DeAndre Hopkins comments on awkwardly watching the Titans lose to Bills from the sideline

The Tennessee Titans best receiver didn't play practically the entire 4th quarter of their Week 7 loss.

DeAndre Hopkins stood by and watched as the Bills continued to rack up unanswered points (34 of them, to be exact) in the final frame of the routing that occurred in Buffalo. Here's a glimpse of what the television broadcast showed from the Tennessee sideline:

Hopkins looked detached from the offensive staff and the current goings-on of the football game. For a while he stood without his helmet, then wore it for a bit, then at one point seemed to strap it up like he was preparing to play again. But no, he just stood idly by for the majority of the final 15 minutes.

The first thought, of course, is that he must have gotten hurt. This seemed to be the answer given by Head Coach Brian Callahan after the game. "I've got to check with Todd (Titans Director of Sports Medicine) to see if there's anything to that," Callahan said. "I didn't get an update on that. But I'm not sure."

Callahan made it clear that it was not a coaching decision. Alright then. Does this mean it was a medical personnel decision? His answer was worded strangely, making it hard to say.

Hopkins explained at his locker that he was dealing with soreness at the end of the game:

Then when further pressed on the strange end of game situation, Hopkins drove home a somewhat mysterious point: players just go out there and do what they're told.

But told what? By whom? This entire situation smells funny. Perhaps it's nothing, but none of this behavior points to it being nothing. What it looked like to everybody at home was an extremely tradeable player being preserved on the bench at the end of a game that was slipping away. Frankly, it looked like somebody who might have even been told mid-game that they were being traded away.

We'll see if there's anything more to the Hopkins/Titans situation soon enough, as the trade deadline looms just 16 days away on November 5th. Should the Titans choose to move him, it would speak volumes about how they view themselves at this juncture.

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