As a Tennessee Titans fan, there are three guarantees in life: death, taxes, and your favorite football team being disrespected throughout the offseason.
Even when the Titans were undoubtedly a bona fide Super Bowl contender (2020-2021), people within the national media would constantly talk about them as if they were barely the second-best team in their own division.
Needless to say, after the way Tennessee’s injury-riddled 2022 season came to a close, skeptics have now chosen to use that as an excuse to completely write the Titans off in 2023.
The latest example of the blatant disrespect surrounding the Titans came from an article written by Dalton Miller of Pro Football Network (PFN).
Miller ranked the four teams in the AFC South, and he predicts the Titans will finish dead-last in the division.
Here is exactly what the PFN analyst had to say about his decision to project Tennessee as the worst team in the AFC South.
The Titans have surprised in each season over the past three. First by overachieving in 2020 and 2021, then by falling apart in 2022.
It seems unlikely that a team built and bred to run the football and survive in the passing game by being incredibly efficient in the play-action game can find success with what they’re fielding on the offensive line.
It may very well be the worst projected Week 1 unit we’ve seen over the past decade. The only redeeming quality is first-round pick Peter Skoronski, but an OL is only as good as its weakest link(s).
If Tennessee is going to win football games, it’ll come by playing solid defense. They have the talent to do it, but they’ve struggled to keep that side of the ball healthy over the past two seasons. But between Kristian Fulton, Amani Hooker, Kevin Byard, Sean Murphy-Bunting, Roger McCreary, and Elijah Molden, the Titans have more than enough talent on the back end to survive the onslaught of QB play in the AFC.
They just don’t seem to have the offense to keep up. But if things go poorly enough, we could catch a glimpse of Will Levis in the back half of the season.
There’s no denying that the Titans have question marks along the offensive line, but to completely discredit the entire team is absurd.
Especially when the team is coming off a season where it started 7-3 with a horrendous offensive line that fielded arguably one of the worst left tackles in NFL history.
The best part about all of these ridiculous predictions is the realization that we are finally approaching the point where the Titans can finally do the talking for themselves.
If the offensive line can just be good enough, and the team can limit the injury bug this time around, this Titans team is going to be a much bigger problem than people are giving it credit for.
You can call that a biased opinion all you want, but if history under Mike Vrabel has shown us anything, the previous statement is probably closer to a fact than it is to an opinion.
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