Austin Schlottmann followed Brian Daboll and Carmen Bricillo to the Titans, signing a three-year, $7 million deal in the offseason. Daboll will serve as the Titans’ offensive coordinator and Bricillo as the offensive line coach.
Schlottmann, who spent two years with them in New York, hopes to be their starting center, but he is taking nothing for granted.
“My whole career has been that, basically,” Schlottmann said, via Jim Wyatt of the team website. "[I] went to Denver in 2018 as an undrafted free agent with a super longshot of making it, stuck around on the practice squad, and then the next year you compete for a spot on the roster. And every year after that they are bringing guys in to replace you, and you have to compete and try and make the team.
“So, I think throughout my career, I have learned how to do that. So, I think the best way to do it is just focus on yourself. Just try and get better every day and work. Be the best version of you every day.”
The Titans head into training camp with competition for the center job and the right guard spot.
Schlottmann has appeared in 85 games, with 18 starts, in seven NFL seasons. It’s more than rookie sixth-round pick Pat Coogan but less than veteran Andre James, who has played 106 games with 61 starts.
“The room has been awesome,” Schlottmann said. “We’ve had a good time, and we’ve kind of jelled together quickly. We are pretty tight. We hang out inside the building, outside the building, and I think the group is eager to improve and eager to be a great unit. I think everyone collectively has that same feeling.”
Titans Clips
On Wednesday, a jury convicted former Titans scout Blaise Taylor of murdering his pregnant girlfriend and her unborn child. Taylor plans to appeal the verdict.
“While we respect the jury system and the process, we must also respectfully disagree with today’s verdict and plan to appeal the decision because Blaise did not do this,” attorney Letitia Quinones-Hollins said in a statement. “He maintains that he is innocent and we will continue working to prove that. We understand and respect the pain that Ms. Benning’s family and friends feel over her tragic death and the death of her unborn baby, but putting an innocent man behind bars is also a tragedy.”
Taylor has every right to appeal the guilty verdict. With a very lengthy sentence looming, there’s no reason not to try.
He’s also entitled to continue to proclaim his innocence. Indeed, most individuals who have been sent to prison will continue to say, to anyone who will listen, “I didn’t do it.”
The question is whether the process included what the law calls reversible error. An appeals court will need to find that a significant mistake was made, or that significant misconduct occurred, to justify a new trial.
The appeal process typically takes months to resolve. Until then, Taylor undoubtedly will remain in custody.
Former NFL running back Chris Johnson went public on Monday with his battle against ALS. He’s now hoping to raise as much money as possible for ALS research.
He’s bringing back the Ice Bucket Challenge, and he’s getting it started by designating three former NFL players to get a bucket of ice water dumped on them: Marshawn Lynch, Pacman Jones, and LenDale White.
You can do that, or you can make a contribution to ALS research. Or both.
Here’s the link to donate in honor of Chris Johnson to the research efforts at Massachusetts General Hospital.
We highly encourage giving whatever you can. Times are tough, but every dollar counts. Who knows which dollar will be the dollar the funds the cure?
There’s a selfish motivation to this particular act of altruism. Any of us could get ALS, at any time. It’s a horrible disease, which robs the body of its abilities without robbing the mind of its faculties.
It can be cured. It should be cured. With enough research, maybe it will be cured.
So click the link and give a little. (Or a lot.) Already, more than $24,000 has been raised in Johnson’s name.
Former Titans scout Blaise Taylor has been convicted of killing Jade Benning and her unborn child.
Via WKRN, a jury convicted Taylor of murder on Wednesday.
Prosecutors claimed that Taylor poisoned Benning’s pink lemonade by lacing it with lethal amounts of cocaine. She was rushed to a hospital on February 25, 2023. The five-month-old fetus died two days later. Benning died on March 6, 2023 — her 25th birthday.
Specifically, Taylor was found guilty on all four counts: second-degree murder of Benning, first-degree murder of the unborn child, first-degree felony murder of Benning, and first-degree felony murder of the unborn child.
He faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Taylor worked for the Titans from 2021 through 2023.
The Titans will have eight open training camp practices this summer, the team announced Tuesday.
Seven will take place at Vanderbilt Health Football Center. The other open practice to fans is the Blue & White Stadium Scrimmage at Nissan Stadium on Friday, Aug. 7.
All open practices are free to attend, with tickets claimed online.
Tickets to the Blue & White Stadium Scrimmage are available now at TennesseeTitans.com/TrainingCamp.
