The Athletic predicts where the Tennessee Titans will pick in the 2024 NFL Draft
By Will Lomas
By now every Tennessee Titans fan has bookmarked Tankathon and most are keeping tabs on where the team would pick if the season ended today.
However, when you look at the Tennessee Titans schedule you can see that they have a much tougher road left than most of the other teams that are picking ahead of them. Almost every one of them has a team or two that they could beat, while the Tennessee Titans have to face the Miami Dolphins, Jacksonville Jaguars, Seattle Seahawks, and Houston Texans twice.
So while the Tennessee Titans would pick 8th if the season ended today, it probably isn't a fair estimate of what is most likely to happen.
Enter The Athletic and Austin Mock's projections.
The Athletic has started doing weekly projections for what the 2024 NFL Draft order will look like based on what the final win totals for each team should be, not based on what would happen if the season ended today. To do that, they use projections made by Austin Mock.
They describe Mock's projections like this,
""Mock projects the score for every game and the final winning percentage for every team using his NFL betting model. The model phases out older data and uses data from this year as the season progresses. The simulation then runs 100,000 times after each day of games to give us, in this case, our projected top-10 draft order, plus each team’s projected win total and playoff chances.""
- Austin Mock and Chris Burke
Where will the Tennessee Titans pick?
According to their current projections, the Tennessee Titans will pick 6th in the 2024 NFL Draft with a projected win total of 5.6.
As far as I am concerned, 5 wins is a very generous estimate right now. Considering their remaining opponents, I wouldn't be surprised if the Titans finished the season with a 4-13 record.
If the rest of the projection holds and the Titans do end up with a 4-win season, that would move them up to the 4th overall selection.
In either case, the top of the Tennessee Titans draft board should be clear to them right now. Assuming the two quarterbacks go first and second like everyone has predicted for a year now, the rest of the Titans' top-five should be Marvin Harrison Jr. (WR, OSU), Joe Alt (OT, Notre Dame), and Ola Fashanu (OT, Penn State).
Aside from those three blue-chippers, other players in that area could help the Tennessee Titans with the sixth pick. We know that positional value doesn't matter to Mike Vrabel/Ran Carthon, so they could spend that pick on Brock Bowers (TE, Georgia). If they are determined to fill a need, guys like Keon Coleman (WR, Florida State), Malik Nabers (WR, LSU), Rome Odunze (WR, Washington), and J.C. Latham (OT, Alabama) were all top-13 players on Dane Brugler's big board.
It would be nice to focus on games that matter during the final month of the season, but the Tennessee Titans spent an entire offseason trying to patch holes and failed across the board. We will see whether it is Mike Vrabel or someone else that has a chance to rebuild this team this offseason, but the one thing we know right now is, that that person will have $100 million in cap space and a very high draft pick to get them started.