NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Robert Saleh came to Tennessee believing in Cam Ward, and watching him up close has only made his new coach an even bigger believer in the Titans quarterback.
“He’s much deeper than you would think for a young hotshot quarterback,” Saleh said. “This kid’s not going to fail. Obviously, I put my job on that one, but he’s not going to fail. He’s special.”
The No. 1 overall pick in the 2025 draft gets to start proving that Sunday when Ward starts his second NFL season with the Titans hosting the New York Jets.
Tennessee has done everything possible to set the quarterback up for success even with Ward working with his second different head coach, third if counting the Titans' interim coach. Saleh hired former NFL head coach Brian Daboll as his offensive coordinator with Shea Tierney as quarterbacks coach.
Such changes can undermine a young quarterback's growth. Ward sees the Titans' latest makeover as being only good for him.
“They've allowed me to be myself from upstairs, downstairs,” Ward said of Titans' front office management to the new coaching staff. “The new system that we're in is more of my style. Coach Dabes has a big part of that."
Ward will join Marcus Mariota as the only quarterbacks in franchise history to start the opener in each of their first two NFL seasons. Ward started every game as a rookie with Tennessee going 3-14 in a season that featured Brian Callahan being fired and Mike McCoy taking over in October.
As a rookie, Ward threw for 3,169 yards and 15 touchdowns, and he was at his best over the final nine games where he had 10 of those TD passes with only one interception. He tied Geno Smith, now with the Jets, as the NFL's most-sacked quarterbacks with 55 apiece in 2025.
Daboll came to Tennessee to work with Ward, a quarterback he studied closely before the 2025 draft. His New York Giants picked third and went with defensive end Abdul Carter after Ward was off the board.
“He’s a good student to teach,” Daboll said of Ward.
The quarterback has enjoyed working with Daboll, a coordinator who works to call plays Ward is comfortable with and wants to run. Ward called Daboll a great offensive mind and play-caller who's also fun to be around.
“Not a lot of coaches would give a young quarterback the input that he gives me in his offense, and so for me that's all I need,” Ward said.
Jets coach Aaron Glenn knows Ward will be a challenge with his ability to make all the throws from different arm angles.
“I think that’s pretty impressive by him,” Glenn said. “He clearly has an understanding of the offense. You see the RPOs he’s running, you see the no huddle that he’s running, so you can tell that him and Daboll are in lockstep.”
The Titans not only brought in Daboll and Tierney to work with Ward, they tried to fix the offensive line by signing veteran center Austin Schlottmann with rookie Fernando Carmona Jr. earning the starting right guard job. They signed wide receiver Wan'Dale Robinson and drafted receiver Carnell Tate at No. 4 as well.
How quickly the Titans end a skid of four straight losing seasons rests heavily on Ward’s development. A sign of just how highly regarded Ward is came Wednesday with the quarterback among only three captains for this season alongside All-Pro defensive tackle Jeffery Simmons and long snapper Morgan Cox.
Ward believes he's ready, feeling more comfortable with what the Titans want to do on offense earlier in the game week than during his rookie season. He's excited to show what basically a new team can do starting Sunday.
“I think I am way more intelligent in terms of the NFL game,” Ward said. “I think playing on time is a big factor in us being successful on offense, so I think the more I can do that, it’s going to put myself and the offense in a better situation.”
Saleh said LB Cedric Gray, recovering from a UTV accident over the weekend, has a chance to clear the NFL concussion protocol before Sunday. Gray did not practice Wednesday. Saleh said Gray was apologetic and frustrated with himself, and the coach is happy the accident wasn't worse.
“You always try your best to keep the main thing the main thing and try to help educate them. But they’re still kids,” Saleh said.
AP Pro Football Writer Dennis Waszak contributed to this report from Florham Park, New Jersey.
See AP’s full NFL coverage here
Tennessee Titans head coach Robert Saleh talks to reporters following a preseason NFL football game against the Chicago Bears, Saturday, Aug. 29, 2026, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Republicans are gathering in Dallas on Wednesday for a highly unusual two-day midterm convention, a first for the party, that will put President Donald Trump at the center of this fall’s midterm elections.
Trump plans to take the stage both nights, delivering a keynote address Wednesday and then closing remarks after Vice President JD Vance gives his own speech on Thursday. Members of Trump’s Cabinet will also address the convention. Democrats, meanwhile, are planning their own counterprogramming.
Republicans hope the event, which is part rally and part fundraiser, will help catapult their candidates into November, primarily by highlighting the first two years of Trump’s term. The president has insisted that running on his record will give the GOP their best shot at winning, even as his own poll numbers sag.
