Titans grades vs 49ers: Why we give Cam Ward’s offense a C+

SANTA CLARA, Calif. ― Preseason games are tough to grade, with so many players shuttling on and off so many lines and so many young options fighting for a finite number of roster spots. So let’s set up a nice, broad, easy framework here.

The Tennessee Titans won their preseason opener against the San Francisco 49ers 19-13 from Levi’s Stadium on Aug. 13. The score, as with every preseason matchup, really doesn’t matter. So instead of getting granular about what happened in which moments, let’s break the Titans roster up into five categories: the first-team offense, the backup offense, the first-team defense, the backup defense and special teams. Instead of grading how these units played, we’ll be grading how much confidence Titans fans should have in them with a couple weeks left in training camp.

Here are The Tennessean’s grades for the Titans after one preseason game.

grades after preseason game vs 49ers

The run game looks good. The offensive line looks solid in the run game but underwhelms a bit in pass pro. It’s easy to look at the field from a bird’s eye view and see open receivers, so credit to play caller Brian Daboll and the assembled group of pass catchers for that. But QB Cam Ward hasn’t been consistent about finding his open receivers when protection collapses. When Ward’s in rhythm, he looks like an above-average NFL QB capable of sustaining long drives behind a solid run game. When he was out of rhythm, both in this game and in the joint practice against the Niners earlier in the week, that wasn’t so much the case.

Mitchell Trubisky led a couple of field goal drives, albeit one that started near midfield and only spanned 13 seconds. The Will Levis-led version of the offense didn’t have as much juice in the second half, with the most dependable plays being scrambles or designed runs called for Levis. The backup offensive line looks rough, with Levis absorbing sack after sack. If there’s any saving grace, it’s that a lot of the depth pieces are very young and still have upside to play into.

It’s going to look a lot different when the front seven gets healthy, or at least it should look a lot different when the front seven gets healthy. But for now, concern is mounting. The secondary is struggling, the pass rush isn’t getting home and the 49ers just went out and gashed the Titans’ starters through the air with a west coast attack built primarily out of second- and third-stringers. When Kurtis Rourke is completing 86% of his passes without being sacked, it’s okay to call it a disappointment even if the run defense looked very good and the bend-don’t-break identity worked pretty well.

Not bad. This is where the Titans’ offseason strategy of building with mid-career veterans instead of going heavy into the UDFA market starts to show. The experience of this group led to some good stuffs in the run game, a pretty consistent pass rush and a couple of clutch breakups in the pass game.

This is a “trust John Fassel” grade more than anything. Because this was a fairly sloppy performance with a couple of muffs on the return game and some penalties in blocking and coverage. But Joey Slye seems to have figured it out this week ― he made from 53, 55 and 58 in the game ― and the Titans know what they have in Chimere Dike. The grade reflects that.

Nick Suss is the Titans beat writer for The Tennessean. Contact Nick at nsuss@gannett.com. Follow Nick on X @nicksuss. Subscribe to the Talkin’ Titans newsletter for updates sent directly to your inbox.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Titans grades vs 49ers: Why we give Cam Ward’s offense a C+