The Tennessee Titans shocked everyone on Monday by firing second-year head coach Brian Callahan amid the team’s 1-5 start to the 2025 season. However, according to longtime media personality Skip Bayless, this outcome could have been avoided this past offseason if Callahan had made what he believes to be the right decision in the 2025 NFL Draft.
Early on in the process leading up to the 2025 NFL Draft this past April, there were plenty who believed that Cleveland Browns quarterback Shedeur Sanders had a real chance of being the first quarterback off the board.
As we know, that did not happen, as the Titans ultimately ended up selecting Cam Ward with the first overall pick in the draft, while Sanders found himself as one of the biggest draft slides in recent memory, falling all the way to the fifth round.
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The trajectory of Sanders’ career certainly took a turn for the worse on paper when he slid as far as he did in the draft. According to Bayless, Brian Callahan’s career did as well when he selected Cam Ward over Shedeur Sanders.
“If they had picked Shedeur instead of Cam, I don’t think this would have happened,” said Bayless on Monday about Callahan’s firing. “That’s just me, that’s how good Shedeur is. He has the charisma factor, the it-factor, to change the franchise and inspire the defense as well as the offense. I haven’t seen Cam be able to do that yet.”
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It’s certainly hard to agree with this claim from Bayless, considering Sanders has yet to show what he can do in an NFL game outside of the preseason.
Additionally, there is at least an argument to be made that neither Ward nor Sanders may have been the correct pick for Tennessee, considering how well Giants rookie quarterback Jaxson Dart has looked early on in his career.
However, there may be something to be said about Ward’s struggles as a rookie, which potentially played a big factor in Brian Callahan being let go by the Titans.
Thus far, Ward has shown some flashes of great play, most notably in the team’s Week 5 upset win over the Arizona Cardinals, where he led his team back from a 15-point fourth-quarter deficit.
Outside of that, the former Miami Hurricanes standout has had obvious rookie growing pains, completing just 55 percent of his passes on the year, the worst completion percentage of any quarterback to start a game this season.
Ultimately, Bayless is going off of a hypothetical scenario that cannot be proven or disproven. So we will never truly know whether Callahan could have saved his job with Sanders under center instead of Ward.
Regardless, it will certainly be interesting to monitor the career arc of both Sanders and Ward in the years to come.
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