No matter what your final score prediction was for the Week 1 contest between the Tennessee Titans and Arizona Cardinals, nobody could have predicted the Titans would get manhandled the way they did.
Following the game, head coach Mike Vrabel was blunt in his assessment of how things went, per Jim Wyatt of Titans Online.
“It’s disappointing when you lose, it’s disappointing when you lose at home,” Vrabel said. “There is no other way to put it. It sucks when you lose, sucks when you get your ass kicked. All the credit to (Cardinals coach) Kliff (Kingsbury) and his staff and those players. You know, they beat us and outcoached us.
“This is what happens in the National Football League when you don’t play well. Told the team, told you guys, we’ll find out what our culture looks like this week and when we wake up in the morning and see the guys that want to come to work and guys that want to figure out a way to try to win a football game.”
Despite how bad it looked, running back Derrick Henry believes this performance is an outlier.
“That definitely wasn’t us,” Henry said. “But I don’t think you panic. … We know we have to be better, we for sure have to be better in all three phases. And when you get hit in the mouth like that, it’s about how you respond.
As Henry notes, all the Titans can do now is respond and show they are better than this. They’ll have that chance on the road in Week 2, albeit in a very tough spot against a 1-0 Seattle Seahawks team.
