Robert Saleh’s first Week 1 with the Tennessee Titans looked a lot like too many Sundays from his Jets tenure.
The New York Jets didn’t just beat their old coach’s new team - they exposed the same old issues that followed Saleh around in New York, only now the uniforms were Columbia blue instead of green. For Aaron Glenn and company, it was a clean, emphatic win. For Saleh, it was a reminder that some of the habits that buried his Jets teams may have followed him to Nashville.
After the loss, Saleh kept his tone measured. He described the Titans as a “young group” and said better days were coming. Jets fans have heard some version of that before - 36 times after losses during his time in New York - and it’s fair to wonder whether his reset with the Titans is really much of a reset at all.
What stood out in Tennessee was familiar in the worst way. The Titans looked disjointed, the kind of team that never really gets its footing once things start slipping. That’s the part of Saleh football that never showed up in a box score but always seemed to show up on the field: the moping, the frozen sideline, the sense that one bad break could turn into three more before anyone could grab hold of the game again.
There were plenty of on-field problems, too. Cam Ward did not look like a quarterback who had taken the Year 2 leap many expected. The Titans piled up procedural penalties, their offensive line was overmatched, and despite heavy investment in the defensive front, they never managed to generate pressure on the opposing quarterback.
And then there were the players Saleh had once gone to bat for in New York. Jermaine Johnson and John Franklin-Myers, both backed by Saleh with major financial commitment, were nearly invisible in this one.
Saleh did have successes with the Jets, and plenty of what went wrong there wasn’t on him alone. But when things started going sideways in New York, his teams too often looked exactly like this: talented enough to tease, too flat to finish, and too quick to fold when the game turned against them.
That’s why this Week 1 loss felt less like a one-off and more like a rerun.
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