Mike Macdonald: Titans QB Cam Ward 'in command' during Seahawks-Titans joint practice

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Seattle coach Mike Macdonald watched his defense work Friday against the Tennessee Titans' offense and Cam Ward.

Macdonald got to see Ward up close as a rookie last November when the eventual Super Bowl champs beat the Titans 30-24 in Tennessee. Another up-close view of 2025's No. 1 overall draft pick hasn't changed the Seattle coach's opinion.

“I can speak to how well he played today,” Macdonald said. "He’s in command of the offense. He’s did a great job. We all saw the game last year. I thought he was a pain in the neck last year too. So it seems like he’s gonna have a really good season.”

How Ward responded after struggling in Tennessee's preseason-opening win at San Francisco was a big focus against a Seahawks defense that was the NFL's stingiest in points allowed in 2025. Ward was 20 of 26 passing with two touchdowns and one interception combined in team and 7-on-7 drills.

“On the offensive side, I’m looking forward to seeing the tape to see if it was a continuation because I felt like we really owned the line of scrimmage last week, and it’ll be cool if we were able to do it against these guys,” said Titans coach Robert Saleh, who also spent his time with his defense.

On the other field, Seattle quarterback Sam Darnold got to see what Saleh is doing, and yes, the Titans' defense pressuring quarterbacks looks a lot like what he saw last season when Saleh was a coordinator with the Seahawks' NFC West rival San Francisco.

“They’re showing a lot of different things defensively without getting too far into the weeds, but they’re doing a lot great things,” Darnold said. "And that defense is going to be really good this year.”

This joint practice featured only a little scuffling and pushing after two Titans were tossed from their session last week against the 49ers in California.

Going against Seattle offered the Titans a chance to test just where they are right now. Saleh filled his coaching staff with plenty of experience with Brian Daboll as offensive coordinator and Gus Bradley as his defensive coordinator. The Titans also were the NFL's biggest spenders in free agency.

All-Pro defensive tackle Jeffery Simmons said the Titans came in with the right mindset working against a good team in Seattle.

“Our mindset was, ‘They may be hungry, we starving,’” Simmons said. “Let's go out here and continue to start to get to where we really want to get to because that's our goal: Super Bowl.”

Macdonald said some of the Seahawks cramped up, including WR Montorie Foster Jr. after a leaping catch late in practice. Temperatures felt close to 100 degrees, especially by the time practice ended.

“It’s an awesome opportunity to have a pretty heavy practice in this heat and humidity," Macdonald said. "I think they said it’s a little bit cooler than it’s been here, which is kind of crazy.”

Darnold said the quarterbacks met up during a special teams period, and the weather came up before he could talk about just how hot it felt.

“They’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a beautiful day! You brought the cool weather with you.’ It’s like, ‘good God,'” Darnold said. "It was honestly really good for us to be able to come out here and have different weather, have a different defense out here.”

Titans cornerback Alontae Taylor jumped a pass from Darnold and ran it into the end zone. Seattle safety Ty Okada picked off Ward on a separate field.

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Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Montorie Foster Jr. (87) is helped off the field after a joint NFL football practice against the Tennessee Titans, Friday, Aug. 21, 2026, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

Tennessee Titans defensive back Jerrick Reed II (28) greets Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Cody White (82) and defensive tackle J.R. Singleton (70) after a joint NFL football practice Friday, Aug. 21, 2026, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

Seattle Seahawks guard Grey Zabel, left, hugs Tennessee Titans defensive end Oluwafemi Oladejo, right, after a joint NFL football practice Friday, Aug. 21, 2026, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

Tennessee Titans tackle Aamil Wagner, left, greets Seattle Seahawks running back Jadarian Price, right, after a joint NFL football practice Friday, Aug. 21, 2026, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

Tennessee Titans quarterback Cam Ward (1) talks to Seattle Seahawks quarterback Jalen Milroe, left, after a joint NFL football practice Friday, Aug. 21, 2026, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

ELSENBORN, Belgium (AP) — The wildfires burning across Europe this summer have exposed a potentially deadly threat lurking beneath the blackened landscape: rusty bombs and mines from World War I and II that threaten crews responding to the flames.

Some of the weapons have exploded in the intense heat. Blasts have been reported in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, where a bomb-disposal team was dispatched to check a forest threatened by flames near a site of fierce fighting in the Limburg province in 1944.

Fueled by climate change, the fires and explosions show that the continent’s “climatic luck” is running out, said Sarah Njeri, a peace and conflict scholar at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Steady temperatures and predictable rainfall once ensured that most buried weapons stayed dormant.

