Tennessee
Tennessee Titans’ best moments: When AJ Brown shook off four Ravens for TD
It is here, at No. 19 on our countdown of the best Tennessee Titans moments, I can reveal that this is our only entry primarily about a wide receiver.
We’ll mention some other guys here and there. Kevin Dyson, Drew Bennett, Derrick Mason, Chris Sanders, Courtney Roby, Justin McCareins, Kenny Britt, Nate Washington, Lavelle Hawkins and Corey Davis are all going to come up. But the arc of Titans history bends away from wide receivers.
Is this the burden of following the Titans? Your team can develop generational running backs, safeties and punters, but excitement from the most exciting position on the field must always elude you. Are the Titans a modern-day Tantalus, and star wide receivers nothing but the juicy, dangling fruit just outside of your reach?
Honestly . . . maybe?
Think back to Nov. 22, 2020.
The Titans are facing the Baltimore Ravens in an eerily quiet COVID-restricted stadium. Baltimore’s up 21-16 with two minutes left, but the Titans are driving. QB Ryan Tannehill drops back and finds A.J. Brown running an in-breaking route just across the 10-yard line. Brown makes the catch and is immediately apprehended by safety Chuck Clark, about six yards shy of the first-down marker.
Brown shrugs Clark off, flipping his hips and reorienting toward the sideline. Cornerback Marcus Peters lurches, but Brown wiggles away and reorients again, this time toward the end zone. Now it’s cornerback Marlon Humphrey’s turn to take a swing at Brown, who sidesteps Humphrey and lowers his shoulder into linebacker Patrick Queen, leg-driving him six yards into the end zone.
Clark, Peters, Humphrey and Queen have combined to make nine Pro Bowls and six All-Pro teams. Brown ran through them like tearaway banners before a high school football jamboree.
In so many ways, Brown was the ideal Titans receiver. Big, strong, muscled like a running back, yet graceful and agile enough to glide through the open field and down the sideline. A modern-day Terrell Owens, both on the field and, well . . . you know the rest.
This moment stands out for precisely that reason. Brown wasn’t just the best young receiver the Titans ever developed. He was a great, young, homegrown talent who so perfectly encapsulated the identity the Titans spent 20 years forging up to that point.
This play highlights that. This moment is the precise instant when the Titans finally found their kind of star receiver.
For however briefly it lasted.
Nick Suss is the Titans beat writer for The Tennessean. Contact Nick at nsuss@gannett.com. Follow Nick on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, @nicksuss.