Tennessee Titans: Week 5 Winners and Losers

Oct 7, 2012; Minneapolis, MN, USA; Tennessee Titans wide receiver Kendall Wright (13) catches a pass against the Minnesota Vikings in the fourth quarter at the Metrodome. The Vikings win 30-7. Mandatory Credit: Bruce Kluckhohn-US PRESSWIRE

Disclaimer:  The Winners and Losers section for Week 5 will be brief.  I simply have no desire to write any more of these if the Tennessee Titans continue to play so poorly.  As bad as the team has been in other games this season, this loss to the Vikings was the most painful one for me to watch.  The Vikings are not a great team.  They are a good team, much better than most people expected them to be, but they are not as good as teams like Houston or New England.  Yet, they manhandled and dismantled the Titans in an effortless manner.  When the Titans lose like this, it is difficult to write these articles because there just aren’t many Winners from week to week.

Disclaimer 2:  I thought long and hard about adding a sub-heading to the title of this article, to fully capture the utter incompetence of the 2012 Tennessee Titans.  Here are some of the possibilities I came up with:

1. This just in: The Tennessee Titans are really, really bad.
2. This just in: The Tennessee Titans are the worst. Not just the worst team in the NFL. They are the worst of anything in the world.
3. This just in: The Tennessee Titans lose games in every way imaginable or possible.
4. This just in: The Tennessee Titans hurt my soul.

In the end, I decided to not go with any sub-heading for this article, perhaps because it’s not in me right now to kick this team while they are so clearly down. But man are they down!

I won’t belabor the point any more. Here is the abbreviated Winners and Losers’ list for Week 5:

Winners: Kendall Wright, Jordan Babineaux, and Jared Cook.
For different reasons, these three players deserve to be congratulated for their play against the Vikings. They all played hard and consistent. They didn’t do anything groundbreaking or game changing, but they did what is expected of them and right now, that is enough to be labeled a Winner on this team.

Losers: This list could be very long but I will go with the two people that I feel are most responsible for the craptastic play we are witnessing every week: Chris Palmer and Jerry Gray.
I honestly can’t tell what they are trying to do out there. Neither side of the ball has an identity – unless you consider “dumpster fire” an identity. The team is sloppy, confused, disorganized, and woefully ineffective. And that falls on the coaches because this team has too much talent to be all those things at once. It’a a thing of terrible beauty that any team could be so bad at so many different things all at the same time…it’s kind of miraculous, to be honest.

So what is the take-away from all of this? This team is awful, but the season is only a little over the 1st quarter mark. They have time to fix this but can they? Will they? Should they?

Can they? Yes, they can fix this. This team won 9 games last season and improved in most areas in the off-season – at least they improved on paper. This team should be better than what we have seen so far, and I believe it will be better in the next 11 games.

Will they? Once again, I believe they will fix things. I know I am a blind optimist when it comes to my teams, but I have also been very good at predicting how well they will do before the season starts. Back in 2008, I felt pretty confident the team was good enough to end between 11 and 13 wins – they won 13. Last season, I thought they would end between 8 and 10 wins – they won 9. This season I was pretty sure they would end between 8 and 10 wins again – so far they aren’t even close. My point it, this team can and should be better than they are right now. And even though the team has given me no real reason to believe they are going to turn things around, I am pretty confident they will.

Should they? This is all me – don’t hold Titan Sized responsible for these comments. If you call yourself a fan of the Tennessee Titans and you are actively rooting for them to lose games so they can get a high draft pick in 2013, you are weak, spineless, and worthless as a fan. Do yourself and everyone else a favor and find another team to root against.

So, there you have it. My hope and prayer is that after the game tonight against the Steelers, I will be able to gush about all the players that deserve to be on the Winners’ list. Scratch that. Allow me to rephrase: After the game tonight when the Titans finally figure things out and handily dispatch the Steelers, I will gush about all the players that made it on the Winner’s list.

This just in: This Tennessee Titans’ fan hasn’t given up hope.

Who’s with me?