NASHVILLE, Tenn. – My biggest takeaways from what Brian Callahan had to say Monday after pondering the Titans' loss to the Packers a day earlier.
NFP and the offensive line: Nicholas Petit-Frere got pulled after he set outside and quickly got beat inside by Kingsley Enagbare, who crushed Will Levis for a strip sack in the third quarter.
Jaelyn Duncan was not good in relief.
The plan now is to see what happens in a long week of practices.
“Let those guys play it out,” Callahan said. “I think that really at the core of the game, Nick played well enough, but his three real bad plays were real bad plays. And that's sort of what the issue is. It's the consistency and we'll see, I'm not going to make any commentary on that until we get through week of practice and see where everybody's at.”
“But after that sack fumble, it was just we needed to make a change in the moment in the game. And I'm not going to say that it's a permanent one or anything like that, but yeah, we just needed something different at that point.”
Said NPF: “It’s just not good enough and I’m disappointed in myself.”
Callahan sounded pretty content with JC Latham, Peter Skoronski and Lloyd Cushenberry overall. So the team’s issues are with Dillon Radunz and Petit-Frere, second- and third-round picks, respectively, made by John Robinson.
Bill Callahan is one of the NFL’s best offensive line coaches but has not been able to raise their games so far.
What are meetings like between head-coach son and position-coach father?
“Just like (with) every other offensive line coach in the league, I mean we evaluate what went wrong and why and where, what do we have to do to fix it, what do we have to do schematically to help it?” Brian Callahan said.
“Those are all things that are normal course of conversation amongst our entire offensive staff, but it's certainly between him and I and that's what our job is and we've got to find a way to get it better.”
Here is one encouraging thing I will buy.
“I knew when the minute the schedule came out, I looked at the teams we had to play and I knew the fronts that we were going to face and it was going to be a challenge for us,” Callahan said. “We played three fronts that I think are as good as any in football and not played as well as I was hoping we would play and we got to find a way to play better.”
Over-graded: Treylon Burks played 26 snaps, was targeted three times, dropped a ball and caught one for nine yards.
He feels incredibly unthreatening, and I’m totally comfortable asking for more Nick Westbrook-Ikhine. NWI isn’t a deep guy, but he’s a very reliable short and intermediate receiver who will do the right things and produce and the Titans need more of that, and he can fight for a few yards after the catch better than Tyler Boyd can at this stage of his career.
NWI has not been targeted yet.
Tyke Tolbert said last week that Burks was doing everything right and was one of the team’s highest graded players at the position.
That took me back to many previous regimes for a franchise that has always struggled at receiver. They would consistently praise receivers for doing receiver work that excluded the all-important catching of the football.
“There’s a lot of things that go into that, there’s the blocking component, there's the route component,” Callahan said. “…He does his assignments but he hasn’t made any plays on the ball yet and that’s their job. As far as doing his job and what’s asked of him on every play, yeah that’s part of it, he’s done that well.
“But when the ball has come to him we haven’t made enough plays. That’s the offense as a while, that’s not just Treylon. We haven’t made enough plays on offense to score more than 17 points.”
Who are we convincing here? Tyler Boyd was the offensive player who took the podium Monday.
His most notable quote:
“We have a legit team. This is a Super Bowl-caliber team on paper.”
What’s the psychology there? Who is he trying to convince? The media he was talking to? The fans who will hear and read it? His teammates. Himself?
I believe the team is better on paper than it’s been on grass, for sure.
And I’m all for a guy being candid.
But I’m not sure what the benefit of that sales pitch is. Because the Titans are an 0-3 team with a slew of problems that is far, far away from being Super Bowl caliber now. And putting that out there doesn’t serve any of those audiences well. Media and fans want realism. And while the locker room may need reassurance, it doesn’t need it on that grandiose level.