Copyright yardbarker
The conditional element of this trade is that the Titans will receive whichever of the Rams’ 5th round picks is the best at the end of the year, and Tennessee will send their worst 6th. In other words, it’s a promise to make the best possible 5th-6th swap when the draft order is set. There are four element to this move that you need to know: the predictable, the good, the bad, and the scary. Let’s dive into each of them: The Predictable News McCreary was amongst the most likely trade chips on this roster, which I wrote about and ranked at this link here. Keep an eye on that list for additional moves that may come. But why would the Titans trade (another) starting cornerback of theirs in the first place? Well, I wrote about that question at length on Sunday, a little over 24 hours before this news broke. Click here for the whole explanation. Put simply, he wasn’t a part of their future plans and his contract expires this year. Moving him now is just a case of taking something instead of letting him walk for nothing in a few months. The Good News And that’s good news! This team desperately needs to continue hitting on draft picks to rebuild the rubble this roster has turned into, and this gives them a better swing in the spring. It may sound like nothing at first glance, but when you look at the actual landscape of each team’s draft picks, you realize this could be a leap of 60+ spots for the Titans. That’s not insignificant. The irony of this trade is that since the Rams will be sending the best of their 5th rounders, it’s almost certainly going to be the Titans own original pick that they sent LA for linebacker Ernest Jones last year. As for what the Titans will send back, it’ll come down to which of the Bills, Ravens, and Broncos finishes furthest in the playoffs. They currently have each of those teams’ original 6th rounders, as well as their own. The Bad News The NFL has become so clingy with adding or subtracting actual picks lately, and that’s the bad news here. The Titans only managed a swap, not an additional pick. They fought hard to find an actual pick for CB Jarvis Brownlee Jr. when they eventually settled on trading him to the Jets for a swap. There’s no doubt they hunted for an actual pick in the same way on this McCreary trade, but came up empty again. GM’s around the league have really valued their total number of swings in the draft lately, and so teams are reticent to actually lose a pick in a trade. It’s even led to some weirdness like the Titans experienced in the 2025 draft, where they traded with the Ravens to move up a few spots in the 4th. They went up to draft WR Elic Ayomanor, but what was so strange was that Baltimore basically made the swap for free. they didn’t gain any value with the pick swap on the back end of the deal. The only theory on why they'd do such a thing is that they wanted to maintain the total number of players they planned on adding. All of that is to say, teams are sensitive to adding or subtracting picks. And it stinks the Titans couldn’t add one here. The Scary News And finally, there’s the scary reality of this cornerback room now. The Titans came into the year with L’Jarius Sneed, Jarvis Brownlee Jr, and Roger McCreary as their starting trio of cornerbacks. Eight weeks in, two of them have been traded and the third is on IR for at least another month. Where does that leave the CB room? You’ve got sixth round rookie Marcus Harris, 2025 waiver claims Jalyn Armour-Davis and Sam Womack, and 2024 waiver claim Darrell Baker on the active roster. On the practice squad, Alex Johnson and Sam Webb are both recent signees who, frankly, we know very little about. Perhaps that’s about to change in a hurry. Needless to say, this lineup is extremely grim. Baker and Armour-Davis have gotten the most run so far this year, and both are clearly limited. Harris might have the greatest potential of the bunch, but he’s green and inexperienced. And Womack made his debut in the beatdown this team just suffered in Indianapolis against his former team. This is a lost season as it stands, but the pass defense might be about to get a whole lot worse down the back half of the year.
