The inactives are out for today's game at noon at LP Field between the Titans and the Patriots and here they are for the Patriots:

DE Jake Bequette, CB Alonzo Dennard, TE Daniel Fells, DL Marcus Fortson, DE Justin Francis, G Nick McDonald, RB Shane Vereen

Vereen was out on the injury report, while McDonald, Dennard, and Fells were questionable. Right tackle Sebastian Vollmer, whom I noted in my game preview, will play after being listed as questionable. And for the Titans, it's:

LB Zac Diles, DE Pannel Egboh, DT Sen'Derrick Marks, OT Mike Otto, RB Javon Ringer, QB Rusty Smith, OT Byron Stingily

Otto was out and Marks was listed as doubtful, so them being down is not surprising. Rookie DT DaJohn Harris makes his NFL debut in his first game, as does DE Scott Solomon, who was listed as questionable. Ringer was added to the injury report on Saturday with an elbow injury, and seeing him unavailable makes the Titans worse at pass protection. Egboh as a healthy inactive tells me the talk about him starting over Derrick Morgan was probably a bit of smoke.

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The Tennessee Titans open the regular season this Sunday at noon at LP Field against the New England Patriots in a game that will be shown to much of the country on CBS. As the Patriots are playing, Jim Nantz and Phil Simms, CBS's designated Patriots crew/pseudo no. 1 team, will be on the call. I'll be on mute at least some of the time.

Since it's the first game of the year, there's no Enemy Intelligence post per se. Then again, the Patriots are probably the team in the league for which rewatching the prior game is least useful. More than any other coach, Bill Belichick puts together very opponent-specific gameplans. Whatever the Patriots will do on Sunday will be what they think will be the best thing to beat the Tennessee Titans and what they think Mike Munchak, Chris Palmer, and Jerry Gray will try to do. I watched some of all four of their preseason games, but even more than most teams the Patriots were exceptionally vanilla in the preseason. That said, I can talk about what the Patriots were.

In 2011, the Patriots were a really good team thanks almost exclusively to an exceptionally efficient passing offense that formed the basis for everything else they did. The Patriots weren't a garden-variety pass offense though but were instead a fairly unusual one. They were a horizontal stretch offense, rarely throwing the ball deep downfield but instead using as much of the 53 yards from sideline to sideline as they could to create space. A big part of their attack was two particularly good tight ends, Rob Gronkowski and Aaron Hernandez. One of the several very good writers covering the Patriots, Greg Bedard, recently wrote a very good piece on those two tight ends, what the Patriots were looking for, and how they represent the offensive change from the 2007 16-0 team, so I'll commend that to you. Their big offseason addition was Brandon Lloyd, a much better intermediate to vertical threat than any receiver the Patriots had last season.

We conclude our trip around the Tennessee Titans position by position was we approach the 2012 regular season with a look at the safeties.

As the 2011 regular season came to a close, the Titans were facing issues at both safety positions, as four of the top five safeties were heading to free agency and the only returner had played in just three NFL games in his career. The Titans ended up retaining both primary starters, though, and both are poised to start again.

The three of us who write for Total Titans don't necessarily completely agree on everything Titans-related very often, but one thing we did all agree on was Michael Griffin was too inconsistent for the Titans to sign him to a long-term extension. Heck, I didn't think he was even a lock to receive a franchise tag designation. We'll never know what the Titans would have done if every other top potential free agent safety wasn't franchised by the time they got around to franchising Griffin, but he's now poised to be here for the next couple years.

The next stop on our tour around the Titans position by position on the eve of the 2012 regular season is defensive tackle.

Like the defensive end grouping, defensive tackle has been a bit of a work in progress under defensive coordinator Jerry Gray. The makeover started last season, as the Titans signed Shaun Smith, a 3-4 nose tackle, in free agency and installed him as a starter. It continued in the draft, as the Titans drafted in the third round a collegiate 4-3 nose tackle who'd drawn comparison to 49ers standout nose tackle Michael Carter. The seventh round saw another collegiate 4-3 nose tackle. Size was the order of the day as undersized penetrator Jason Jones was moved to defensive end, though he still played some snaps at tackle. Then again, the Titans drafted an even more undersized penetrator in the fifth round. To say I was somewhat confused by these moves was a bit of a puzzle.

Of those five players, only two made the team this year. Jones departed as a free agent, and Smith was cut during training camp after year one of a three-year deal. The seventh-round pick also failed to make the 53-man roster, though he's still around and I'll get to him later. The other two players appear to be keepers, and the Titans are trying out two new rookies to see if they might be as well.