The 0-5 Titans' CEO Apologized to Fans — Then Called 33 Losses in 39 Games “Stability”

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2026

Let’s rewind the tape to Nashville, and bring a calculator. The Tennessee Titans are 0-5. Their offense is the worst in the National Football League — 246.4 yards and 11.6 points a game, numbers that belong in a preseason scrimmage. They have been outscored by 51 points in five weeks. Stretch the lens out and it gets worse: 33 losses in their last 39 games, six wins total since the start of 2023, three wins since the current general manager arrived. At some point a record stops being a slump and becomes an identity. So on Friday, the president and CEO of the franchise, Burke Nihill, did what executives do in that spot. He apologized. And then — this is where the tape gets good — he kept talking.

The apology itself was real, and let’s give it its due before we grade the rest. Nihill emailed the fans directly: “We’re sorry,” he wrote. “You’ve spent far too many Sunday afternoons leaving Nissan Stadium disappointed, and you’re tired of it.” He told ESPN the organization feels “a sense of grief,” that it has “let our fans down.” That is a grown-up paragraph. No hiding behind “unacceptable” boilerplate, no blaming injuries or the schedule. Owners and executives almost never write the first sentence of that email. Credit where due: he wrote it.

Then came the second act, and the second act is why we’re all here. In the same round of comments, Nihill said he feels “a sense of stability” inside the organization — stability — and threw his full support behind general manager Mike Borgonzi and head coach Robert Saleh, the men presiding over the worst offense in football. They will get this team “out of the woods,” he said. And then the line that will live on the tape forever: “The train is on the tracks. It just hasn’t picked up momentum, but it will.” Player. A train that hasn’t picked up momentum in 39 games is not a train running late. It’s a train parked at the station with the engine off, and the passengers have started walking home — last Sunday’s announced crowd at Nissan Stadium was the lowest since the pandemic, per Nick Gray of the Nashville Tennessean, in reporting carried by Bleacher Report.

The context makes the word choice even wilder. This is a franchise that has fired a head coach or a general manager every single year since 2022 — ESPN’s Turron Davenport counted it out loud this week. Coaches gone, executives gone, front-office staff gone; the one constant in Nashville has been change at the top, and the one product of all that change has been six wins in three seasons. Against that backdrop, “stability” isn’t a reassurance. It’s a rebrand of the exact thing that’s been failing. Fans heard it instantly, too — the response online to the apology was immediate, and it was not “thank you for the stability.” It was: sell the team.

The fairness pass, because the Rewind grades the whole tape. Patience is a real virtue in a rebuild, and Nihill is not wrong that torching the front office every winter is its own disease — the Titans’ recent history is standing proof. A newer GM and a first-year head coach deserve more than five games before the guillotine gets wheeled out, and quarterbacks in year two develop on crooked timelines. If Nihill had said “we’re terrible right now, the record is ours, and we believe these men fix it — judge us in January,” nobody’s rewinding anything. But that’s not what he sold. He sold grief and stability in the same breath, sorrow and a train metaphor in the same interview — an apology that keeps apologizing for everything except the plan, delivered by the man whose signature is on the plan.

The verdict

So hand it down with precision. It doesn’t go to Robert Saleh, five games into an impossible job with the league’s thinnest offense. It doesn’t go to the fans, who have now spent three seasons paying major-league prices for a minor-league product and still showed up 52,000 strong. It doesn’t even go to the apology email, which was honest and overdue. It goes to the pivot — the moment a CEO looked at 33 losses in 39 games, the worst offense in football, and a fanbase walking toward the exits, and chose the word “stability” to describe it. You cannot grieve the fire and praise the fireplace in the same press availability. Say you’re sorry, say you’re fixing it — but don’t tell the people on the platform the train is coming when the train is the thing they’re all staring at, parked.

THE VERDICT — After review: Burke Nihill is outta pocket.