The Tennessee Titans on Tuesday finally returned to game action following a COVID-19 outbreak that impacted the team the last two weeks.
But it looked like the Titans hadn't skipped a beat as they took the field against the Buffalo, decisively handing the Bills their first loss of the 2020 season.
It's safe to say Tennessee played with quite the chip on its shoulder, as running back Derrick Henry stiff-armed a Bills corner into oblivion and corner Malcolm Butler pulled down two interceptions.
That same energy was carried into the postgame interviews, as quarterback Ryan Tannehill expressed the team's frustration.
“Yeah, we were under a lot of heat. Honestly, I didn’t quite understand it why we were under such heat,” Tannehill told reporters after the game, via Pro Football Talk. “But we stuck together, believed in each other and knew that the guys in our building on our team were all we needed. … Under some heat, obviously, for a couple of weeks and it felt really good to be able to go out and play and kind of shake that off.”
The Titans caught some shade after they allegedly held an illegal workout the day after their facilities closed, but Tannehill recently said at practice that they lost faith in the league's testing system. Tennessee isn't the only team who feels this way, either, but Tannehill thinks the adversity made his team come together.
“We said a lot of things (in meetings) throughout the past couple weeks and things are being said, personal things that were said against our team, our guys and it really felt uncalled for,” Tannehill said. “So yeah, we were a little ticked off about how we’ve been treated, how we’ve been looked at over the past couple weeks and really just stuck together through that process and believed in each other and wanted to come out and play our game and play how we believe in each other and knew what we could do and we did that.”
Well, that anger certainly worked in the Titans' favor.
