Tennessee Titans PSA: Don’t believe vague rumors from national media

Tennessee Titans fans should start hitting the mute button.

Look, I am as big of a fan of conspiracy theories as anyone else, but the idea that Ryan Tannehill may start for the Tennessee Titans over a healthy Marcus Mariota is even a little bit much for me.

Whether it is people from ESPN, NFL.com or wherever, you have to remember that unless they are specifically assigned to the Titans most or all of these people only have passing knowledge of players on the roster.

That mostly comes from the combination of being a small market team and also being a team with no real fantasy football stars. That pushes them down the power rankings both figuratively and literally.

The tweets I am going to post below should be taken with the smallest grain of salt. Not because I think the people tweeting them are bad reporters/analysts, but because I think they have gotten some information from the wrong people and are backed into a corner defending themselves.

Now. I had a tweet here, but Benjamin Allbright has deleted it. So verbatim his response said:

"“Tell your coaches and font office to stop calling me about it.”"

Which was a response to Captain Algebra saying that he was completely off base about there being any QB controversy in Tennessee.

I have no doubt that agents are driving a lot of this conversation, but the buy in from the national media proves something. You can really say anything with no repercussions.

For example, if I tweeted right now:

"BREAKING NEWS: All 32 NFL teams have called me and sources inside those organizations have told me that if the starting quarterback doesn’t do well enough there is a strong push for the backup to start in his place."

Could you definitively prove me wrong? Mike Vrabel has said time and time again that Marcus Mariota is the starter and that Ryan Tannehill was brought in to be the backup, so obviously it doesn’t matter what the coach says.

Even if you found coach to go on record, I could just say that my source wants to remain anonymous and then insinuate that maybe it was someone else on the staff or even that coach himself.

This is all rumor and speculation, so it is basically the Wild West but deleting tweets is always a bad look and usually means that maybe there isn’t as much to a rumor as you thought because there is nothing that people with inside info like to do more than RT a controversial tweet that they were right about.