How Titans Can Still Have a Successful Season

After the Tennessee Titans 3-14 finish last season in the aftermath of a head coaching hire that is now known (if it wasn't then) to be a mistake, expectations for the navy, white and baby blue coming into the 2025-26 season were relatively ground-level, all things considered. Now, nine games into the campaign, perhaps ground-level was too high. Perhaps fans would've been better off digging a hole.

An Incidental Win

At 1-8, the Titans have struggled in essentially every conceivable category in the game of football. Their lone win, which came in week 5 over the Arizona Cardinals, was spurred by a defensive lapse from their opponent that essentially boiled down to outrageous luck. After Cam Ward threw an interception on a need-to-score drive, the pick was then fumbled back to Tennessee before a knee could hit the ground.

The Titans turned that into an incidental score and, in the end, came away with what is still their only victory. At this point, the only way that Tennessee can realistically come away from this season with a measure of success is if the team redefines success entirely. For a franchise with both feet in the grave at the moment, positives will have to be drawn from somewhere that isn't the win column.

A Tennessee Titans helmet rests on the field | Steve Roberts-Imagn Images

Redefining Success

The time for an ever-elusive above .500 season will come again in Nissan Stadium, especially if general manager Mike Borgonzi is to be believed when he described the team's current coaching search to expectant Titans media.

But for the time, with the playoffs entirely out of view and a trajectory firmly set on the same road that led the team to last season's abysmal aforementioned finish, Titans fans will have to find victories in things that the team can carry over into the next coaching regime; as frustrating as taking "moral victories" can be, an exception can be made when a team isn't winning any other way.

Take the Titans' offensive core of rookies as a defining example; while quarterback Cam Ward and receivers Chimere Dike and Elic Ayomanor have yet to translate their potential to consistent, tangible output, the flashes of connection that the group shows with one another presents a promising development for the team's scoring future.

To boot, on the other side of the ball, Tennessee's front office kept their promise in maintaining defensive tackle Jeffery Simmons through the trade deadline, ensuring that the team's defense keeps in tact its statistical champion moving forward.

It's not all bad for the Tennessee Titans, even if it feels that way. "You can't see the forest for the trees," right? Or does it go, "You can't see the future for the four straight losses?"

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