One Titans preseason game was enough to sound alarms about Cam Ward and Carnell Tate

This is a time for boundless optimism around the NFL — a time to believe that your rookies will all hit, your young players will take a leap and those glowing training camp reports will carry over to the regular season. And few teams seemed to have more reason for optimism entering 2026 than the Tennessee Titans, with a brand new coaching staff and a top-10 pick at receiver in Carnell Tate set to help unlock second-year passer Cam Ward.

Unfortunately, those good vibes lasted … less than one quarter of preseason action. It’s still far too soon to render any firm judgments, but the way Tennessee’s young duo debuted on Thursday night against the San Francisco 49ers made clear that this is anything but a sure thing.

Cam Ward still making rookie mistakes as he enters year two with Titans

Ward completed just 5-of-12 passes for 57 yards in his preseason debut, and somehow the actual performance was substantially worse than those numbers suggest. The headliner, which you may already have seen passed around social media, was a first-quarter fumble that was all of Ward’s rookie foibles rolled into one — from holding onto the ball too long to trying to write checks that his legs simply can’t cash.

Obviously that’s not a great sign for your young signal-caller’s decision-making as he enters his second year in the league. But that wasn’t even the most worrying part of Ward’s night. What should actually have Titans fans hovering over the panic button is just how scattershot Ward’s accuracy remains, and just how many layups he clanked due to a combination of poor ball placement and slow processing.

Ward’s ceiling is not in question; even amid a horribly dysfunctional environment last season, he showed flashes of the player he could become, one with plus arm strength and excellent anticipation when he’s working in rhythm. What he needed to improve upon was the down-to-down stuff, which is exactly why Robert Saleh tapped Brian Daboll — who oversaw much of the same development with Josh Allen in Buffalo — to be his offensive coordinator.

Say what you will about Daboll, but he’s got a proven track record of putting his young passers in positions to succeed, of making their lives easier. He did it for Allen, and he did it for Daniel Jones and Jaxson Dart in New York. He’ll try to do much the same for Ward, but it’s not going to take if Ward is unable to convert the easy throws Daboll schemes up for him. These are the sorts of mistakes that he simply cannot make if he wants to grow into being an above-average starter in the NFL.

Again, it’s still mid-August, and this was just one half of one game. No one is saying that Ward is destined to bust — far from it, in fact. But it’s clear that the lightbulb has yet to come on, and that there’s going to be a pretty steep learning curve as he adjusts to playing within Daboll’s system. The idea of someone with Ward’s physical gifts and off-platform ability being kept on schedule was and is awfully enticing. It’s still theoretical right now, though, and we need to see Ward start taking real steps forward soon.

Carnell Tate has a high bar to clear to live up to his draft pick

Of course, it would help if he had a genuine ball-winner on the outside, and while there’s still plenty of reason to believe Tate will make good on the top-10 hype, this was hardly the most auspicious debut. He failed to tally a single catch on just three targets, clearly behind Wan’Dale Robinson (and even Elic Ayomanor at times) in Tennessee’s passing game.

What’s more, it wasn’t like he was consistently creating separation and simply failing to see the ball. That was the main question about Ward out of college — not the biggest or fastest athlete by NFL standards, he’d never been the top option at Ohio State, which led some evaluators to wonder whether he could be a legitimate X at the highest level. Facing a banged-up 49ers secondary, he was hardly winning on a regular basis, a big part of why Ward and the Titans had a hard time pushing the ball downfield much at all.

Is all of this much ado about nothing? It’s entirely possible. But Titans fans no doubt tuned in on Thursday hoping to see signs of progress — improvement in the fundamentals from Ward, some tangible evidence from Tate that he had the goods. They went 0-for-2, and while that doesn’t have to be a death sentence, all the valid questions we had entering the night will only grow louder.

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