Youth not an excuse anymore for Titans

Keith Bulluck says the Titans don't have the excuse of being a young team anymore. File

Not so long ago, the biggest theme in the Tennessee Titans’ locker room was how young the roster was.

Certainly that was the case two years ago, when the team turned its fortunes over to rookie quarterback Vince Young just four games into his career.

And it continued last season, as the Titans often proudly pointed to the fact that they had so many players with three years or less experience on the squad.

Now, just one year removed from that, the talk of the Titans being a “young” team has all but disappeared from locker room and interview conversations.

“Everybody played in the playoffs last year, and no one’s really young on this team anymore,” said linebacker Keith Bulluck, one of the team’s seasoned veterans. “I remember a couple of years ago, we were talking about we had the youngest team in the league, but that’s not the situation now. We have depth and we have experience, and we have attitude.”

That playoff experience, brief as it was with a 17-6 Divisional loss to the San Diego Chargers, at least allowed the Titans to accomplish one of their main goals from 2007.

And they want to build on it for this season and beyond.

“We reached one of our goals last year, and that was to get into the playoffs,” Titans coach Jeff Fisher said. “We’ve obviously set our sights higher this year. Regardless of whether you’re young or old, we’ve got a team that consists of players that were there last year that have higher expectations, and I think that’s all that matters.”

In using last season as a building block, the Titans should still be anchored by a defense that returns 10 of 11 starters from a year ago — defensive end Antwan Odom defected to Cincinnati as a free agent. That cohesiveness and needed depth at certain positions have the Titans believing that the maturation process into legitimate contender this season is possible.

“I think we’ve got a little more confidence. We’ve played together for a year now,” said cornerback Cortland Finnegan, now heading into his third NFL season. “I think everybody as a team and as a unit, we’ve gotten better. The competition is definitely there. Guys are excelling in their game, and our backups are actually starters. So that always makes everyone better. I can only speak from a secondary standpoint, but I feel like everybody is getting a whole lot better.”

Getting better involves more than just the physical aspect of the game, Bulluck said. The mental portion of applying the scheme and having trust in teammates that can only come through experience is also there for the Titans.

“We’ve grown up a lot,” Bulluck said. “We’ve grown up in a sense that guys that might have just been out there playing and not understanding situations, they’re now out there understanding situations before they happen and understanding what could possibly happen from this particular formation and situation.”

Defensive end Kyle Vanden Bosch warns that it will take more than just knowledge and a year of experience to reach the team goals, but that those things certainly don’t hurt.

“Hopefully, it gave us confidence, but we can’t think we’re better than we are,” Vanden Bosch said. “We want advance past the first round of the playoffs and do some things in the playoffs this year. Last year, we just got there, and I hope nobody is satisfied with that.”

It appears that no one is. The goal of taking the next step is now the talk of the team — not the roster’s youth.

“There’s only so many times you can use that, and we used it last year,” Finnegan said. “Let’s just say we’ve matured one more year and we’re more comfortable, and that’s big for us right now. Everybody believes in one another and that’s huge. Right now, we’re one year better.”