The team’s open practices at the Vanderbilt Health Football Center are Saturday, Aug. 1, Monday, Aug. 3, Tuesday, Aug. 4, Sunday, Aug. 9, Monday, Aug. 17, Friday, Aug. 21 (joint practice with Seattle) and Thursday, Aug. 27 (joint practice with Chicago).
A limited number of tickets will be available online for open practices at Vanderbilt Health Football Center on a first-come, first-served basis beginning Wednesday, July 15, at 10 a.m. CT.
Former Titans linebacker Tim Shaw, who was diagnosed with ALS in 2014, was teammates with running back Chris Johnson for three seasons. Johnson revealed on Good Morning America on Monday that he, too, has ALS.
Johnson now communicates with a speed-generating machine.
“I’ve got to brag on him,” Shaw told Paul Kuharsky of paulkuharsky.com by text. “He’s actually injected some hope in me. I’ve been in this fight for 12 years. Like anything else, you get into your routines and beliefs. His great attitude and excitement about treatments have shaken me out of survival mode, and I actually got a couple of treatments two weeks ago, and I’ve joined two clinical trials. So I don’t know if I’ve done anything for him, but he’s done a lot for me.”
Johnson joins Shaw, Steve Gleason, Tim Green and OJ Brigance as former NFL players pushing for ALS research and awareness.
“I’m very proud of CJ,” Shaw said. “Telling the world is super tough, especially when you’re a private person. Chris and I have been talking for a while. He’s got such a great attitude. He’s got all the motivation of his family, and he has faith in God for his future. So he’s crushing it.”
In 2021, a study of all “19,423 NFL athletes who debuted between 1960 and 2019 and played one or more professional game” resulted in a finding that the risks of developing ALS “were nearly four times as high as those of the general population.”
The murder case against former Titans scout Blaise Taylor continues.
On Tuesday, Taylor decided not to testify in his own defense.
It’s not a surprising decision. Most criminal defendants choose not to waive the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Doing so opens the door for an aggressive cross-examination that could help the prosecution more easily prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
As a practical matter, it’s a no-win situation for the defendant. Even though the judge tells the jury not to hold the decision not to testify against the defendant, it’s hard for many jurors to not conclude that, if the defendant was innocent, the defendant would get on the witness stand and say so.
Taylor allegedly poisoned his pregnant girlfriend by lacing pink lemonade with a lethal amount of cocaine. Both Jade Benning and her child died.
The case, now in its seventh day, is moving toward a conclusion. Closing arguments will precede the jury’s deliberations.
Taylor, who worked for the Titans from 2021 through 2023, faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.
In choosing to go public with his ALS diagnosis, former NFL running back Chris Johnson chose not to focus on the link between the disease and football.
At one level, it didn’t really need to be mentioned. The connection has been established. For example, ALS is one of the specific conditions (along with Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, early and moderate dementia, and certain cases of CTE diagnoses after death) that automatically qualified retired players (as of July 7, 2014) for no-questions-asked compensation from the NFL’s unlimited concussion settlement fund. And, in 2021, a study of all “19,423 NFL athletes who debuted between 1960 and 2019 and played 1 or more professional game” resulted in a finding that the risks of developing ALS “were nearly 4 times as high as those of the general population.”
At another level, it was more than a bit awkward that the segment on Good Morning America didn’t mention the ties between ALS and football, either during or after the Johnson interview was televised.
It came close, a couple of times. Johnson’s wife, Brittany, explained that she believed his initial symptoms (weakness in his right hand) may have been the result of a pinched nerve from playing football. And Michael Strahan’s narration of the piece addressed the belief that Johnson has a case of “sporadic ALS,” which happens with no family history of the illness. Given that, as Strahan said, 90 percent of all ALS cases are sporadic and basically random, the connection to football makes it not quite as random as it would be for someone who didn’t play.
Via Sean Keeley of Awful Announcing, Jeff Pearlman teed off on the failure to mention the link between ALS and football. (Here’s Pearlman’s full video.)
It absolutely needs to be mentioned. In our initial post regarding Johnson’s diagnosis, I focused solely on the fact that Johnson is suffering from a condition that has robbed him of his physical faculties. But, yes, the link needs to be mentioned. It needs to be known, by anyone and everyone who chooses to play, or to let their children play.
In his recent appearance on the Stick To Football, Tom Brady tiptoed around the topic of head injuries.
