campaign, though, and I’ve talked a lot about how I think you can trace that directly back to losing two key players in Weeks 8 and 9. LB Ernest Jones was traded to the Seahawks, and then S Quandre Diggs suffered a season-ending injury. Those two were holding the spine of the defense together as DC Dennard Wilson’s “fixers”. They were the linchpins of that group, and the drop-off to their backups was far too steep to sustain success.

When going through the depressing exercise of trying to forecast triage and depth talent this year, everything points me back to Sneed. The Titans’ trio of starting CB's is a really solid group on paper. Sneed, Jarvis Brownlee Jr., and Roger McCreary could be one of the best units in the game when healthy and playing their brand of football. But each has questions, and the depth behind them is scary and unproven.

Will Sneed be healthy this year? And if he is, will he get back to playing like one of the best corners in the NFL? Because that’s what the Titans are paying him to be, and those are two very big questions right now.

If he’s unable to go at any point, I think it slides everybody into a position that will put them in a poor position to shine. Sometimes one shift up the wrung for everybody in a room suddenly makes fantastic 3rd or 4th stringers into bad 2nd stringers, by no fault of their own. And as much as I like Brownlee, I don’t see him as a CB1 yet at all. That prospect scares me. And McCreary having to play on the outside (or somebody behind him in the order) certainly doesn’t get the best out of that player, as we’ve seen demonstrated in the past.

And the Titans CB group stumbling could send the rest of the defense into a funk pretty quickly. This isn’t a team that was able to effectively rush the passer in 2024, and they don’t stand to take a big leap in that department in 2025. The only way a team like that wins is by being sound on the back end. If your coverage is poor, you’re cooked.

It all feels like a roster built to fall apart with just one or two key losses. Tennessee may either need surprisingly good fortune in terms of health this year, or for some depth players to really take a step forward in order for them to make defense a strength again.