No one could really blame Jeffery Simmons if he wanted to exit stage left from Tennessee and find greener pastures the way past teammates like Derrick Henry and Kevin Byard have.
But Simmons stays and perseveres.
And it appears a big reason for that is moments like Sunday’s when the Titans could have just disintegrated and mailed in another loss in a season where hope has been few and far between.
But Simmons, who signed a three-year, $100 million extension to stay in Tennessee, stubbornly wouldn’t allow it.
Perhaps that is the same stubbornness that makes Simmons stay the course and see the Titans return to competitiveness before his playing days are through.
When Simmons arrived in Tennessee in 2019, all was pretty rosy, despite him coming in with some off-field baggage and a torn ACL that cost him the first six weeks of his rookie season.
Jon Robinson and Mike Vrabel had built the Titans into a winner, one that would go all the way to the AFC Championship Game his rookie season and would make the postseason for the next two years after that.
But then, as anyone who follows the Titans knows, everything began to unravel with firing after firing, trades and free agent losses of key players, poor drafts and poorer free agent investments until the franchise has bottomed out over the last three years as probably the worst in the NFL.
Heeding his own advice
It would have been easy for Simmons to have asked for a trade and land with a contender. But games like Sunday’s showed why Simmons stays in hopes of being part of the solution for when the Titans finally return to respectability.
It was Simmons’ halftime speech in the Titans locker room with the team down 13-0 that seemed to provide a needed spark.
“At least for me in the last couple of years, we always come in with so many high expectations, but it’s all about the moment, and each and every time I step on the field, especially that last drive, it’s how can I be in the moment, be present and just dominate,” Simmons says.
“If you can get guys to take it play-by-play and stay in the moment, everything else will take care of itself. Guys were just doing their job. We talked about it. Saleh talked about it all week: Everyone do your job. Somebody’s got to make a play. Win your one-on-ones, and today we did it.”
Simmons then heeded his own advice by forcing and recovering a Jonathan Taylor fumble on the first play of the third quarter to start the comeback process.
Simmons’ play was one of three turnovers forced by the Titans defense, in addition to two big plays from special teams that helped Tennessee secure its first win of the season. What Simmons has preached finally took a bit of root Sunday.
“It was a team effort and that’s the kind of thing we need as a team to continue to stack wins,” Simmons says. “When you’re doing your job and you’re not trying to chase plays and making things up, the ball will find you, and just like plays, when you’re doing what you need to do, and you’re where you’re supposed to be and you’re in the defense, and you’re doing your job, plays are going to find you. It wasn’t anything spectacular that we were doing. It was guys doing their jobs.”
No sense in secrets
There have been far too little of that for the Titans over the past few years.
Sunday was just one game, but it was a game in which the Titans should have lost and probably would have lost most any other time in recent years. But this time, they found a way into the win column, even though the stat sheet would suggest otherwise.
And they probably would have found a way to lose – except for Simmons and his play and his message.
“When I walk into the locker room, I’m talking to everybody. I want the coaches, I want everybody to hear me. (There’s) no sense in it being a secret. It’s not a secret what I’m saying, because we’re in this together,” Simmons says. “No matter if it’s 21-0, I’m going to have this same mindset that we can go out there and finish the game. Even when I brought it up, I said ‘That’s enough talking. We’ve said enough. Coach has said enough. Let’s go out there and finish this football game. Let’s go out there and win a football game.”
After the game, Titans coach Robert Saleh said he appreciated Simmons’ approach.
“I want to give a special shoutout to Jeff Simmons, who I thought was outstanding in the locker room at halftime,” Saleh says. “And it may have gone unnoticed, but just observing him and the team, he’s a man’s man and I appreciate him. I think he’s the best D-tackle in ball.”
He is that, but to the Titans as they try to dig themselves out of a multi-season hole, Simmons is much more than that. He is the Titans’ beacon of hope that somehow some way things can get turned around not just for one half or one game, but for the future.
Terry McCormick also covers the Titans for TitanInsider.com