Titans positive preseason trend will be put to the full test vs Broncos to flip the script from Brian Callahan’s first season 

The Tennessee Titans have so, so much room for improvement in 2025. When you finish dead last with a 3-13 record the previous year, that’s no surprise. But some things will be easier to fix than others. Getting ahold of good football players to build up your roster takes time and good process. Hitting on quality QB play is expensive and has a low hit rate. Not everything about a climb up from the bottom of the scrap heap is simple.

But simply not shooting yourself in the foot? That’s pretty straightforward. And it’s a great place for this team to start, because simply playing cleaner football would go a long way towards being more competitive.

Callahan’s Focus On Erasing S.I.N.s

A lot of the Titans offseason program was focused on eliminating Self-Inflicted Negatives, or S.I.N.s as the Titans began calling them. These are the kinds of setbacks in football that you have control over: pre-snap penalties, drops, holding calls, exchange issues, fumbles, and sacks.

Other penalties, negative runs and passes, incomplete passes, no-gain runs, and interceptions are all things the Titans need to clean up as well, obviously. But starting with an emphasis on those S.I.N.s allowed them to control what was directly within their control first and foremost.

The Titans tracked these controllables all throughout their summer programs, finishing with seeing how their emphasis on discipline translated to preseason game settings. And Callahan shared this week that it’s been good news on that front.

Titans Trending In A Cleaner Direction

When we spoke with the Titans’ Head Coach on Monday, he said he’d be glad to share where he felt the progress on S.I.N.s is. “We're talking preseason,” he first qualified, “so it's certainly not predictive, not trying to jump ahead of anything and say that because we did this, we're going to continue that process. But it does give us some game analysis and quantitative data from actual football games. I think we were the least penalized offense in the preseason. I think we were in the top 10 least penalized defenses in the preseason.”

This is a small sample, and a seriously small one for the actual starters who will play on Sundays, but it’s a fantastic start for Tennessee. We’ll have to see if it translates for the long haul this fall, but playing so cleanly in the preseason is an encouraging step in the right direction. There was just one phase this August the coaching staff still wants to see get a lot better.

“Our biggest issue,” said Callahan “I think numbers-wise, was we had a little more on special teams than we would have liked, so we've got to get that improved. But I think we're one of the top 10 least penalized teams in the three preseason games. We had zero fumbles offensively. We held onto the football. We only threw four interceptions. So we protected the ball the way we want to, and we extracted it. We had two forced fumbles, so that put us, I think sixth in the league in the preseason. Had two interceptions, so we were I think about middle of the pack in the turnover and the extraction portion of ball security. So those things showed up. Didn't have a lot of pre-snap issues. So all the things that we emphasized, it felt like we got better over the course of the preseason games.”

In 2024, the Titans committed 132 penalties, tied for second in the NFL with the Ravens and behind the Jets. Over 50% of their offensive penalties were pre-snap. for Cam Ward’s sake in particular—as well as DC Dennard Wilson’s sanity trying to scheme up his defense—having a much improved S.I.N.s rate in 2025 will be a massive first step to competitiveness.