As the Tennessee Titans move toward opening a new stadium, they could end up with another new look.
Fanatics recently posted an image of a plush football with what appears to be a possible new Titans logo. The folks at the TicTacTitans Twitter page preserved it before it was deleted.
The revised logo goes with a more basic “T”, no flames, and a lighter blue.
The Titans had no comment on the situation to the Tennesseean.
Previously known as the Oilers, both before and after the move from Houston, the franchise changed its name to the Titans in 1999.
They’ve undergone various tweaks to their uniform and helmet. Currently, the base helmet is dark blue.
The Titans are due to open a new stadium in 2027.
Titans Clips
Four years ago, Malik Willis was favored to be the first quarterback in the draft. He wasn’t.
At pick No. 86, Willis went third among all quarterbacks, behind Kenny Pickett and Desmond Ridder.
It never really clicked for Willis in Tennessee, and he became expendable after two seasons. The Packers obtained Willis for a seventh-round pick not long before the start of the 2024 season.
While he has been the clear No. 2 to Jordan Love for the last two years, Willis has made the most of his limited opportunities.
In 11 appearances with four starts for the Packers, Willis completed 70 of 89 passes (78.6 percent) for 972 yards (10.92 yards per attempt), six touchdowns, and no interceptions. His passer rating was 134.64. He also has 261 rushing yards on 42 attempts (6.2 yards per carry) for three touchdowns.
Yes, the sample size is small. But, yes, the impact has been significant.
And he’s less than three weeks away from free agency.
Where he goes, and what he’ll get, becomes one of the more intriguing questions of free agency. The coming class of free-agent quarterbacks is headlined by Aaron Rodgers and Daniel Jones. One is 42, and the other is recovering from a torn Achilles tendon. Both are generally expected to return to their current teams (Steelers and Colts, respectively).
Other current free-agent options for quarterback-needy teams include Russell Wilson, Marcus Mariota, Joe Flacco, Tyrod Taylor, Pickett, Zack Wilson, and Jimmy Garoppolo.
The Kirk Cousins contract adjustment from January guarantees he’ll be cut on March 11 or 12, so he’s essentially a free agent. Kyler Murray and Tua Tagovailoa likely will be released, unless a trade can be worked out for either or both. The Jets also could move on from Justin Fields. And Mac Jones looms as a potential trade option, if the 49ers are willing to move him. (They say they’re not, but ‘tis the season for posturing.)
Then there’s Geno Smith, who already has $18.5 million fully guaranteed from the Raiders in 2026, with the remaining $8 million vesting on the third day of the 2026 league year. He could be available for trade, or he could be cut. (The Raiders also could keep him as the bridge to Fernando Mendoza, if they make him the first overall pick in the draft.)
Willis’s numbers are undeniable. Is he ready to be a full-time starter? And is a team ready to give him a starter-level contract?
As starter-level contracts go, the range is broad. The market tops, generally speaking, at $60 million per year. The bottom of the veteran starter market, as of last year, was $10.5 million for Russell Wilson (who started only three games). Fields has a $20 million average, and he received $30 million guaranteed on a two-year deal. (Fields also was eventually benched, after being publicly bad-mouthed by his thin-skinned owner.)
Sam Darnold, with only one viable suitor, received $33.5 million per year on a three-year deal from Seattle, which has quickly proven to be a steal. (In hindsight, he should have signed a one-year deal, like Jones did in Indy. With no other options, however, it wouldn’t have been easy to insist on a one-year commitment.)
Where will Willis fit? Much of it depends on the number of teams that pursue him. The Dolphins, who are now run by a pair of former Packers employees, are a team to watch — if they can wedge Willis’s contract into the cap wreckage of the Tua contract. The Cardinals, where Packers coach Matt LaFleur’s brother, Mike, is now the head coach, could make sense, too.
The Steelers could be an option, but they seem to be content to wait for Rodgers to make a decision. Which would take them out of play in the early days of free agency. The Vikings will be looking for a veteran to compete with J.J. McCarthy.