In an exchange with reporters before his flight to the convention, Trump said oil prices that have surged because of the Iran war likely won’t come down until after the midterm elections. An AP-NORC poll in July offered a stark repudiation of Trump’s handling of the conflict, as results showed about two-thirds of U.S. adults say the war with Iran has not been worthwhile.
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It’s scorching outside the American Airlines Center in Dallas, but that hasn’t kept thousands of Trump devotees from pouring into the Dallas arena for this unusual midterm Republican convention.
It has the feel of a quadrennial national political convention, just smaller. In fact, it resembles more of a Trump election campaign rally — but with lots more speakers.
Outside the event center, there is tons of Trump swag, including signature “Make America Great Again” hats. The walls of the basketball arena, where the Dallas Mavericks play, are covered with photographs of Trump. There are Trump photographs in the elevators.
The ambience underscores the event’s real purpose of spurring Trump’s most devout supporters to lift Republicans in the midterms.
Speaker after speaker tout Trump’s record, at times prompting the audience to reprise the mantra from the 2024 campaign, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Colorado Rep. Jason Crow is among the Democratic members of Congress who traveled to Dallas to offer a counter to Trump’s run of show inside American Airlines Center.
“Like most things, Donald Trump is not making it about Americans,” Crow told The Associated Press. “He’s not making it about Sept. 11. He’s not making it about the midterms. He is not making it about saving Republicans who are at risk. He’s making it about himself.”
Crow said Democrats will key on Trump’s failure to deliver on his economic promises while explaining how they would address rising costs and use their House majority to investigate Trump’s administration and his family’s financial dealings.
“Our job is to highlight the abuses, the failings,” he said, “and to try to make the case as to how we will fix this and retake our democracy.”
House GOP leaders Reps. Steve Scalise and Tom Emmer used stark language in their attacks on Democrats.
“These people are insane,” Scalise, the House majority leader, said of the opposition party. The Democratic Party has been “completely taken over by communists” in a “Bolshevik revolution,” he said.
If Republicans stay home in November, Democrats will win the House majority and will go on the attack, he warned.
“The first thing they’ll do is they’ll impeach President Trump and his Cabinet,” he said.
Emmer, the House majority whip, said Democrats “hate your country.”
“This is a country worth fighting for,” Emmer said. “We will not let the Marxists and communists and anarchists destroy it.”
Emmer called out three Democrats by name: Zohran Mamdani, Ilhan Omar and Abdul El-Sayed, three of the nation’s most prominent Muslim politicians.
Opponents of redistricting in Missouri have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court after an appeals court let stand a new map backed by Trump.
It’s is the latest turn in the legal battle over the 2025 redistricting. The changes are aimed at helping Republicans gain an extra seat in their effort to maintain control of the U.S. House.
More appeals are expected, however, with the midterm elections fast approaching.
It comes shortly before ballots begin going out in the pivotal midterm elections.
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Rep. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, one of the most endangered Republicans in the House, talked up GOP healthcare plans.
His speech confronted an issue that Democrats see as one of their best.
“You deserve high quality, readily available and actually affordable healthcare,” Van Orden said. “You know who else knows this? Our great President Donald J. Trump.”
Democrats warn that millions of Americans will lose health coverage under the GOP budget that Trump dubbed “one big beautiful bill.” They say that threatens to bankrupt rural hospitals that rely on Medicaid payments to keep their doors open.
But Van Orden offered a different view. He highlighted a $50 billion investment in the Rural Health Transformation Program.
“These investments have made a real difference to real people all over rural America,” he said.
Turner, the Housing and Urban Development secretary, was the first Cabinet member to speak at the midterm convention.
He told the audience that Trump ended diversity, equity and inclusion, commonly called “DEI,” and that “biological truth” was back. Housing assistance, he said, was meant to be a “trampoline and not a hammock.”
A former football player who spent nine seasons in the NFL, Turner is a native of the area near where the convention is being held.
A Dallas mother says she left the Democratic Party because of what she saw as government overreach during the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the GOP convention, Ally Raskin said her daughter was required to stay out of school for longer than vaccinated kids in her class after an exposure to the virus. She said she pulled the girl from school and sued the district.
“That experience changed me,” Raskin said. “It became impossible for me to ignore how deeply political decisions can affect our basic freedoms.”
After that, she ran to be a Republican precinct leader and pushed her county to hand count ballots. She said she found her “political home” and her voice.
Republican Carlos De La Cruz, running in Texas’ newly drawn 35th District, praised Trump for securing the border in “record time” during a speech before the GOP midterm convention.
