Isaiah Wilson played four snaps in the NFL. Three on offense, one on special teams, and then he was gone, traded to Miami and cut inside of two weeks, out of the league before most people ever learned he was in it. The Titans took him 29th overall in 2020, a first-round tackle, and while the team that drafted him went on a playoff run, Wilson was down in Miami posting videos from a pool. Anywhere else you could build a thirty-for-thirty around a bust that complete. In Tennessee, it barely cleared the local news, because in Tennessee that’s just a Tuesday…
Recognize this guy? Probably not. Titans fans do. It's Treylon Burks. He's the WR they drafted with the pick they got for trading away A.J. Brown. After you saw Mike Vrabel, who looked like he needed a drink right then and there. They shipped out a top-five wideout, slid back to 18, and took Burks to replace him. Three years later, the ledger reads 53 catches, 699 yards, and exactly one touchdown, most of it swallowed by injuries, before the team quietly passed on his fifth-year option. Brown, meanwhile, stacked 1,400-yard seasons in Philadelphia and won a Super Bowl. There is no debate about who won the trade.
Here’s the thing, mostly because nobody bothers to think about the Titans at all. They are not the worst franchise in football. The Browns have them lapped on pure misery, the Jets on comedy, the Lions spent sixty years as a national punchline before they finally figured it out. What the Titans are is something worse, and if you sit with it long enough, much sadder. They are the team nobody thinks about. The Browns fan is a folk hero at least, and the Jets fan is a comedy bit in the Big Apple. The Titans fan is a ghost.
One Yard Short
It was all right there once. In January of 2000 the Titans won a playoff game on a lateral off a kickoff, the Music City Miracle, Kevin Dyson running 75 yards as the clock hit zero. Three weeks later they were in the Super Bowl, driving to tie it in the final seconds, and Dyson caught a slant and got tackled at the one-yard line as time expired. The same man who scored the miracle came up a yard short of a championship, which turns out to be the most honest thing this franchise has ever done. That was twenty-six years ago. They have not been back.
The Nashville Quarterback Graveyard
Every doomed franchise is doomed at quarterback, and the Titans have been burying them in the same plot for two decades now. Steve McNair was the one real answer they ever had, a co-MVP who got them to that Super Bowl, and we’ll leave him be. Everything after him has been the same movie on a loop:
- Vince Young (No. 3 overall, 2006). Offensive Rookie of the Year, then benched, then a punchline, then out of the league by 28.
- Jake Locker (No. 8 overall, 2011). Walked away at 26 because he just didn’t love it that much, and unfortunately wasn't that good.
- Marcus Mariota (No. 2 overall, 2015). Did establish some credibility with the team, but ultimately has bounce around the league as a backup.
- Will Levis (No. 33 overall, 2023). Comedic turnover machine, benched inside two seasons, and frankly surprised it took that long.
- Cam Ward (No. 1 overall, 2025). The newest lottery ticket. We'll see. His rookie year certainly left a lot to be desired though the circumstances were terrible.
Five premium swings since McNair, basically zero hits. Every year, same speech about a fresh start, same feeling in your stomach that you’ve seen this one before.
The Ones They Let Walk
It’s not that they never had talent. That’s the part that turns what you could say is bad luck into malpractice. They kept finding real players and handing them to other teams, usually right as they got good:
- Jevon Kearse, the Freak, one of the scariest pass rushers of his era, walked to Philadelphia in his prime.
- Albert Haynesworth, the wrecking ball who anchored the two best defenses this franchise ever built, gone to Washington for a record deal in 2009. The defense went out the door with him.
- Chris Johnson ran for 2,000 yards and got cut to save a few dollars.
- A.J. Brown, one of the four or five best receivers alive, certainly at the time, was traded on draft night in 2022. He was catching touchdowns in a Super Bowl for the Eagles about five minutes later.
- Derrick Henry, perhaps the best back of his generation, let leave for Baltimore in 2024, where he promptly had one of the best years of his life.
In exchange for all of it, the Titans got a shrug and a backup lineman. And that's just a handful. I fell to my knees as if we had won the Super Bowl just knowing Jeffery Simmons made it through the trade deadline and is still on the team.
First-Round Regret
And when they weren’t giving good players away, they were spending high picks on players who never were:
- Isaiah Wilson (OT, No. 29, 2020). a grand total of four, yes 4 career snaps.
