# Titans Punditry Check: The Mocks Missed Carnell Tate, and the Week 1 Pick Missed Worse | MissedTakes Daily

*Published 2026-10-08 — MissedTakes*

The newest published take on the Tennessee Titans isn't about this season at all — it's a mock of next year's draft. On October 6, [Justin Melo](/pundits/justin-melo) projected Tennessee holding the No. 2 overall pick in 2027 and using it on an Ohio State receiver, while [Tyler Sullivan](/pundits/tyler-sullivan) separately wrote that Tennessee "appears destined to have another top-five pick." Eight weeks into Robert Saleh's first season, the pundit conversation around this team has already turned to the next rebuild.

That's not unearned pessimism — it's backed by how badly this year's punditry on Tennessee has gone.

### The mocks had the wrong guy

We've graded 92 mock-draft calls about the Titans' No. 4 overall pick, and as a group they've scored well — 87.2 average accuracy, well above a shuffled-mock baseline. But that number hides something: the Titans actually took Ohio State receiver Carnell Tate at No. 4, and almost nobody called it. The field split between Notre Dame running back Jeremiah Love (Nick Wright, Bucky Brooks, Todd McShay, Matt Miller and others) and a linebacker — Sonny Styles for Daniel Jeremiah, Gregg Rosenthal and Field Yates, Arvell Reese for a few more. Only [JP Acosta](/pundits/jp-acosta) named Tate, and it's the one call in the group graded a perfect 100. Everyone else scored well anyway, because our grading rewards how close a guessed player's actual landing spot was to pick No. 4 — not whether the pundit named Tennessee's guy. It's a reminder that a strong-looking mock-draft average doesn't always mean the room called the pick; often it means the room was simply looking at the right part of the board.

### Week 1 was worse, and it wasn't close

Twenty of our 24 graded game-outcome calls on the Titans have settled, and the group has an average accuracy of just 10 with an average skill score of -38.9 — a program that's been close to automatic points-off for anyone taking Tennessee's side. The season-opening loss to the Jets set the tone: 22 pundits in our tracking had a pick on that game, 12 of them took the Titans, and Tennessee lost 23-10. The room's average accuracy on that single game was 41.

![Week 1: Jets at Titans](/posts/visuals/af9c322c-f21c-4c31-9a9a-8d09fde3299b.png)

### Nobody agrees on the floor, either

Preseason and in-season win-total calls for 2026 span an enormous range — John Breech has Tennessee at 3-14, ESPN's Mike Clay projected 4.8 wins, Lane Mills and Nick Wright both landed on six, and Jason McIntyre twice called for a winning record at 9-8. Only four of the Titans' win-total calls have been graded so far, all from 2023 and 2025, which isn't enough to say who's closest this time — but it's worth noting that last year's version of this exercise also ran hot: with Tennessee finishing at three wins against a field mostly clustered around five to seven, Brady Quinn's call of five wins was the field's best (60 accuracy), while Colin Cowherd's seven-win over call scored just 20.

### Whose Titans coverage has actually held up

Among pundits with at least five graded Titans calls, the gap in trust is wide. [Daniel Jeremiah](/pundits/daniel-jeremiah) has the best mix of volume and results (80.4 accuracy, +30.22 skill over 10 graded calls), and [Kyle Crabbs](/pundits/kyle-crabbs) isn't far behind on skill despite middling accuracy. [Colin Cowherd](/pundits/colin-cowherd) and [Derek Brown](/pundits/derek-brown) are the opposite story — both deeply negative on Tennessee specifically (-76.62 and -80.71 skill), even though Brown's overall site record is a top-10 one. That split is the point: a pundit's general trustworthiness doesn't automatically carry over to how they've called one club. Dharya Sharma has a perfect record on the Titans, but on only five graded calls — a lean worth watching, not yet a pattern.

![Trust on Titans Calls, by Pundit](/posts/visuals/81b7f190-07d8-489d-b5bf-b19587c4db92.png)

### The league's day in brief

We graded 2,452 takes across the sport in the last week, and the overwhelming majority — 1,899 — were 2026 mock-draft picks settling as that class's rookie season plays out, the same wave that resolved the Titans' own mock-draft calls above. The best of the week came from [Nick Faria](/pundits/nick-faria), whose detailed Jets post-cuts depth chart landed two separate perfect, 100-accuracy calls. The roughest also touched Tennessee in passing: a CBS Sports roster-cuts piece by [Carter Bahns](/pundits/carter-bahns) that sketched several teams' depth charts, including the Titans' quarterback room, scored zero. On awards, the 2025 MVP ballot went to Matthew Stafford and Offensive Rookie of the Year to Tetairoa McMillan, both decided results the field mostly didn't see coming for Stafford. For how every tracked pundit stacks up, the [leaderboard](/nfl/leaderboard) has the full board.