De La Cruz had listed himself as a “TRUMP CONSERVATIVE” on his campaign website. That changed to “PROVEN CONSERVATIVE.”
His campaign rejected a suggestion that he was moving away from the president.
The change came amid a sprint to Election Day as a small group of Republican candidates has quietly begun to distance themselves in subtle ways.
Republican delegates were seated on the center floor of the arena in sections near signs designating the states they represent. In the seats on the sides of the arena, other attendees were starting to file in.
Those in their seats chatted with each other and took photos, giving modest applause to the speakers.
Many in the crowd were given red American flag signs to wave.
Joe Gruters opened the convention by clanking a comically oversized gavel.
“The Republican Party is America’s party,” Gruters said. The GOP, he said, is “faith, family, community and country.”
He laid out the contrast Republicans plan to drive over the next two nights:
“Republicans are delivering freedom, opportunity, security and common sense,” Gruters said. “Democrats are being overtaken by radical socialists driving their party further and further from the values that make America great.”
And Gruters delivered the first of what is likely to be a steady stream of effusive praise for Trump, calling him “the greatest Republican messenger of our lifetime” and “the best president this country has ever had.”
The Republican midterm convention kicked off with the national anthem and “America the Beautiful,” alongside an honor guard presenting the U.S. and other flags.
Before the songs, an announcer said the party was ready to “fight, fight, fight” Democrats.
Calling Mexico “an even graver challenge” than other countries in the region because of cartels’ power there, Rubio said Wednesday that the “ideal” scenario would be for the two countries to address the situation jointly.
“Eventually that threat will have to be confronted one way or the other,” Rubio told reporters in Ecuador. “But our hope is to do it cooperatively with Mexican authorities.”
Rubio complimented Mexican authorities for doing “more than they’ve ever done before to go after these groups, but it is still not nearly enough.”
Asked by reporters if the U.S. knows which countries are helping Tehran in the ongoing war, Rubio said the U.S. doesn’t believe that foreign assistance is helping the country, as both sides have returned to open hostilities in recent weeks.
“We don’t believe anybody is giving Iran anything that’s changing the dynamics or the parameters of what we’re seeing,” Rubio said while in Ecuador. “At the end of the day, they continue to fire on naval ships and when they fire at our naval ships, they pay a price in tankers.
He added, “In the meantime, we’re going to continue to strangle them economically.”
At the U.S. Embassy in Ecuador, Rubio said that U.S. strategy in dealing with boats allegedly tied to drug trafficking “depends on the country.”
The U.S. secretary of state was asked whether the United States had changed its approach to intercepting the boats, as opposed to boat strikes that have been part of a months-long campaign.
Rubio said that countries like Ecuador have “been very cooperative,” calling such bilateral agreements “an incredible advance.”
Saying that each target “goes through all the lawyers” of the Pentagon, Rubio stressed strikes “are joint operations” and occur under “an understanding as to how those operations are going to occur” with the country in whose waters they take place.
The president and his onetime fixer have made up since Cohen went to prison and was a key witness in a 2024 business fraud trial that resulted in Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts.
“What they did to Michael Cohen was a disgrace,” Trump said Wednesday.
Cohen spent three years in prison for federal crimes that included arranging the payment of hush money to conceal his boss’ alleged sexual affairs. Cohen told his sentencing judge that he did Trump’s “dirty deeds” out of “blind loyalty.”
Trump noted that Cohen “recanted” and said prosecutors “forced him to say things he didn’t want to say and that he didn’t believe.”
Cohen has told CNN he has submitted a pardon application to the White House.
Asked whether he’d pardon Cohen, the president said he’s “never been asked that question” and added he appreciated that Cohen “came out and rectified the situation.”
Gina Hinojosa said that if the GOP midterm convention kicking off Wednesday in Dallas is just about the culture wars, she doesn’t think people have the patience for that.
“People don’t want politics as usual and that is why our campaign is building momentum,” she said.
The state lawmaker is running against Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who is seeking a record fourth term in November.
She spoke in Dallas at a venue that featured thousands of volumes of files related to Jeffrey Epstein and met with women who have accused him of sexual abuse.
Hinojosa said it’s “really incredible that we live in a country where the justice system is so broken at every level that there has not been accountability.”
“We do not have a better ally in the region with regards to confronting the threat of criminal transnational organizations,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday in Ecuador, standing alongside Foreign Minister Roberto Kury.
Speaking first in Spanish, then in English, Rubio said “elite forces” from both countries “are working jointly on a day-to-day basis in a way that has no precedence in order to try to dismantle these terrorist organizations.”
Rubio also said he would be asking Congress for $45 million “to continue contributing towards this effort of dismantling these terrorist groups and finishing them once and for all.” However, he did not specify what the funds would be for.
