The Tennessee Titans are playing about as well as anyone could have expected them to. They are 1-5 and only won the one game because the Arizona Cardinals decided that they didn’t want it and gift wrapped it to them.
Oh, and did I mention they fired head coach Brian Callahan this week after a throttling to the Las Vegas Raiders? Indeed they did, and they hired Mike McCoy as the interim head coach and he’s supposed to right this ship and get quarterback Cam Ward to play at an MVP level or something.
Whatever McCoy is expected to do, he’ll have to do it without wide receiver Calvin Ridley for the time being. He’s been ruled out for this week’s game against the New England Patriots with a hamstring injury.
The good news for the Titans is that they were probably going to lose anyway.
What do the Tennessee Titans have behind Calvin Ridley?
It’s not so much that the Titans won’t have Ridley in Sunday’s game, it’s what they have behind him. Which is to say absolutely nothing.
After ESPN’s Adam Schefter declared that Ridley had been ruled out for the Patriots’ game, his colleague Field Yates was kind enough to list the remaining depth chart at wide receiver.
“Titans WR depth chart without Ridley: Elic Ayomanor, Van Jefferson, Tyler Lockett,” Yates posted on X.
Free-agent acquisition Tyler Lockett has eight catches for 52 yards and no touchdowns. While he wasn’t expected to be Randy Moss in 2007, that’s woefully inadequate for a veteran through six games. With eight catches and 99 yards during the same time frame, wide receiver Van Jefferson has been equally helpful to the offense.
Sure, Ridley has been an abject disappointment for a team that really needs him to be better than he is, but his loss will still be felt.
Sports Illustrated’s Jordon Lawrenz breaks down the sad reality.
“In fact, even with his disappointing season, Ridley makes up for over 26% of this team’s receiving yards,” Lawrenz writes. “His 290 lead the way, even though he’s only hauled in 16 of 35 targets. Ayomanor’s 34 targets are good for second while Okonkwo is third at 30. Other than those three, no one has more than 19 targets.”
Can McCoy help the Tennessee Titans with Cam Ward?
McCoy’s number-one job is absolutely to figure out how to turn Ward into the player they drafted with the No. 1-overall pick in this year’s NFL draft. Ward hasn’t been bad per se when you figure that he’s had minimal help at all levels, but he needs to be better.
He knows his role, he’ll work with McCoy and he knows he’ll have to do it without wide receiver help (whether he has Ridley or not).
“My job is to play quarterback, and my job is to help lead this team to wins,” Ward said. “I am going to support whatever decision we make (as an organization), and the guys in the locker room are going to support it.
“At the end of the day, with coach or without coach, we are trying to win football games and that is the same message coach Mike (McCoy) is preaching. We just have to live by it and stay true to it.”
Ayomanor is Ward’s best bet and it doesn’t say much when he has to count on a fellow rookie.
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