When the Tennessee Titans swapped second- and third-round picks with the Arizona Cardinals during the 2023 NFL Draft, moving up eight spots in the second round and sending a 2024 third-rounder to Arizona, they did so to draft QB Will Levis. He had just seen himself slide from a possible top-10 pick to a second-day selection. Still, Tennessee believed they had landed a steal.
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And at first, Levis showed a lot of promise. He threw four TDs in his first start. But in his second year, the comedy of errors that was his 2024 campaign proved too much for even head coach and QB guru Brian Callahan to tolerate. The Titans finished with the worst record in football, and they were set on taking the best quarterback available in the draft. That turned out to be Miami’s Cam Ward.
That selection was set in stone for weeks ahead of the draft, and now that Ward is in town, Callahan has already started thinking back to the last time he worked with a rookie first overall pick: Joe Burrow. Callahan was Burrow’s offensive coordinator, and he has talked about using similar tactics in his approach with Ward as he did with the Cincinnati Bengals QB.
“I went back and watched all of those [rookie Zoom meetings] just to see where [Burrow] was in that process. It was good for me to see that because you don’t remember it sometimes,” said Callahan.
“The amount of work that it took to get where he was. A lot of that’s a credit to Joe, but there was definitely things we did developmentally, both in how we taught the scheme, how we introduced it, what we asked of him, and how we structured game plans that first year. Those are the things I’ve been revisiting,” Callahan continued.
That leaves Levis in an awkward spot. He still has two years on his deal, a four-year, $9.5 million contract. That means the Titans would seem to have a decision to make with him. However, with the way Callahan is talking about tailoring the playbook to Ward’s strengths, which are not the same as Levis’, it seems that decision has already been made.
Clearly, as one Redditor pointed out, “They just don’t care about Will Levis anymore. Lol“. Thanks, Captain Obvious!
Another user astutely attempted to predict Levis’ future NFL prospects: “He’s probably headed for the backup journeyman path.” Other fans, meanwhile, were more critical of Callahan’s strategy of bringing in college concepts to the Titans offense that are familiar to Ward.
One said, “If the formula is 2 variations of 4 verts, Y-cross, and the most basic RPO concept imaginable I think the rest of the league is safe from the “nightmare,” with another chiming in with, “we will be seeing a lot of great passes from ward in garbage time that will seem like chris paul hits a 3 down by 42 seem like nothing.”
The Chris Paul reference is objectively hilarious if you know the video it’s referencing, and the Titans are likely to be playing a lot of garbage-time football with a rookie at the helm in 2025. However, we disagree that those garbage-time passes will be as useless as that hilarious Paul three.
Ward will be building his confidence and comfort in an NFL setting, even in blowouts. Those experiences will also build his mental toughness. Just take a look at Callahan’s last project: Burrow. Giving the QB something more familiar to work on during the transition clearly paid off, even as Burrow went 2-7-1 in his rookie year. He took the Bengals to the Super Bowl the very next season.
We’re not saying Ward is on Burrow’s level, but Burrow himself has often praised Callahan for the role the coach played in his development. It’s not crazy to think Callahan can do something similar with the 2025 No. 1 overall pick that he accomplished with the 2020 No. 1 overall pick.
