Stats and Film Agree: Cam Ward's weapons need a major change in 2025, but so does the young QB

The most of any QB in at least a decade?! What happened here? And what does it tell us about where this offense needs to evolve in the future?

I've watched the tape and dug up some stats that tell the story of two big shifts we need to see in 2026 to avoid games like we saw in Week 17.

Cam Ward and his weapons both need to undergo change

When I see such an astronomically high TTT metric like this one from Ward, I immediately wonder about how well the QB was seeing the field vs. how open his options were downfield. That's something you have to watch the tape on to really get a good feel for, and when I did, I felt that the biggest complaint (and in many cases, assumption) from fans in this game wasn't really the biggest issue.

"Cam Ward's receivers weren't getting open!"

It's true that Week 17 was the Titans' second-worst game of the year when it comes to pure separation (per NFL Pro), this isn't a group that's actually got a simple separation problem. The Titans added team speed in this department last offseason to combat poor separation from years prior, and in terms of literal yards of distance between receivers and the nearest defender, they've improved. They rank 9th in the league. Sure, I saw less separation on tape than I've seen much of this season against the Saints. Guys weren't doing a great job of getting open against a pretty stout New Orleans secondary. But there are two other metrics that I think tell the real story on why Cam Ward doesn't really trust his weapons right now.

Take a look at the middle two columns in this chart. Catch Rate Over Expected and Yards After Catch Over Expected. Here are NGS's official definitions of these terms:

• Catch Rate Over Expected- Not all targets are equal. A receiver's catch rate is highly correlated with the difficulty of each target. CROE adjusts for this difficulty to provide a more contextual measure.
• Yards After Catch Over Expected- YACOE measures the difference between a receiver’s actual yards after catch and expected yards after catch, representing a receiver's ability to create explosive plays and maximize yardage on receptions.

In other words, we're looking at a player's ability to make a play on the ball, and then to make a play with the ball. And as you can see in the heat-mapped chart above, the Titans receiving corps is really bad at these things!

This is where Cam Ward's trust issues seem to comes from. It's not so much wanting these guys to get more open as it is trusting them to be in the right spot, reliably make a play on the ball, and reliably make a play with the ball. Of course he doesn't have unwavering trust in them yet, the numbers bear out that he shouldn't.

The first question he was asked after the game was about what was working early, and what went wrong late. "I think just playing on time, being good in the run game, being efficient in the pass game" Ward laid out as how they initially found a rhythm. But he continued with how it fell apart, saying "and at times, myself getting big-play happy with trying to push the ball down the field and then just me having to connect with the receivers."

So he acknowledged the connection issues with his receivers. But he also acknowledged his big play hunting, which is where his share of the blame pie comes in. Ward has always been a big game hunter, it's something Brian Callahan mentioned explicitly throughout the first couple months. He's wired to push the ball downfield. But as an NFL coach once told me of this situation, you have to be willing to take what's given to you underneath; especially when you don't necessarily trust your weapons.

This is something he must adjust, and that will come with time on task. It will be a big focus of his first real NFL offseason. His ability to scramble, buy time, create, and get the ball deep down the field from tenuous platforms is a lethal weapon, but he can't lean on that. He has to learn to eat the meat and potatoes on his plate, play in rhythm, and command the offense.

This story was originally published by A to Z Sports on Dec 30, 2025, where it first appeared in the NFL section. Add A to Z Sports as a Preferred Source by clicking here.