Tennessee Titans training camp: Several notable players continue to sit out

Maybe you’ve been paying attention to one of the lesser-mentioned nuggets as NFL training camps have rolled on. Maybe you haven’t, but if you’re a lover of Tennessee Titans football, this next statement will be one that you can agree with. Shorter practices, fewer padded practices, and less contact definitely hasn’t led to fewer injuries, not this season anyway.

The question is a simple one then. Why is that the case? Truthfully, you can see where the NFL was coming from when they put certain guidelines in place in an attempt to improve player safety and make sure as many stars made it to the regular season as possible.

Still, the Titans have had to juggle their roster quite a bit. It feels like tag team wrestling in the WWE. Every time a player or two tags in to take the practice field, others tag out. Harold Landry sat out of the 11th practice session as did Cameron Batson and Dane Cruikshank. Add their names to a list of notable Titans who were M.I.A. on the practice field.

Several notable Tennessee Titans continue to ride the pine at practice.

Sure, in a perfect world, we’d like to see everyone on the field at every practice. The facts are as follows though. That will probably never be the case on any NFL team during any training camp again.

As the curtain was drawn on another Tennessee Titans practice on August’s second Tuesday, a practice that doubled as Tennessee’s 11th of what’s been a very interesting training camp, several notable guys were riding the pine so to speak, or in the cases of Julio Jones, Nate Davis, Kendall Lamm, Geoff Swaim, and Denico Autry, riding stationary bikes.

For the uninitiated, Davis and Lamm are two guys who are expected to be starters if Lamm beats out Dillon Radunz for the starting right tackle job. At the time of this story being published, Radunz sits on the Titans’ first depth chart as a backup guard, but that can change as we move through training camp.

Most of these absences can be chalked up to ‘precautionary measures’, as is the case with Autry and as was the case with A.J. Brown. It’s hard not to pay a little more attention to Julio Jones’ absence and the absence of Geoff Swaim though. Julio is supposedly sitting out for precautionary measures as well, but it’s approaching two weeks since he’s practiced. Swaim, on the other hand, hasn’t practiced since July 29th.

It’s good to see guys like Caleb Farley and Bud Dupree on the field and earlier than expected. You have to absolutely love this Tennessee Titans medical staff, but the goal was to get those guys on the field with everybody. So far, we all have yet to see the entire Tennessee Titans football team on the same practice field at the same time.

That’s a sentiment that goes all the way back to mandatory minicamp. There’s no reason to panic, but everybody’s checking Twitter for injury updates every chance that they get. You can best believe this is a topic that we won’t stop discussing.