Rubio visited Ecuador on Wednesday on the second leg of a three-nation tour of South America.
The Qatari-gifted Air Force One took off at around 2:55 p.m. ET after the issue with the inflatable emergency slide was resolved.
Asked whether he was sure the Qatari-gifted jet was safe for his trip to Texas, the president expressed no doubt: “Yeah, I am, or I wouldn’t be on it.”
Trump said crews had been testing an emergency slide that was seen deployed on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews.
After Trump boarded, a crew appeared to pack up and cart away the deployed slide.
Trump flew on the Qatari jet during his July trip to Turkey for the NATO summit. An older Air Force One was used as a decoy when he returned home from Ankara.
In Quito, Rubio announced his latest foreign terrorist organization designation of a Latin American drug trafficking ring: Ecuador’s Los Tiguerones.
The designation imposes sanctions on the group and its members and makes providing any kind of “material support” to it a U.S. criminal offense.
Perhaps more significantly, under the Trump administration’s counternarcotics strategy, it could make the group a target for military action.
Los Tiguerones are among 22 criminal gangs designated as “terrorists” by Ecuador’s government in 2024 after it declared an internal armed conflict during a surge in violence that included gunmen storming a television station during a live broadcast.
The gang’s top leader, William Alcívar, alias “Negro Willy,” was captured that year but later released.
The president rejected the idea that any Republicans might want to avoid attending the midterm convention.
“Everybody’s coming to the convention. Everybody wants to come,” Trump said.
The president claimed the arena doesn’t have space for every politician who wants to attend. “We have room for the ones that have a close race,” he said.
However, multiple Republicans with tight contests will be at home campaigning. Among them are Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, GOP Senate nominee John Sununu of New Hampshire, and Rep. David Valadao of California, one of the most vulnerable House Republicans.
Republicans have a razor-thin House majority and have grown increasingly worried about defending their 53-47 Senate majority.
Trump said Wednesday that oil prices that have surged because of the Iran war likely won’t come down until after U.S. midterm elections.
Oil prices jumped more than 3% today, pushing international Brent crude past the $100 threshold for the first time since July as salvos between the U.S. and Iran escalated.
“Right after the election, oil prices are going to be tumbling downward,” Trump said. “I think it’s going to take a little bit longer than the midterm.”
Trump, in an exchange with reporters before traveling to Dallas for the midterm Republican convention, added that he believes Iran will finally relent after the pivotal elections are held in the U.S.
“I think the war’s going to end immediately after the election because they can’t hold out any longer,” Trump said.
At the outset of the war, the president said it would last a matter of weeks. The war is now in its seventh month.
The organizers say they understand why many Republicans are skipping the Dallas midterm convention.
“One thing, we just have so many speaking slots. We can’t get them all in,” Ray Washburne, co-chair of the Dallas host committee, told reporters before the convention’s kickoff at an event hosted by Bloomberg News. “The other is: If you’re not in a contested race, it really doesn’t make much sense to come. And the ones in contested races, they need to be in their home states to campaign.”
Nonetheless, he said about 30,000 people are expected to attend over the two nights.
“It’s going to be a packed house. It’s going to be raucous,” said Rick Gorka, a convention spokesperson.
Despite Trump’s low approval ratings, Washburne said the president “absolutely” remains an asset and that it makes sense for him to be prominent.
“He’s always front-and-center,” he said.
The president said, “We’re going to have a tremendous crowd tonight” in Dallas, adding that the ticketed event is “sold out.”
“Looks very big. Looks very exciting, and we’re going to explain what we’ve done,” Trump added before boarding Air Force One.
Trump wanted the unusual midterm convention to boost excitement among Republican voters. His approval ratings have dropped over the course of this election year.
Even though he’s not on the ballot, that threatens GOP majorities in the House and Senate.
An emergency inflated slide was visible on the side of Air Force One.
Trump told reporters on the tarmac that crews were testing the slide. He had stayed on Marine One for several minutes after arriving at Joint Base Andrews before emerging to talk to reporters.
Trump said he’s confident the aircraft is safe as he travels to Texas.
FILE - People protest against Trump's policy towards Greenland in front of the US consulate in Nuuk, Greenland, Jan. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)
National Guard troops stop a young woman on a rental scooter near a closed intersection where President Donald Trump was holding an event, in Washington, Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
President Donald Trump arrives to speak during the Tunnel to Towers Foundation event for the 25th Anniversary of 9/11, on the Ellipse near the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
A Mercedes decorated with images of President Donald Trump is seen outside before the Republican convention Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026, in Dallas. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
