Like an anime nerd at a frat party, Titans struggle to find acceptance.

For the most part, the Tennessee Titans have had little trouble with their early season opponents on the way to starting 5-0. Gaining attention from the media and pundits, however, has been a bit more difficult. Take an example I found while browsing ESPN.com. I was reading a blog posting by Paul Kuharsky who covers the AFC South for ESPN.com. In it, he was trying to defend himself against readers who claimed that he was giving the Titans too much coverage.
Wait, what?
I'm honestly not sure if those guys were reading the same articles that I have.
Up until their win over Minnesota, the Titans had largely been ignored by the mainstream sports media. Take for example Kuharsky's blog posting after the Titans' Week 3 win over Houston. At the time, Tennessee was among a handful of undefeated teams in the league, and had a two game lead in the division. But all the talk still centered on the Colts and Jaguars, as their story was one of the top stories.
Okay, I can admit that whenever the Colts play Jacksonville, it's going to be big business. After all, both teams qualified for the postseason a year ago. But even the smaller budget written about the Titans game made an effort to push the blue and white out of the limelight. Let's take a look. Only three of the eight paragraphs in this story focus on the Titans and what they did, and the final paragraph sounds more critical and pompous than anything else. The Titans don't even get a mention until the third paragraph, when you get a blurb about Ed King.
Things have begun to turn around for the Titans, though. After beating the Vikings, we get this nice little piece. And with that win, coupled with a win over the Ravens, Tennessee has been all over the front of the NFL page on ESPN.com. But it isn't all over yet. On Kuharsky's latest blog, the Titans get somewhat slighted. The rapid reaction piece he wrote was a paltry 88 words --shorter than any blog I've ever posted -- while the Jags game got 173 words and the Colts-Texans gets a full write-up that the other games didn't get from Kuharsky. It will be interesting to see how Mr. Kuharsky and ESPN.com handles AFC South coverage as the season progresses.