And don’t rule out the Ravens. If (and it’s not a big if but it’s still on the radar screen) they trade Lamar Jackson, they’ll need a quarterback, too.
Other teams that will or at least could be looking for a veteran quarterback include the Jets, Browns, Colts (if Jones leaves), and Falcons.
Someone surely will want Willis. The more teams that want him, the more money he’ll make.
The process will accelerate next week in Indianapolis, where every team will meet with every agent who represents every looming free agent in an annual swap meet of untraceable tampering that happens with no electronic footprints or popcorn trail.
Our guess is that Willis will land between $20 million and $30 million per year — unless a land rush emerges. If that happens, who knows? $35 million? $40 million? (While $40 million sounds like a lot, it’s still only 66.6 percent of the current market limit.)
Or maybe Willis will have the leverage and willingness to insist on a one-year deal that pays him a relatively modest salary but gives him another shot at free agency in 2027. (A no-tag clause would be even better, if not virtually impossible to finagle on a one-year deal.)
However it goes, it’s a story that isn’t getting the kind of attention it should, or that it will once teams start jostling for a chance to see whether Willis can do on a full-time basis what he did as a part-timer for the Packers.
His numbers suggest that he could be not just a capable starter but a potential superstar. With true franchise quarterbacks so hard to find, why wouldn’t someone roll the dice on the possibility of landing a player who could become one of the best quarterbacks in the league?
Brian Daboll worked with the second quarterback drafted in 2025 before being fired as the Giants’ head coach and he’ll get a chance to work with the first one in his new job.
Daboll was hired as the Titans’ offensive coordinator after they tabbed Robert Saleh as their new head coach and the former MetLife Stadium denizens will be coaching a team that has 2025 first overall pick Cam Ward running the offense. Ward’s rookie season was upset when head coach Brian Callahan was fired, but he found his footing in the final weeks of the season and turned in his most consistent run of success to close out the year.
At a Wednesday press conference in Nashville, Daboll said Ward’s presence was a “big factor” in his decision to accept the Titans’ offer.
“He’s a young, athletic quarterback who has accuracy,” Daboll said, via the team’s website. “He can make plays on the move, and do a great job when if the play doesn’t look great, all of a sudden it looks great because of his ability. He’s smart, and I look forward to working with him, and building this thing together, along with the other pieces we have in play, and the pieces we’ll go get. . . . I think [Cam] can do a lot of things, but he’s going to have to put the work in, which I know he will. And, we’ll do stuff that he’s comfortable with.”
Daboll got some head coaching interviews during last month’s searches and pushing Ward to a higher level in 2026 would be a good selling point if he wants to move back into a top job in the near future.
The Raiders are getting closer to making a hire for a key defensive assistant.
Per Jonathan Jones of CBS Sports, Las Vegas plans to interview Ben Bloom for its linebackers coach vacancy.
Bloom, 43, was retained as Titans senior defensive assistant under new head coach Robert Saleh after serving as the club’s outside linebackers coach from 2024-2025.
Bloom has also coached as a defensive assistant for the Cowboys and Browns since entering the league in 2009.
The Titans added a couple of players to their offseason roster on Tuesday.
The team announced the signings of defensive lineman Earnest Brown and offensive lineman Ryan Hayes. Unless they’re released in the next few weeks, Brown and Hayes will both be on the 90-man roster when the new league year gets underway in March.
Brown spent the 2025 season on the Cowboys’ practice squad. He played three games for the Buccaneers in 2024 and had 14 tackles in 12 games for the Rams over the previous two seasons.
Hayes appeared in one game for the Dolphins in 2024. He was on the Falcons’ practice squad last year.
When former Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed his lawsuit against the NFL and multiple teams in February 2022, the claim of systemic and chronic racial discrimination made it a landmark attack against the league. Flores’s efforts have had, to date, a much more significant impact.
