How much each win impacts the Titans' position in the 2025 NFL Draft

The Tennessee Titans' loss against the Washington Commanders guaranteed their third-straight losing season. With the slight hopes of a playoff berth extinguished, it's time to shift some attention towards the offseason.

If the season ended today, the Titans would have the No. 7 overall pick in the 2025 NFL Draft, but the season doesn't end today. With five games left, the Titans could be drafting anywhere from first to the late teens depending on how many of those games they win.

In a very top-heavy first round, pragmatic Titans fans are rooting for the team to pick as high as possible. However, logic disappears when the ball is kicked off and fandom kicks in, and that is ok. Every Titans fan should be pulling for this team to win games because that means that players that are already on the roster are playing well.

The tricky part is threading the needle between the desire to watch good, winning football and realizing that there are only a handful of blue-chip players in this year's class. Dane Brugler and Marcus Mosher (two popular draft analysts) had an interesting exchange a month ago that illustrates just how important it is to draft as high as possible this year.

The good news for the Titans is that Cam Ward and Shedeur Sanders will be forced up draft boards for teams desperate to take a swing on a quarterback. That should push more talented players down the board and toward the Titans since Will Levis has shown enough to earn the starting job in 2025.

Fans want to watch good football, but they might not want to jeopardize long-term success. Luckily, we have figured out exactly how many games the Titans need to win.

The Titans only have three wins and no one expects them to go undefeated for the rest of the season. Looking at the range of outcomes for teams that have won between 3-7 games since the NFL moved to a 17-game season in 2021. Here they are:

Teams with 3 wins pick between 1-4.
Teams with 4 wins pick between 2-5.
Teams with 5 wins pick between 5-6.
Teams with 6 wins pick between 6-7.
Teams with 7 wins pick between 8-13.

Those are the ranges of possibilities over those three years, but these are the picks that teams were most likely to get with those win totals:

Teams with 3 wins were most likely to pick 1st or 2nd.
Teams with 4 wins were most likely to pick 3rd or 4th.
Teams with 5 wins were most likely to pick 5th or 6th.
Teams with 6 wins were most likely to pick 7th.
Teams with 7 wins were most likely to pick 10th.

This year could certainly be an outlier, but there is a small but consistent sample size that suggests that as long as the Titans win three or fewer games over the next five weeks, they are going to pick somewhere in the first seven selections.

That would put them in position to still land a blue-chip player, and they could have their pick from a few if Sanders and Ward are over-drafted because of the positional value of quarterbacks.

Things aren't going great for the Titans right now, but the young talent on this team has been a bright spot. If this front office can recreate the draft success that landed J.C. Latham, T'Vondre Sweat, and Jarvis Brownlee, then things could start to trend in a positive direction quickly.