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In one season as Tennessee Titans head coach, Brian Callahan exhibited a kind of unhinged honesty when it came to his quarterback, Will Levis. Granted, this was completely understandable. Levis’s penchant for altering the game by doing something memorably dangerous and ill-advised was quickly becoming legendary. 

Just as the game would seem to be headed in a conventionally positive direction, Levis would splay his body out in a completely horizontal fashion and fire the ball backward, or drift into pocket pressure and flick the ball toward an oncoming defender, or exist on the unfortunate end of some communication breakdown with a wide receiver, making it look like he was purposely firing a football toward an opponent. 

At one moment, caught on camera, Callahan approached his quarterback on the field and earnestly asked: Hey, what the f--- are you doing? 

After that game, a Week 2 loss to the New York Jets, Callahan said of Levis’s play: “It was dumb. It was the same exact thing he did last week, and he cost us points in the red zone. … He’s a grown-up and he knows better, and so I was really irritated that he cost us three points in a game that we probably needed it.”

Regardless of your takeaway, the correct read on Tennessee’s quarterback situation a year ago was that Callahan could behave that way because he knew Levis wouldn’t be his problem for much longer. Levis was an inherited quarterback who was not drafted in the first round. (He was taken with the 33rd pick in 2023.) The coach who drafted Levis had already been let go and it was a matter of months before the general manager who selected him would also be out the door. Most coaches interested in developing a young quarterback would refrain from calling their play “dumb” or dressing them down on the field in such a particularly demeaning way. 

Again, we’re not blaming Callahan. But we say that on the night Tennessee has drafted its next franchise quarterback, Miami’s Cam Ward with the No. 1 pick, to say this: Now we’ll find out what the Titans truly have at the head coaching position. It would seem to be a fireable offense for Callahan to say the same of Ward’s play, or unleash the same kind of body language on the sideline. The Titans have made an effort to display how convicted the team has been in Ward all along. Rolling with his inevitable rookie moments is now underlined and cemented as part of the job description. 

With a new stadium opening in 2027, and the need to fill said stadium with human beings, this pick is obviously bigger than one person. But it begins with the offensive coach so sought after that the Titans wouldn’t let him leave the building to take another interview elsewhere. Callahan rose to prominence as the operator behind the scenes of Joe Burrow’s massive star rise. His inability to get much out of Levis—Callahan was much nicer to him in interviews and on the sidelines later in the season, by the way—was either inevitable due to Levis’s high-variance play or the precursor to questioning whether he’s up for the magnitude of this turnaround in the first place.

Luckily, Ward is the ultimate test. He is neither as irresponsible with the football as Levis nor as flawless as Burrow. There are just enough head scratching moments to coach out of him—a totally sidearm cross-body pick against Florida last year stands out—but more than enough physical tools to help Ward get away with drop-backs that may not appear to be technically perfect. 

In short, he’s a quarterback who seems to be possibly good enough … if the offense that’s built for him is good enough. 

What’s most interesting to me about Ward is that I think people are missing the point on a Patrick Mahomes comparison that has followed him throughout the past season. Ward isn’t necessarily Mahomes, but he is obviously one of the first Mahomes Generation quarterbacks to make it big. Ward was 14, just entering his formative years as a quarterback, when Mahomes was drafted. He was 16 when Mahomes started taking over the NFL as a full-time starter. Ward has some of that foot quickness and functional mobility. He has a hose for an arm that seems to work at any angle. 

In this offseason of veteran quarterback movement, the Titans didn’t have to commit to Ward as aggressively as they did. They didn’t have to make the selection such a foregone conclusion that Ward recently listed Treylon Burks as one of his top five receivers in the NFL during a Twitch stream. Given Ward’s isolation in this draft class as the one quarterback truly befitting of a first-round pick, the Titans could have flipped the No. 1 pick, made a play for Jimmy Garoppolo or Matthew Stafford or Aaron Rodgers or Kirk Cousins or Joe Flacco or Daniel Jones and taken their chances in a future class. 

But the Titans didn’t do that. Which means they saw Ward as being that special. And that Callahan agreed with that assessment. And that Callahan’s performance last year with Levis can be most accurately blamed on the quarterback. At least the Titans hope so.

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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Titans’ Cam Ward Selection Is the Ultimate Test for Brian Callahan.