Take heart, weary Tennessee Titans fans. Dark skies have cleared. Happy days are here again.
Your judicious and valiant franchise, I can report, has finally snuffed out the real cause of its misery. It has removed the bad mojo from its midst just in time for a new season, meaning that nature is healing and wins and success will be sure to follow.
Rejoice! The bad man is gone.
Jared Stillman is no longer welcome in the Titans’ company.
Oh, what a savvy move from these brave Titans, revoking credentials from a radio host who dared to be critical of them and ask pointed questions (during back-to-back 3-14 seasons). It doesn’t appear to have been for any reason other than the fact that Stillman has for years been critical of the Titans and asked them pointed questions.
That didn’t so much bother Mike Vrabel and Jon Robinson, who weren’t interested in bullying and restraining local media (they had winning to do). But it sure has been pushed to the forefront for Robert Saleh’s Titans of 2026.
Technically, “journalistic integrity” would be the offense for Stillman, a former 102.5-FM host who often plays to a national audience on SiriusXM. But this decision, rather transparently, came after a series of questions and a back-and-forth between Stillman and Titans quarterback Cam Ward during a press conference after the Aug. 27 joint practice with the Chicago Bears.
It wasn’t that noteworthy an exchange. Stillman was respectful. He asked Ward how he thinks he has played this preseason, and Ward replied by asking Stillman what he thought. Ward shouldn’t have done that if he didn’t want an honest answer, which he got.
Stillman has been a vocal critic of Ward on his show. I’m sure that had plenty to do with how it was viewed internally among the Titans:
Gee, could it be that Ward really hasn’t played that great this preseason?
Nah, that can’t be it. This is all that rotten Stillman's fault.
Yeah.
The Titans can credential whoever and however they want. But the same standards that are being used internally to explain Stillman’s exclusion aren’t being applied to other media members. This was selective.
It is, therefore, not difficult to figure out what’s happening here. This is intimidation. The Titans are no longer content to have their own state-run media spraying sunshine and lobbing softball questions. From this point, they’d prefer that all assembled media fall in line. This is a preemptive attempt, perhaps foretelling another terrible season on the horizon, to control media coverage through unspoken fear of retribution.
To understand such reasoning requires an understanding of how much Titans owner Amy Adams Strunk pays attention to what gets written and said publicly about her team. Life gets easier for everyone in that building – especially the higher-ups – when times are good, headlines are positive and Adams Strunk is being told what she’d like to hear.
Except times haven’t been good for a while now. As the team's rebuild drags on painfully, the Titans have gradually implemented more restrictive media policies, and that has accelerated sharply since Saleh was hired. This preseason, media had to request players and have requests approved in advance by team officials who often screened questions and topics before interviews would be granted.
In the wake of the Stillman news, the Titans had seven team media reps show up and hover at Mike Borgonzi’s Sept. 1 press conference, evidently keeping a close watch for disgruntled troublemakers.
(At one point, I raised a finger and counted around the room at those seven, just to see if any of them would notice enough to mention it to me, being that unpredictability can be highly problematic for an authoritarian state. Guess what? One of them did.)
None of this, of course, is going to help win games. But in Titans-land, way too much time and effort gets wasted trying to manage up and placate ownership instead of toward what’s best for the franchise. That has persisted through this hellish stretch of Titans history, during which seemingly everyone important in the building (other than Jeffery Simmons) has either left or been fired.
Problem is their replacements are short-sighted enough to support what’s being done with Stillman.
Because what’s being done is a few things, really, and none stand to benefit the Titans:
- They’ve guaranteed a massive uptick in audience and influence for the “Stillman & Company” program, making him a cult hero to any thinking Titans fan who prefers media that’s willing to hold the Titans accountable and call things for what they are, instead of how the Titans hope them to be. This will likely be a narrative nationally, which means …
- They’ve created an unnecessary and stupid distraction for the team at an inopportune time.
- They’ve confirmed their status as the softest sports organization in this state, if not the entire NFL.
- And they’ve warned everyone who covers the Titans that “journalistic integrity” is going to be defined by the team, not the journalists who don’t work for them. That’s a problem. Because it never works out well when any organization believes it has the authority, in a free society, to control what others say and think.
What’s next? Cutting off power to the scoreboards at Nissan Stadium on Sundays? Because, I tell you, those scoreboards have been saying some hurtful, negative things about the Titans, too.
The NFL’s insistence in keeping score on Sundays, best I can tell, is all that's keeping the Titans from feeling great about the Super Bowl and those snazzy new uniforms and new logo and that nice new stadium.
It’s kind of a shame that they’ll have to soon start losing games again in front of meager crowds.
I wouldn't boo, though. Not if you want to be allowed back.
Reach Tennessean sports columnist Gentry Estes at gestes@tennessean.com and hang out with him on Bluesky @gentryestes.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Rejoice, Titans fans! Your team has found the problem. It's Jared Stillman | Estes
