There has never been a worse time to be a Tennessee Titans fan | Estes

I'd suggest they find something more relaxing to do with their Sunday afternoons. Call a loved one. Read a good book. Go see a movie. Take a walk. Dine on a late, leisurely lunch.

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Anything, really, would be better than beating your head against the wall by watching this sorry franchise. The latest disappointment, a 26-3 drubbing by the AFC South rival Houston Texans, underscored how there's no one coming to save this 0-5 team from another miserable season and a lot of meaningless football games in the coming weeks.

A loss like this would've been embarrassing if it wasn't routine by now. Just a typical Sunday for the worst franchise in the NFL.

Take note: I said "franchise." Not "team." There is a difference.

The team stinks, for sure. But a bad NFL team – consisting of players and coaches – often improves in a parity-driven league. A bad franchise, however, usually stays stuck as a bad franchise, Because there's no cure for what ails a bad franchise. No one has authority to replace bad ownership, no matter how miserable the culture has become due to job insecurity for everyone else. Firings just continue, evidently, until morale improves.

In the week leading up to this Texans debacle, the Titans abruptly – and without explanation – parted ways with three employees on the business side. The Titans confirmed them as senior vice president and chief revenue officer Adam Nuse, vice president of creative Charles Jensen and senior vice president of brand marketing Erin Swartz, who just headed the franchise's rebrand.

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(Here I thought that rebrand went well, but what do I know?)

Anyway, Titans CEO Burke Nihill – who has caught a lot of flack for these moves – did not want news of this internal shakeup to get out. The reason it did was because someone leaked it to radio host Jared Stillman.

Which was a shot at Nihill's leadership, if not owner Amy Adams Strunk. Because Stillman was the media member whose credential the Titans foolishly pulled just prior to the start of this season, mostly because he was mean and critical of them.

As Titans fans understand, it's exhausting to care about a losing franchise that keeps acting like this.

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Because the losing makes everything a crisis. Everything is a controversy. Everything creates performative outrage in media circles. Everyone wants to be angry and find someone to blame, even if it's as silly as a quarterback just joking with a team media rep while waiting on reporters to start a press conference.

The discourse around this franchise has become sickening enough to where someone getting fired – a real person facing real misfortune – becomes fodder for public amusement because of how the news was leaked.

That is the Titans' fault. It has become impossible to extrapolate misery and missteps off the field from continued misery on it. The frustration being that nothing even seems to change, because the Titans' leadership never views itself as a problem. They see coaches and execs and other vulnerable employees as the problem when they keep cycling through them. They see me as a problem for criticizing them like I do. They see other media members as the problem for asking questions they don't like after another deflating defeat.

They also see you, dear Titans fan, as the problem for booing on Sundays and wearing paper bags on your head. All to express discontent with a terrible franchise that is about to charge a lot more for tickets without ownership having enough respect for you to ever offer an explanation or any sort of plan publicly.

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Adams Strunk's public silence has lasted years, and it has created a void that keeps being filled weekly by anger, outrage and frustration.

There's no joy here.

In fact, there has never been a worse time to be a fan of the Tennessee Titans.

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: There has never been a worse time to be a Tennessee Titans fan | Estes