Music City Miracles
The Tennessee Titans need more than Cam Ward to get their rebuild going. Here are three Secret Superstars who have the ability to elevate a franchise that had lost its way.
In addition to detailing my picks for the NFL’s Secret Superstars heading into the 2025 season with this “Hidden Gems” series, I try to summarize where each team is in the article intros.
When getting into where the Tennessee Titans have been over the last few seasons, it was hard not to think of the recent writeup I did on the Jacksonville Jaguars, another AFC South team with a recent near-berth in a Super Bowl, whose fortunes were then upended by hubris and bad decisions. It was 2017 for the Jags and 2019 for the Titans, who came up short to the Kansas City Chiefs in a 35-24 loss on Jan. 19, 2020.
Since then, there have been a lot of whiffs: trading A.J. Brown and hoping that Treylon Burks would be an equivalent solution. Failing to prepare for Ryan Tannehill’s descent. The whole Will Levis/Malik Willis thing. Deciding that Derrick Henry was past his prime.
No Urban Meyer-level disasters there, but not the way you want a franchise to go.
By the end of the 2023 season, even Mike Vrabel’s 54-45 regular-season record wasn’t enough to satisfy those in charge, which gave way to new head coach Brian Callahan in 2024. The former Bengals offensive coordinator has learned a lot about football over the years, and quarterbacks in particular, which he has proven in recent time with Tennessee radio host Burk Reising, and Greg Cosell of NFL Films and ESPN’s NFL Matchup.
With the first overall pick in the 2025 draft, Callahan got the quarterback who can take all that knowledge to the field in Miami’s Cam Ward. Most know of Ward as the hyper-athletic guy with an impressive ability to make plays outside of structure, but don’t sleep on the fact that Ward was the NCAA’s best passer from the pocket last season — when he brought up that attribute at the 2025 scouting combine, he wasn’t fooling around.
So, that’s the start of the rebuild that Callahan and new general manager Mike Borgonzi need to undertake, and there’s enough talent elsewhere to at least make the 2025 Titans a spirited alternative to the 3-14 oof-show we saw in 2024.
If that’s to happen, it’ll require the efforts of everyone on the roster. So, here are three Secret Superstars for these Titans — one underrated veteran, one underrated free-agent signing, and one underrated draft pick.
I had Hooker in mind for this space already, based on his outstanding sixth NFL season. But when Quandre Diggs — a Twitter buddy of mine from his days in Seattle — expressed outrage over Hooker’s exclusion from ESPN’s recent list of the NFL’s top safeties based on thoughts from coaches and executives, that was the tie-breaker.
Diggs knows quite a bit more about safety play...