Through a series of rulings during a four-year war over the question of whether the claims of Flores, Steve Wilks, and Ray Horton will be resolved in open court or (as the league strongly prefers) arbitration controlled by the Commissioner, Flores and company have torn down the league’s longstanding method for forcing employee legal claims into a secret, rigged, kangaroo court.
The problem is simple. The league wants civil cases filed against it to be determined not by an independent party but by the league itself. Finally, independent judges with the power to do so are telling the NFL that it cannot do so.
“The court’s decision recognizes that an arbitration forum in which the defendant’s own chief executive gets to decide the case would strip employees of their rights under the law,” attorneys Douglas H. Wigdor and David E. Gottlieb said Friday, after the latest decision scrapping the league’s practices. “It is long overdue for the NFL to recognize this and finally provide a fair, neutral and transparent forum for these issues to be addressed.”
And that’s really the next step. Instead of maintaining its current Hail Mary pass to the U.S. Supreme Court, the NFL should do the right thing and abandon the heavy-handed practice of insisting that lawsuits filed against the league be presided over by the Commissioner.
The Commissioner, who recently defended the practice by saying, essentially, “it was like that when I got here,” shouldn’t want to do it. It’s a hopeless and irreconcilable conflict of interest.
Few if any other companies attempt to stack the deck in such a laughable, third world, banana republic way. Most companies realize it’s more than sufficient to force employees into arbitration handled by one of the various companies (like the American Arbitration Association) that exist for that purpose.
It’s still a much better forum for corporate America than the traditional judge-and-jury process. Especially since the various companies that provide arbitration services tend to skew toward the interests of the businesses that are responsible for creating the system that funnels them so much business.
But that’s not good enough for the NFL. Its longstanding approach to arbitration is proof positive that it wants to completely control anything and everything it can.
Finally, the NFL is losing control over legal claims made by non-players. The consequences sweep far beyond Flores, Wilks, and Horton. Every other team and league employee who is compelled to agree to the arbitration term in their contracts now have a pathway to avoiding a fundamentally unfair and un-American approach to justice.
For that reason, maybe it will be useful for the league to keep pushing its appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Assuming that at least five of the nine justices of the highest court in the country see this game for what it is, the end result will be a published opinion that becomes the law of the land as to the league, all of its teams, and every current and future employee who have no choice but to agree to a contract that forces them to allow the Commissioner to have final say over any and all grievances they ever may pursue.
The NFL’s secret, rigged, kangaroo court is on life support.
In the lawsuit filed four years ago by former Dolphins coach Brian Flores, the presiding judge has reversed a prior order sending some of the claims to arbitration. Now, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has concluded that all claims will be litigated in open court.
The ruling means that the Flores claims against the NFL, the Dolphins, the Giants, the Broncos, and the Texans will be handled in court, not arbitration. It also applies to the claims made by Steve Wilks against the Cardinals, and by Ray Horton against the Titans.
Friday’s decision flows from last year’s ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which denied arbitration as to the remaining Flores claims based on the NFL’s insistence that Commissioner Roger Goodell control the process. That same “fatal flaw” (as Judge Valerie Caproni described it) impacts all efforts to compel arbitration.
The league will undoubtedly fight the result. Although Goodell defended the practice during last week’s Super Bowl press conference, it is fundamentally unfair for the person hired and paid by the teams to be resolving legal claims made against his employers. No one in that position can be fair and impartial.
The NFL hates external oversight. It wants to control its business, and it hopes to keep any dirty laundry tightly under wraps.
The league previously filed a petition for appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on the question of whether the arbitration requirement is legitimate. Whatever the final outcome, it’s long overdue that the highest court in the country examine and resolve whether it’s appropriate for any organization to require employees to submit their legal claims not to an independent party but to the boss.
Multiple former NFL players received presidential pardons on Thursday.