“It’s not my favorite thing to talk about,” Brady said. “I think that, like, part of what you sign up for as an athlete is, you’re willing to take more risks than what other people are willing to take.”
He’s right; they are. But the full range of risks should be known by everyone who signs up to play, at any and every level.
Yes, while playing a game you may suffer concussions — along with all sorts of other injuries, from torn ligaments to broken bones to a ruptured spleen to a serious neck injury causing permanent paralysis or death. It’s also important to realize that the accumulation of concussions and subconcussive blows to the head could cause long-term health issues, like ALS, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and/or dementia.
The existential threat to the game arising from the possible restriction of the flow of young players who, over time, will hone the best of the best into NFL-caliber athletes is real, but largely unspoken. While enough young men will continue to choose to play football (and will be permitted to do so by their parents), the quality of the athletes who make it to the highest level of the sport could diminish, over time, if the broader pool of players shrinks.
It doesn’t mean other sports are risk-free. If you’ve been watching the World Cup, you’ve seen a constant stream of subconcussive blows to the head (or possibly undiagnosed concussions), every time a player uses his skull to contact the ball. Beyond that, players’ heads are struck by elbows and knees and cleats and other heads.
Hockey, rugby, basketball, and baseball are also physical in their own ways, with an ever-present risk for head trauma. And combat sports like the UFC feature a stunning level of brutality, with fighters often taking repeated devastating blows to the head until the referee can literally dive between the participants to end it.
People will always choose to take risks in order to participate in the sports they enjoy. And many believe the benefits of participation in sports that entail the risk of brain injury outweigh the risks. Still, the risks should be acknowledged.
For the feature that disclosed Johnson’s fight with ALS, it wasn’t even a footnote.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
As it turns out, Dianna Russini didn’t FaceTime an NFL head coach for help in getting out of a ticket for texting while driving.
She claimed she did during a February segment with the Stugotz and Company radio show. Her anecdote was mentioned at the outset of last week’s lengthy article in the New York Times, her former employer.
The bodycam video of the Dianna Russini traffic stop has now been posted by Adam Herbets of the Center Square.
The seven minute, 10 second video includes the entire traffic stop. At no point does it include a FaceTime call to any head coach.
After the officer approaches her car, Russini says, “I’m an NFL reporter, and I just broke that Sean McDermott got fired from the Bills. And that I what I was just sending to send [sic], a tweet. I was gonna pull over, because I have to make calls. I know you don’t care, but I just wanted you to know my reason why.”
The officer says, “Obviously you were on your phone for a while. . . . I understand you’ve got a job.”
Then, Russini says, “You know who I was on the phone with? Brian Daboll. He wants the job.”
Next, she asks the officer if he’s a fan of the Giants or Jets.
“I’m actually — I’m not a fan of either,” the officer says.
“What is your team?” Russini replies.
“I’m a Vikings fan, unfortunately,” he said.
Russini then shows him her phone, and a text exchange with Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell. But she didn’t FaceTime O’Connell. She simply showed the officer her phone.
She also added, regarding the Vikings, their “quarterback sucks.”
After going to his vehicle, the officer eventually returns and says, “I’m gonna cut you a break on the cellphone. I understand your job requires you to be on the phone a lot. Just try to wait ‘til you get home, OK?”
And that was that. There was never a FaceTime. So, while it made for an interesting radio story on a radio show, it never happened.
The murder trial of former Titans scout Blaise Taylor has continued on Monday.
Taylor, 30, is accused of poisoning Jade Benning, who was pregnant with their child. Both the baby and Benning died in early 2023. He is specifically accused of lacing Benning’s pink lemonade with cocaine dissolved in alcohol.
On Saturday, one of Taylor’s former girlfriends testified that she had been impregnated by Taylor and has chosen to have an abortion. She also said that, after Taylor later impregnated another woman (not Benning), Taylor talked about trying to terminate the latest pregnancy.
“He was Googling things,” Apple Dennie testified, via News Channel 9. “He was looking stuff up to figure out how she . . . if there was something you could do to make her have an abortion. And asked me if I could get the abortion pills, and he could make her take them or put it in her drink.”
The prosecution rested its case on Saturday. The defense case commenced on Monday. The biggest question for the defense is whether Taylor will waive his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and testify on his own behalf.
Most criminal defendants don’t testify, mainly to avoid what would be an aggressive cross-examination that would outweigh the benefit of the defendant giving their side of the story on direct examination.
