A quick dose of reality: If the Tennessee Titans lose to the Jacksonville Jaguars in Week 13, the Titans will be officially eliminated from playoff contention before the calendar turns to December.

But that’s hardly a surprise, right? The Titans (1-10) would need several colossal miracles to bounce their way to qualify for the postseason. So let’s move on to a more sobering truth:

If the Titans lose to the Jaguars (7-4) at Nissan Stadium on Nov. 30 (noon CT, CBS), they’ll clinch last place in the AFC South with five games to go. There’s already no catching Indianapolis, and a Jacksonville win would put the Jaguars out of place.

That leaves only Houston, which the Titans could theoretically tie with if the Titans won out and the Texans lost out. But Houston would hold the tiebreaker given the two head-to-head wins.

Yes, a lot of this feels inevitable. The Titans are five games back of third place, careening toward the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft for the second year in a row. Finishing last in the AFC South for the third straight year is borderline unavoidable. But this is the AFC South. The perennial butt of the NFL’s jokes. The division that’s owned seven top-five draft picks in the last five years. A division that hasn’t sent multiple teams to the playoffs in the same year since 2020. A division that came into 2025 projected to have three of the NFL’s 10 worst teams. The rest of that division is poised to lap the Titans before Cyber Monday.

“Every divisional game is different. They’re the biggest games of the year, the ones that matter most,” Titans quarterback Cam Ward said. “Those are the games that are mandatory to win.”

Mandatory or not, the Titans haven’t had any success against their divisional foes in recent years. The Titans are 2-14 in their last 16 divisional matchups, including an 0-4 mark this year. This follows a stretch where the Titans had gone 24-12 in their previous 36 AFC South matchups from 2017-22. Included in that stretch? A 9-3 record against the Jaguars, including home-and-home sweeps in 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021.

Now the Jaguars have won five of the last six against the Titans, Jacksonville’s most successful stretch against the Titans franchise since winning five out of six between 1995-98. Only nine players on the Titans’ active roster were born when that streak began, and more than half of the Titans’ roster wasn’t alive when that streak ended.

Nevertheless, the Titans are looking up at the Jaguars in the standings for the fourth straight year.

“Some of the guys are the same that we’ve seen in the past that they’ve had, even when they had a bad record or a worse record and we have the better record,” said Titans safety Amani Hooker, one of the few holdovers from the era when the Titans could pencil in an easy W whenever Jacksonville was on the schedule. “Overall, it’s a competitive division. Whenever we play a division game, it’s a fight.”

Fight is one way to say it. Losing fight is the more apt way, especially this year. In four divisional losses in 2025, the Titans’ average margin of defeat is 18.5 points. They’ve been outgained, on average, by 106.5 yards per game. If these have been fights, they been fights where the Titans have left bruised and beaten.

The Titans have two matchups left against the Jaguars this season. If both are losses, it’ll mark two firsts: The first time the Titans finish last in the AFC South three years in a row, and the first time the Titans ever finish with an 0-6 mark in the AFC South.

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.