The first overall selection in the 2025 NFL Draft is the silver lining of a season where the Tennessee Titans lost 14 games. After all hopes for the postseason were dashed, the fan-base is now seeing why having the top pick can be a game-changer for a franchise.
Mike Borgonzi, Chad Brinker, and the Titans' newly assembled front office now have every option available to them. That isn't just a theory. NFL insider Ian Rapoport went on the air on Friday morning and confirmed that based on what he has heard at the Senior Bowl this week.
The Browns and the Giants are both “likely” to take a quarterback in the NFL draft, per @RapSheet 👀
— B/R Gridiron (@brgridiron) January 31, 2025
(via @RapSheet) pic.twitter.com/922DoigS1h
In that clip, Rapoport says that the Titans, Cleveland Browns, and New York Giants are all in the market for quarterbacks, and there are also three or four more teams "in and around the top 10 who need a quarterback," leading to a lot of speculation on where quarterbacks are going to land in the draft.
Rapoport then mentions the Titans specifically saying, "No one knows right now what the Titans are going to do at one. Are they going to take a quarterback? Are they going to take a positional player? Are they going to trade? How this all shakes out will be one of the more fascinating top of the drafts that we have seen."
Rapoport goes on to confirm that so far, GMs see this quarterback class possessing two guys (Shedeur Sanders and Cam Ward) at the top, and then there is a gap with the next group of quarterbacks consisting of Jaxson Dart, Quinn Ewers, and Jalen Milroe.
Parsing through all of that, it certainly sounds like the Titans are interested in trading down with one of the quarterback-needy teams that sit right below them. In that clip, Rapoport also goes into detail about how the Giants' brass have been very vocal about how much they like Sanders while also spending time researching Ward in Miami.
All it takes is for one of these teams to fall in love with a quarterback. If so, they almost have to trade up with the Titans because they can't be sure that another team won't leapfrog them and take their guy on draft day. If the general consensus is correct about this quarterback class, then there should be little debate that the best decision the Titans could make is to sign a veteran quarterback, trade down, and then come away with the best player in the draft while accumulating more capital.
Things continue to line up perfectly for the Titans and if they are willing to focus on improving the team instead of repeating the Jake Locker mistake they made over a decade ago.