Will Levis might have the highest ceiling and the lowest floor of any starting quarterback in the league. He had all of it in one game on Sunday, leading the Titans to a 32-27 upset at Houston.
Entering Sunday in the Super Bowl era (since 1966), NFL teams were 6-145 in the regular season and playoffs when taking eight-or-more sacks and committing three-plus turnovers. But Levis refused to be No. 146. He kept pulling himself and the Titans off the ground, overcoming Jimmie Ward’s 65-yard go-ahead pick-six and, in the end, made more good plays than bad. Head coach Brian Callahan said his quarterback’s resiliency was “huge.”
“You’re going to have bad plays in a game at every position, and particularly the quarterback ones,” Callahan said afterward. “You throw one for interception and it goes down the other way for points; it’s challenging to overcome. But it was just really good to see that nobody really flinched at all. We just kept going and found ways in all phases to make the plays to win the game at the end.”
They won in the end because both before and after that interception, Levis was explosive. After Houston scored on the game’s first snap, Levis led the Titans to 17 unanswered points, including a 38-yard strike to Nick Westbrook-Ikhine. Then, after Ward’s interception return, Levis and tight end Chig Okonkwo on an electrifying, 70-yard touchdown with 9:35 remaining in the fourth quarter. Callahan said Levis deserved the win after finishing 18 of 24 for 278 yards, two touchdowns and one interception.
“He does everything the way that you want a quarterback to do things,” Callahan said. “He works his butt off to be in position to help our team.”
Tony Pollard also helped the team. The running back rushed for 119 yards on 24 carries (5.0 avg.) and scored from 10 yards out to give Tennessee a 17-7 lead with 11:03 left in the second quarter. The Titans also got three Nick Folk field goals from 50-plus yards in a game with three lead changes.
Folk’s 56-yard field goal cashed in a C.J. Stroud interception, picked off by rookie Jarvis Brownlee in the final minute of the first half. Kenneth Murray also intercepted Stroud late in the third quarter.
Tennessee (3-8) can play spoiler next week when the Titans travel to Washington (7-5), whose playoff hopes are teetering after a third straight loss. Houston, meanwhile, has lost three of its last four to fall to 7-4 heading into a Week 13 game at Jacksonville (2-9). While the Texans still have a comfortable two-game lead over Indianapolis (5-7) in the AFC South, they need to overcome Murphy’s Law as they head down the stretch.
“Everything that could go wrong, it went wrong,” said Houston head coach DeMeco Ryans. “We still had a chance there to tie it up and finish the game, and we didn’t.”
For more information on the Titans and Texans, visit the Tennessee and Houston team pages at ProFootballPost.com.
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