The Tennessee Titans capped off five padded practices in six days with a Sunday to forget. The final practice of their long weekend was quite bad, particularly for the offense.
Now, the practice itself was designed to be brutal for the offense. I wrote about what I learned on that front right here, if you’re interested. What was actually most off-putting to me about the day wasn’t the outcomes, but rather the responses. This was a day of sloppiness and responding poorly to adversity. And that starts at the top with QB Cam Ward, who for the first time in Tennessee, played “young” in my opinion.
I tweeted this Sunday evening, and got three replies that I’ve decided to frame this piece around. The first of which was this:
Well, I wasn’t originally going to expand on this in writing. But just for you, BizarroPK, I’ve changed my mind. You’re right, we should talk about this. So allow me to explain what I saw, and what I think it can mean.
Cam Ward Finally Stumbles
Cam is a rookie. He’s going to have rookie moments. That’s not really what I’m talking about here. But as Bronxite points out in our second comment, it’s important to maintain that perspective with him this year regardless.
No, what I’m talking about is getting tilted. Letting your frustration get to you and starting to press is what I saw from Ward for the first time Sunday. The moment it become apparent was during the long “bring it or bluff it” period. This was something like twelve consecutive plays of Todd Bowles-esque zero blitz looks on third and long, designed to put the offensive in maximum conflict.
It went poorly out of the gate for Ward, as you’d expect it to. This is football on hard mode, far harder than any drive you’d face in a real game. The fact that it was rough wasn’t the concerning part. The concerning part came when Cam got flustered. He started doing things that are uncharacteristic for him. If you asked his coaches, I think they would agree with this assessment. He started pressing, and at one point couldn’t seem to hit the broad side of a barn.
Now, this is both a disappointment in the moment as well as a credit to Ward overall. Because the fact that I hadn’t seen him knocked off his mark mentally like this once since becoming a Titan is pretty impressive. In fact, I spent much of the past couple months remarking on shows and in writing how I was waiting for him to finally be rattled like this. Well, Sunday was the first time I saw it. So now the question becomes, how does he respond?
Treating Ward Differently Than Will Levis
The Titans didn’t operate like this early last camp. This hit me as I was thinking back on the week on my couch Sunday night, seeing our third and final comment pop up on my screen:
I thought back to the early days of camp with Levis and company, and the relentless grind of this year’s camp for the offense really doesn’t compare. They’re absolutely going harder on the Ward offense. There are two main reasons for this, in my estimation.
First, the coaching staff would tell you they’re approaching this camp with a fundamentally different mindset than last year. The term “excuse-making” is a bit strong, but in hindsight, 2024’s camp had a little too much hand waiving going on. “Oh, it’s his first time doing this. It’s their first time together. It’s our first time coaching. It’s only July, it’s only early August. We’ve got time.”
That’s a sentiment the coaching staff wants completely erased from the team’s vocabulary. They’re preparing for war, now. Today. Urgency creates energy. So they’ve focused in on the hard stuff early in camp. They’re setting a tone that they hope acts as a batting donut for Cam and the offense, making September feel more natural when that time comes. They’re trying to break things now, while they have the time to fix them. A commentor (whose name I wish I could remember) on the A to Z Sports Morning Show put it perfectly Monday morning: “they’re trying to identify Week 8 problems before Week 1.”
The other reason—as far as I can figure—is that this coaching staff is leaning on Cam because they can. They haven’t giving anybody any more than they can handle, not this year and not last year… and Cam is a coach’s dream when it comes to being able to ride someone hard in practice.
Will these approaches pan out? We’ll have to see. At the very least, they’re going about things differently with intentionality. Nobody is banging their head into a wall over and over on this team. But this weekend feels like something we may look back on from this camp as a real moment. How Cam, the offense, and really the entire team responds this week as they have their first joint practice and preseason game in Tampa will be telling. Let’s see how it goes…
