{"id":80660,"date":"2025-05-26T16:56:11","date_gmt":"2025-05-26T16:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/80660\/"},"modified":"2025-05-26T16:56:11","modified_gmt":"2025-05-26T16:56:11","slug":"femi-oladejos-high-energy-routine-is-no-act-as-titans-fans-will-learn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/80660\/","title":{"rendered":"Femi Oladejo’s high-energy routine is no act, as Titans fans will learn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Usually when people go back and visit<\/a> their old high school, they just kind of mill around. Lean against a few walls. Say hey to a few teachers. They don’t, you know, sit down in their old third-period history class to ace a pop quiz.<\/p>\n

Someone ought to tell Tennessee Titans<\/a> second-round draft pick<\/a> Femi Oladejo this.<\/p>\n

“We had our spring game. And we\u2019re going through the warm-up process. And I saw (Oladejo) walking out of the locker room,” UCLA defensive coordinator Ikaika Malloe told The Tennessean<\/a>. “I kind of take a second to process and I go \u2018Wait a minute. What are you doing here?\u2019 Femi was in his locker getting ready for the spring game. I go \u2018You do realize you don\u2019t play here anymore, right?\u2019<\/p>\n

“But that\u2019s him. He\u2019s so wired that he came not only to watch it, but he prepared for the game. He had his shirt off like he was about to put on pads. He had his earphones on. He was staring at the locker to get his mind right for the game. I said \u2018Bro, you\u2019re gonna have such a great career. You shouldn\u2019t even be here, but your mindset is wired that way.\u2019 At first I was laughing saying \u2018What are you doing?\u2019 But then I was like, \u2018Man, he\u2019s going to be successful for sure.\u2019”<\/p>\n

The Titans<\/a> drafted Oladejo with the No. 52 pick in the second round of April’s NFL draft. A 6-foot-3, 259-pound outside linebacker, Oladejo is one of several Titans rookies who’ll be expected to play a significant role in the team’s ongoing rebuild. But it’s important to separate Oladejo’s long-term potential from the team’s short-term depth concerns at pass rusher. Oladejo is the first edge defender the Titans have drafted in the first two rounds since Harold Landry III in 2018. Not coincidentally, the Titans drafted Oladejo in the same offseason they parted ways with Landry.<\/p>\n

But unlike Landry, who logged 25 sacks and 48 TFLs across four years as a college pass rusher, Oladejo has a whopping 10 games of experience playing the position. He spent his first three college seasons and the first couple weeks of his senior year playing inside linebacker before bumping outside. Not even a year after making that switch, Oladejo’s the symbol of youth and revitalization for a Titans’ pass rush that desperately needs a facelift.<\/p>\n

“It\u2019s intriguing,” says UCLA executive director of player development Durell Price, “because you\u2019re like \u2018Holy crap, what is this kid\u2019s potential?\u2019”<\/p>\n

On May 11, the Titans’ social media team put out a 48-second video of Oladejo playing his way through a rookie minicamp practice. Oladejo’s either screaming or sprinting for about 45 of those seconds.<\/p>\n

That’s not movie magic.<\/p>\n

That’s Oladejo.<\/p>\n

“I would say as a kid I was just always the extrovert leading team chants,” Oladejo says. “I\u2019d say it\u2019s just who I am. I try to help players in a positive way.”<\/p>\n

It’s not hard to find proof of this. Malloe says Oladejo still calls him just to check in, inverting the conventional coach-player relationship. When Malloe used to go on his 5:30 a.m. meditative walks, he’d often see Oladejo, awake before dawn on his off days, making his way to a bible study group. Price remembers visiting a childhood leukemia patient at the UCLA Medical Center only to find Oladejo had already swung by to race go karts with the kid.<\/p>\n

The natural impulse to be skeptical of Oladejo’s outward-facing identity. But the facade never cracks.<\/p>\n

