The Tennessee Titans have a huge battle this Sunday when they travel to Nevada to take on the Las Vegas Raiders. Both teams have one win through five weeks this season and the race to the bottom is on.
The Titans are coming off of an improbable 22-21 last-second win over the Arizona Cardinals last week and the team is excited about rookie quarterback Cam Ward.
“I told him that’s why we drafted you with the No. 1 overall pick,” Simmons said after the win. “His calmness, his poise in that pocket. I don’t know many rookie quarterbacks that could have that type of poise when the game came down to him and he knew it.”
Ward got off to a terrible start last week, going 5 of 16 passing for 58 yards in the first half. But, in the fourth quarter he amped it up when it mattered, hitting 13 of 18 for 193 yards.
“The end of the game are what quarterbacks kind of live on,” offensive coordinator Nick Holz said. “That was a pretty impressive performance. You really saw the ball come out, and he played really decisively. When you get one of those guys who can do that, you feel really good about it. You know you’re never out of it because you have a guy that can bring you back.”
Cam Ward had his welcome-to-the-NFL moment
Find a great quarterback in NFL history and they’ll tell you their first “moment” in the league when they really arrived. It’s an easy one for Ward, whose team started 0-4 this season. Ward stepped it up and got it done when it mattered, even if he was helped tremendously by Emari Demercado‘s 71-yard blunder.
“Be at your best when your best is required,” Callahan said. “That was a big moment for his development as a young player. Now, how do we play with that sort of efficiency and that sort of precision from the first quarter to the fourth quarter?
“I’m really happy for what he’s shown and grown with, and to see him in a big moment with the deck stacked against him and come through and play well at the end of the game was really encouraging.”
Cam Ward and the Titans still have a ton of things to fix
While it was great for the Titans to get a win, let’s not forget that this team is still an NFL bottom feeder. The amount of work that still needs to be done can’t even be measured.
“We still have a lot to prove to ourselves from an execution standpoint,” Ward said. “Not having interceptions, fumbles, negative plays, that’s the biggest thing. A lot of times throughout the season, we’ve always shot ourselves in the foot. We didn’t do that towards the end of the game, so we just got to build off that.”
Yep, all of that. His head coach agrees wholeheartedly.
“That’s not the way we want to live, nor is it sustainable,” Callahan said. “We got to find a way to play better earlier. That’s the key and having the same mentality about how we feel after a loss when you’re correcting the tape and making sure you’re correcting what needs to get corrected.”
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