The Tennessee Titans need to stop pretending. Will Levis is not their future, is not their present, and is about to become somebody else’s cheap flier if they let August 30 come and go without a phone call.
The writing has been on the wall since the end of the 2024 season. Tennessee drafted a new quarterback, moved on from the front office that picked Levis in the second round, and installed a coaching staff with no attachment to him. Every signal has said the relationship is over. The only thing missing is the transaction.
Now the calendar is doing the work. NFL rosters have to be trimmed to 53 by August 30, and the preseason trade market is heating up as teams take stock of injuries and depth chart surprises. Somebody is going to lose a QB2 in the next ten days. Somebody is going to panic. That is the window.
Levis has spent this summer competing with Mitchell Trubisky for the backup job. That sentence alone should tell you where he stands with this coaching staff. His preseason opener against San Francisco was ugly, with three completions on eight attempts and a rushed pocket that led to three sacks. He finished strong against the Saints in the finale, but strong preseason reps against depth defenses do not fix the tape teams have on him from 2023 and 2024.
The Titans have been holding out for a real return. That is the mistake. There is no real return to be had. Levis is a former second-round pick with two years of NFL film that shows below-average accuracy, poor pocket feel, and a reckless streak that produces both highlights and disasters. Nobody is trading a third for that.
The market is a late seventh, at best. Possibly a conditional pick that becomes a sixth if he plays a certain number of snaps. That is what taking your medicine looks like when you missed on a Day 2 pick, and that is what Tennessee should do this week.
The alternative is worse. If the Titans cut Levis outright on August 30, he clears waivers or gets claimed for nothing. Either way, Tennessee gets zero back. A trade this week, even a bad one, is better than the waiver wire next week.
There is also the locker room angle. Keeping a fourth quarterback on the roster to string along a former second-rounder is not a look championship organizations pursue. This is a young Titans team trying to establish a culture, and holding a phantom competition for the QB2 spot into September helps nobody.
The teams to watch are the ones that have taken preseason quarterback injuries or the ones whose backup situations look thin on tape. Someone is going to make the call. The question is whether Tennessee picks up the phone with realistic expectations or lets the deadline pass while asking for picks that were never coming.
Cut bait. Take the late-round pick. Move on. The Titans have bigger problems to solve than what to do with a quarterback the whole league has already stopped believing in.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