“His personality is very contagious,” Malloe says. “He\u2019s always upbeat. And he\u2019s energetic. Nonstop energy. In the first initial when we met, I wasn\u2019t sure if he was trying to be energetic to show his personality or that\u2019s who he was. It didn\u2019t take long. By the end of the week I was like \u2018This is that kid.\u2019”<\/p>\n

“It took me about three months,” Price adds. “It took me three months of seeing him every single day and nothing changed. It was always \u2018Hey, how you doing coach!\u2019 or \u2018Hey, how\u2019s it going?\u2019 The enthusiasm just for being in the building and to want to be around the team, it never changed. You can see guys after a week or two who are \u2018Oh, screw it, I\u2019m not going to pretend anymore.\u2019 But after three months I\u2019m like \u2018You know what, that\u2019s just who he is. I never see him not. That\u2019s just who Femi is.\u2019”<\/p>\n

What about Femi Oladejo, the football player?<\/p>\n

If anyone in UCLA’s football offices knows what it takes to develop a pro defender, it’s analyst Clancy Pendergast. Before taking his off-the-field role with the Bruins, Pendergast spent six seasons as an NFL defensive coordinator with Arizona and Kansas City and seven more as a college defensive coordinator.<\/p>\n

“If you walked on the practice field, you\u2019d say \u2018That\u2019s an NFL defensive end or outside linebacker,\u2019” Pendergast says. “That\u2019s just what he looks like. We finally got him put in the right spot, but his ability to play the inside linebacker position is going to help him even more. I think all his football\u2019s ahead of him.”<\/p>\n

Pendergast draws a comparison between Oladejo and Bertrand Berry, the All-Pro defensive end he coached in Arizona. Berry played at 6-foot-3 and 254 pounds, almost identical to Oladejo. And just like Oladejo, Berry played linebacker in college before putting his hand in the dirt as a pro. By his late 20s, Berry developed into one of the NFL’s most fearsome pass rushers.<\/p>\n

Malloe says he regrets not moving Oladejo to outside linebacker sooner. Malloe equates Oladejo’s present situation to one of a college freshman. He’s gotten by on power and hustle so far. Now he’ll have to hone techniques and actually learn how to rush the passer like a pro. That’s why Malloe says he’s encouraged that Oladejo spent a good chunk of his time during the pre-draft process at UCLA’s facility watching film and asking questions of his former coaches.<\/p>\n

Price says Oladejo plays like his shirt’s on fire. He describes Oladejo as having a “calculated routine,” one that emphasizes learning and recovery. On a 1-10 scale for how close Oladejo is to being a fully-formed player, Price says he’s somewhere between a 7 and an 8.5.<\/p>\n

“That last year he had, it was almost like he was programmed differently to see the game differently and to know that he could affect the game in a positive way for his team just by doing his assignment every play for his team,” Price says. “I felt like he was reborn on the end, there. It gave him new life. If he was a little down in the middle, he moved to the outside and became Superman for us.”<\/p>\n

Nick Suss is the Titans beat writer for The Tennessean. Contact Nick at\u00a0 nsuss@gannett.com<\/a>. Follow Nick on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, @nicksuss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Usually when people go back and visit their old high school, they just kind of mill around. Lean…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80661,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2061],"tags":[3689,247,265,318,339,3690,7,3688,7332,248,267,246,88,6,245,264,325,9,266,678,3691,526,394,2411,527,8057,8061],"class_list":{"0":"post-80660","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennessee-titans","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-american","10":"tag-american-football","11":"tag-college","12":"tag-college-sports","13":"tag-enabled","14":"tag-football","15":"tag-highlights","16":"tag-middle","17":"tag-national","18":"tag-national-sports","19":"tag-neutral","20":"tag-news","21":"tag-nfl","22":"tag-overall","23":"tag-overall-neutral","24":"tag-sharing","25":"tag-sports","26":"tag-sports-news","27":"tag-story","28":"tag-story-highlights-ai-enabled","29":"tag-tennessee","30":"tag-tennessee-titans","31":"tag-tennesseetitans","32":"tag-titans","33":"tag-tn","34":"tag-tn-sharing-middle-tennessee-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/114575192045934327","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80660\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}