Via ESPN.com, White House “pardon czar” Alice Marie Johnson announced Thursday that President Trump gave pardons to defensive tackle Joe Klecko, offensive lineman Nate Newton, running back Jamal Lewis, running back Travis Henry, and halfback/fullback/tight end Billy Cannon.
None were currently incarcerated; Cannon died in 2018.
“As football reminds us, excellence is built on grit, grace, and the courage to rise again,” Johnson wrote on social media. “So is our nation.”
Klecko, a Hall of Famer, played 11 years for the Jets and one with the Colts. Via ESPN.com, he pleaded guilty to perjury in 1993 for lying to a federal grand jury investigating insurance fraud.
Newton spent 13 years with the Cowboys and one with the Panthers. The six-time Pro Bowler and two-time first-team All-Pro pleaded guilty, per ESPN.com, to federal a drug trafficking charge in 2002, after police found $10,000 in his truck — along with 175 pounds of marijuana in car driven by an accomplice.
Johnson said Newton, who won three Super Bowls with the Cowboys, “personally” got the news from owner Jerry Jones.
Lewis spent six years with the Ravens and three with the Browns. He was the 2003 AP offensive player of the year, after rushing for 2,066 yards. Lewis had seven 1,000-yard seasons. Per ESPN.com, he pleaded guilty after using a cell phone to set up a drug deal, not long after he arrived in the NFL as the fifth overall pick in the draft.
Henry played seven years in the NFL, with the Bills, Titans, and Broncos. He pleaded guilty in 2009 for conspiracy to traffic cocaine, per ESPN.com.
Cannon won the Heisman Trophy in 1959 before spending a decade in the AFL and one year in the NFL. Via ESPN.com, Cannon pleaded guilty to counterfeiting in the 1980s.
No reasoning was given for the decision to grant the pardons.
The Titans finalized their coaching staff under head coach Robert Saleh, the team announced Thursday.
In addition to Saleh, the coaching staff consists of 14 other new additions with eight others returning from last season.
Previously, the Titans announced their three coordinators — Brian Daboll (offensive coordinator), Gus Bradley (defensive coordinator), and John Fassel (special teams coordinator).
Fassel also has assistant head coach as part of his title.
Here’s a look at the complete staff:
Robert Saleh: Head Coach
Gus Bradley: Defensive Coordinator
Brian Daboll: Offensive Coordinator
*John Fassel: Assistant Head Coach/Special Teams Coordinator
*Ben Bloom: Senior Defensive Assistant
Dave Borgonzi: Linebackers
Carmen Bricillo: Offensive Line
*Trevor Browder: Offensive Assistant
Dalton Hilliard: Defensive Backs/Nickels
*Randy Jordan: Running Backs/Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship Coordinator
Cade Knox: Offensive Assistant/Game Management
Greg Lewis: Wide Receivers
Marquand Manuel: Defensive Backs/Safeties
*Tony Oden: Pass Game Coordinator/Cornerbacks
John Rudnicki: Offensive Assistant
Ahmed Saleh: Defensive Assistant
*Travis Smith: Senior Defensive Assistant/Pass Rush Specialist
*Rayna Stewart: Assistant Special Teams
*Luke Stocker: Tight Ends
Shea Tierney: Quarterbacks
Aaron Whitecotton: Defensive Line
Isaac Williams: Assistant Offensive Line
Rob Dadona: Chief of Staff
* indicates returning member of the coaching staff
Mike McCoy is headed back to the AFC West.
Per Tom Pelissero of NFL Media, the Raiders are hiring McCoy as assistant head coach.
McCoy, 53, was added to the Titans staff as senior offensive assistant in early 2025. But he then took over as interim head coach after Brian Callan was fired in October.
The Titans went 2-9 under McCoy over the rest of the season.
McCoy was previously the Chargers’ head coach for their final years in San Diego from 2013-2016. He recorded a 27-37 regular-season record with a 1-1 postseason record.
Since then, he’s been the Broncos offensive coordinator, Cardinals offensive coordinator, and Jaguars quarterbacks coach.
