The Tennessee Titans' best player, Jeffery Simmons, was blunt about the team's latest depressing loss, a 20-10 shellacking at the hands of the Las Vegas Raiders, which came on the heels of their first victory last week.
"Today was bad football," Simmons said on Sunday, via The Tennessean. "We didn’t play good today at all."
The Titans had unforced errors on offense, with rookie Cam Ward turning it over three times, and the defense couldn’t come up with pivotal stops.
The dismal performance on the road wasn’t a surprise to Simmons, who said poor practices foreshadowed the loss.
"In this league, you have to learn how to be able to stack wins and carry that momentum over," he said. "It started at practice. Just being honest, this was probably one of our worst weeks of practice. We came out flat Thursday. Sometimes things carry over."
Added Simmons: "When you get in this league, you have to prove it every week and re-prove it. You’ve got to go out there and keep proving yourself that you can win in this league. We didn’t do that in all three phases."
Simmons' brutally honest quote doesn’t reflect well on an already embattled second-year coach, Brian Callahan, whose comment that he “felt good coming into the game” contradicts the player’s assessment of the practice concerns.
Ward particularly struggled, making ill-advised plays and flat-out dropping the pigskin on the final possession. The rookie quarterback didn’t blame questionable play-calling for the poor showing from the offense.
"We have to try new things, and if we’re going to stay the course, we need to make the course work," Ward said. "It’s really just both the players and coaching staff continuing to either call out a play and execute the play, or at the end of the day, we have to do our job as a whole. At the end of the day, the coaches, they can only do so much. We as players have to do our jobs."
Ward has shown the leadership to call a spade a spade. "We’re not an efficient offense," he said after Sunday's loss, taking ownership of some of those issues himself.
The No. 1 overall pick has flashed a big arm and the talent to be a difference maker. However, one good quarter out of the past eight isn’t enough to stack wins.
The roster remains wanting, and injuries haven’t helped, but the weekly disappointments speak to a larger problem. It’s simply not a fundamentally sound operation. The looming question in Tennessee (1-5) is whether Callahan and his staff are the right group to nurture Ward’s growth into 2026.