- Corey Davis (WR, No. 5, 2017). Definitely never a real No. 1, maybe could have been a No. 2 if weren't drafted by the Titans and then walked to the Jets for nothing.
- Dorial Green-Beckham (WR, No. 40, 2015). One season, 32 catches, flipped to Philadelphia for a backup offensive lineman.
Defenses That Deserved Better
I want to be fair, because at times the defense was genuinely, seriously good. It was one of the most disappointing things about the team. Watching them have jog back on the field after the offense just went 3-and-out for the 6th time:
- 2000: No. 2 in scoring, 11.9 points a game allowed. A championship number.
- 2008: No. 2 again, 14.6 a game, 13-3, a legitimately elite unit.
- 2018: No. 3 in scoring defense.
- 2007 and 2011: No. 8.
The problem was the offensive side of the ball. Across these years, the Titans offense gave the ball away 675 times, threw 47 pick-sixes, and personally gift-wrapped the opposition 67 touchdowns the defense never got a snap to prevent. You’d watch the defense claw out a 3-and-out and then watch the offense fumble it right back, and there was the whole franchise in a single possession.
How They Lose the Big One
Maybe the worst feature of the Titans is that they lose the games that matter with expert reliability. Not just the playoffs when they make it, though they lose those too- an 8-10 postseason record since 1999 and exactly one conference championship game to show for a quarter-century. It’s the hinge games, the win-this-and-you-run-everything games:
- 2008, Week 12. Sitting 10-0, the best team in football, they got run off their own field by Brett Favre and the Jets, 34-13, and were never the same.
- 2017, Thursday night at Pittsburgh. 6-3 with the division right there, on a national stage. Mariota hit a 75-yard touchdown on the very first snap of the second half to cut it to 16-14, all the momentum in the world, and then Pittsburgh scored 24 of the next 27. Final: 40-17.
- 2022. 7-3 and coasting toward January, they lost their final seven straight, the last a winner-take-the-division game they coughed up to, of all people, the Jacksonville Jaguars.
- 2008 and 2021. Two No. 1 seeds, two weeks of rest, and both times they walked out of the bye and lost the first game they played. In the 2021 version Ryan Tannehill threw a pick on his opening pass of both halves and a third one, tipped, with 20 seconds left, handing Cincinnati a 19-16 walk-off.
Home field, a bye, the top seed in the AFC, and nothing. At some point the consistency stops being a coincidence.
The Coaching Carousel
There’s no throughline because there’s never been one. Since the last stable era ended, the chair has just kept spinning:
- Jeff Fisher (1994-2010). The last real stability. Gone after 2010, and quickly out of the NFL altogether.
- Mike Munchak (2011-2013). 22-26, fired.
- Ken Whisenhunt (2014-2015). 3-20, fired in the middle of it.
- Mike Mularkey (2015-2017). One playoff run, then a mutual parting.
- Mike Vrabel (2018-2023). Got them a No. 1 seed and got fired anyway.
- Brian Callahan (2024-2025). 4-19, plug pulled about a season and a half in, and well deserved.
Six coaches since 2010, a couple of them perfectly good, not one leaving on anything you’d call a high note. We'll see how the story ends for Robert Saleh.
By the Numbers
- 0 championships in 26 Tennessee seasons. 1 Super Bowl trip, a quarter-century ago.
- 10 playoff berths, 8-10 postseason record, 1 conference title game.
- 2 No. 1 seeds, 0 wins.
- 3 last-place finishes since 1999, tied 3rd-most in the NFL (only Cleveland has more)
- 3 top-8 draft picks spent on quarterbacks from 2006 to 2015. Zero franchise QBs, and they ran it back at No. 1 overall in 2025.
- 3 straight seasons falling down: 7-10, 6-11, 3-14 (2022-2024), from playoff team to the worst record in football.
The Emptiness
The Browns’ suffering means something, it’s a whole inherited identity, a curse passed down. The Jets being a punchline is at least a kind of fame. The Lions waited sixty years, and the entire country stood up when they finally broke through (no Super Bowl either, but they are hovering around). The Titans just… exist. They go 9-7 and miss the playoffs when they aren't 3-14, or they go 12-5 and lose the first playoff game, and either way the sun comes up Monday, and nobody outside the state of Tennessee remembers it happened. They aren’t the worst team in football. They’re the emptiest one.