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OCT 31, 2022
The Titans have won
five straight, and I’m paying attention. Tennessee doesn’t have its quarterback, its left tackle,
or its No. 1 receiver from last year. Somehow, none of that mattered Sunday.
Rookie Malik Willis threw the ball 10 times. The Titans’ leading receiver had
26 yards. And, yet, somehow, Tennessee still
was able to grind out 314 yards on the ground, when Houston had to
know exactly what was coming.
“It
was a mindset,” center Ben Jones told me postgame. “We
knew what we needed to do up front, we got challenged earlier in the week, and
it takes all 11. No matter if it’s a quarterback, running back, tight ends,
receiver. We had receivers blocking downfield for a long touchdown for Derrick
[Henry]. So it wasn’t just us; it was all of us. We had a mindset, we knew it,
we wanted to control the rock on the road and our defense stopped the run. So
we had a mindset and a game plan and we executed.”
Now, it was the Texans, and the Titans won
by only seven.
Still,
and I’ve said this before, no one is more consistent in living up to their
identity anywhere in the league than the Titans. And it’s because, I think,
they so uniformly follow the lead of their best players, who happen to be their
toughest guys such as Jones and Henry, and the lead of their coach.
That last part, at least, was obvious in an
encounter Jones and Mike
Vrabel had after last week’s win over the Colts in which Vrabel
tearfully embraced Jones, telling him, “I’ve never seen anything like it,” in
reference to Jones’s toughness playing through injuries.
“We have a great relationship on and off
the field,” Jones said. “He is literally family to me. I talk to him every day,
in-season, off-season and he knows I was going through something that day. And
whatever it took, we knew we were going to win that game no matter what, and
the way it ended, in our hands, no matter how it was, no matter how we were
feeling as an offensive line, it was just our offensive line jelling right
there at the end.
“Five guys doing everything they could to
end the ballgame. And he was just proud of us and he knew we laid it all on the
line, no matter what. We kept getting up when we were hurting, and that’s how
much he loves us. That’s how much he cares about us.”
So was Jones hurting after this one, too?
“If I ain’t hurting,” he answered, “We
ain’t winning.”
And the Titans are winning.