“Climate change is now doing the work of unburying and reactivating what was previously stable,” Njeri said. Fires can ignite old munitions but can also burn away the scrub and brush that hides them.

This wildfire season was supercharged by heavy rains in January that spurred vegetation growth, which became kindling when the summer heat arrived. Those temperatures, combined with drought conditions, low humidity and stiff winds, offered an ideal environment for fire, according to a study issued last month by the World Weather Attribution group.

As they advanced, the flames moved over territory that has long been known to hold unexploded weapons, a lethal legacy that lingered long after the guns fell silent.

In a forest in tinder-dry France, a massive wildfire outside the southwestern city of Bordeaux uncovered a cache of what is believed to be World War II-era ammunition.

In the eastern Belgian province of Liege, Gov. Hervé Jamar said “a few sporadic detonations" were recently heard and that emergency services were adapting to account for munitions buried in a fire area. He said no fire crews were in danger, but local media published photos of a firefighter handling a rusted bomb.

During World War II, booby traps, bombs and mines were sprinkled throughout the province's dense peat-bog forest known as the High Fens. In the first four years after Germany’s surrender in 1945, the munitions killed six civilians, said Bernard Collard, a local historian who runs the Truschbaum Museum near Belgium's border with Germany that houses a collection of found objects from the war.

“When you go into a forest like this, you are not sure where the explosives are,” he said. He remembers his father detonating a found bomb in a quarry.

The fire in the High Fens, which stretches across the border with Germany, is smoldering atop a much-bloodied battlefield where Nazis fought Allied troops. The Battle of the Bulge was fought in and around the High Fens.

The fire is even closer to the sites of two lesser-known skirmishes along Elsenborn Ridge and in the Hurtgen Forest, which lasted 88 days and killed about 33,000 American and 28,000 German troops.

Collard is authorized to scan with a metal detector the former battlefields, now forests, pastures and farmland. He has found mortar shells, machine guns, helmets, cigarette cases, and once, a human skeleton.

“You never know what you might come across, and you shouldn’t take it lightly,” Collard said while standing in a field that was once a blood-soaked site. Nearby, blueberry bushes cover old foxholes, trenches and deep craters from artillery fire.

He frequently works with the Belgian demining squad. “It’s part of our history. We live with it,” Collard said.

Unexploded ordnance is even more dangerous around wildfires because heat can trigger the explosives, said Jonas Tepe, a spokesperson for North Rhine-Westphalia, just across the border in Germany.

The Belgian Ministry of Defense said it receives requests from the region about every week to assist in disarming explosives, yet it does not consider the area a “hot spot” compared to elsewhere in Belgium. Such requests are even more common in the west, where farmers in towns such as Ypres — infamous for harrowing trench warfare in World War I — call the annual tilling of the soil “ the iron harvest ” because it turns up so many war remnants.

Every year across the nation, Belgium’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Destruction Service responds to more than 3,000 calls and disposes of 200 to 250 tons of munitions left over from both world wars.

Drought has also helped to lay the past bare by shrinking rivers and lakes to reveal old weapons.

In Slovakia, the Danube River fell and exposed two naval mines that police pulled out of the water and buried in a trench for a controlled demolition. Authorities in Hungary closed Budapest's Margaret Bridge after a bomb dating from World War II emerged at its base in receding water.

As the Rhine dried up, German authorities also found a WWII-era bomb.

Christina Greene, a researcher at the University of Arizona who, with Njeri, wrote an article on Europe’s wildfires and unexploded ordnance risk, said “the legacy of war keeps creeping up” because of climate change.

“It's reliving the legacies of war and conflict in a way that we haven't had to deal with in a while in certain places."

FILE - Charlotte Cardoen-Descamps points out different types of World War I shells that were found on her farm in Poelkapelle, Belgium, May 4, 2007, in what is known as the "iron harvest". (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo, File)

FILE - World War I shells, some marked in pink are suspect gas shells, are piled in a warehouse at the explosive disposal facility (DOVO) in Poelkapelle, Belgium, April 21, 2015. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert, File)

Bernard Collard runs a metal detector over a field in the Elsenborn area of Krinkelt, Belgium, Friday, Aug. 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Valentin Bianchi)

FILE - Smoke rises from a field scorched by a wildfire near Waimes, Belgium, Aug. 17, 2026. (Photo AP/Marius Burgelman, File)

FILE - Members of a bomb disposal unit, Dieter Schwaetzler, left, and Rene Bennert sit next to 1.8 ton World War II bomb after defusing it in Frankfurt, Germany, Sept. 3, 2017. (AP Photo/Michael Probst, File)