Tennessee Titans 2026: The Coverage Report — 167 Graded Takes, Six of Them About the 53

Across all 32 clubs, the Tennessee Titans have 457 logged takes and 167 of them graded. That is 29th of 32 by raw take volume and 27th of 32 by graded takes. The league's median club sits at roughly 222 graded takes; Buffalo, the most-covered team, has 527 — more than three times Tennessee's total.

Is that gap deserved? The club's results argue both ways. Tennessee went 3-14 in 2025 and 3-14 in 2024, and has not made the playoffs since a 12-5 season in 2021. Bad teams draw less attention, and that is a defensible allocation of pundit time. But the same team held the No. 1 overall pick in the 2025 draft and picked fourth and 31st in the first round of 2026 — the kind of assets that normally generate volume. What the file shows is that the attention came in draft season and mostly left afterward.

The clearest illustration is season win totals. For 2025, exactly three tracked pundits put a number on Tennessee: Colin Cowherd at 7, Danny Parkins at 6, and Brady Quinn at 5. The Titans won 3. Most clubs in that same table carry five to thirteen calls. Three forecasts, all high by two to four wins, is not a sample you can draw conclusions from — it is a measure of how little our sources committed to this team.

The cutdown: six graded calls, no surprises

The news hook for this series is the 53-man cutdown, and here the Tennessee file is thin enough that it needs saying plainly: we have 15 roster-spot takes on the Titans, and only 6 of them are graded. All six scored 100.

Five of the six come from a single article. Dharya Sharma, previewing the preseason opener on August 12, named five receivers as roster locks — Carnell Tate, Wan'Dale Robinson, Calvin Ridley, Elic Ayomanor and Chimere Dike. All five made the 53. Four of those calls scored a skill delta of 0, because the naive baseline ("he was on somebody's 53 last season, so he makes one again") already had them there. The exception is Tate, the No. 4 overall pick in 2026: no prior 53, so the baseline was 0 and the call is worth a skill delta of +200. The sixth graded call is Josh Edwards writing that "Last year's No. 1 overall selection, Cam Ward, is safe" — correct, and also skill 0 against the same baseline.

So: no graded surprises in either direction. Nobody in our file called a lock who got cut, and nobody called a cut who stuck, because the calls that would have produced those results have not been graded yet.

The one that matters is Will Levis. Four separate tracked takes had him as a cut candidate:

• Michael Middlehurst-Schwartz had Levis at the top of his cut list: "Levis has been reduced to a clear No. 3 option. With development a priority throughout the roster, carrying three quarterbacks seems like a" — the quote runs out there in our evidence field.
• Sharma expected Tennessee to release him at final cuts, with Mitchell Trubisky holding the backup job.
• Carter Bahns, in a CBS Sports list of 20 veterans at risk, wrote that three years after Tennessee made him the first player off the board on Day 2 of the 2023 draft, "he could be out the door."
• Lane Mills, who does not have a pundit page here, called him "the biggest name to watch as a cut candidate."

All four are ungraded as of September 7, as are calls on Bryce Oliver, Xavier Restrepo, Trubisky, and Nathan Jahnke's note that "K.J. Osborn has a shot to make the roster as Tennessee's sixth receiver." When those land, this section will have an actual verdict. Right now it does not.

What the graded record actually is: a draft file

Strip the Titans record down and it is a mock-draft archive. Of 167 graded takes, 99 — 59 percent — are mock draft picks, at 80.3 average accuracy and +36.9 average skill.

That accuracy is real but easy. Seventy-six of the 99 graded mock rows score as hits, and a large share of them are variations on the same call: Cam Ward first overall to Tennessee in 2025, from Tom Pelissero, Dane Brugler, Kyle Crabbs, Cowherd, Quinn, Daniel Jeremiah and roughly a dozen others, all at 100. The harder version was 2026, where the consensus in our file had edge Rueben Bain at No. 4 (he went 15, scoring 62.09) and only a few got Carnell Tate: Andy Furman on February 8 (100, skill +45), Bucky Brooks on February 5, and Derek Brown on February 20.

One data caveat worth stating: at least eight of those 99 graded rows are filed under "Tennessee Titans" but are actually about University of Tennessee prospects being drafted by other clubs — Jermod McCoy, Joshua Josephs, Chris Brazzell, Colton Hood. Read the type-level averages with that in mind.

The rest of the graded file:

The sleeper column is the ugly one, and it is one player. Three separate pundits — Tom Strachan, Ryan Wormeli and Derek Brown, who called it "easy, free volume and upside" — sold Calvin Ridley in 2025. He had to beat WR25 and finished WR112. Each scored 0 with a −200 skill delta. Two more had Ayomanor (finished WR53, needed WR36), three had Tony Pollard (RB23, needed RB22). The lone sleeper hit in the file is Marcus Mosher on Will Levis in 2024, and he won by QB30 over QB32.

The award column is Cam Ward. Kyle Brandt picked him for Offensive Rookie of the Year three times, including in November when he stood by the pick. Tetairoa McMillan won it.

Who has earned a Titans record

With a floor of five graded takes on this team, eight names qualify. Only two clear ten, which is the point at which we would start comparing people:

Sharma at 100 percent on five takes and Brooks at 96.6 on five are the kind of lines this site exists to not oversell — five graded calls, most of them scored against a baseline that already agreed with them. Jeremiah and Crabbs have the only samples here worth a sentence, and both got there almost entirely through mock drafts.

That is the Tennessee file: heavily weighted to the two weeks a year our sources cared about the draft order, thin everywhere else, and — on the cutdown that just happened — still waiting on the grades that would make it interesting. See the scoring methodology for how each of these baselines is set.