Jeffery Simmons is attending Titans mandatory minicamp, but he’s not participating in any drills. While the player is clearly staging a “hold-in,” neither Simmons nor the Titans coaching staff will attribute his on-field absence to contract issues.

The Titans picked up the former first-round pick’s fifth-year option, so Simmons still has two years remaining on his rookie pact. He’ll earn a base salary of $2.22MM this upcoming season before getting that fifth-year jump, which is at $10.75MM. Curiously, Simmons doesn’t have an agent; instead, he has a “team” that deals with his contract.

“I’m not talking to them about my contract. I have a team in place that, if it is my contract, they’re going to talk to whoever upstairs,” Simmons said (via Terry McCormick of TitansInsider.com). “Vrabs doesn’t handle contracts. My job is to be a leader, be a player and not just on the field but in the weight room, the lockerroom, or whatever it may be. I’m on the plan and I’m sticking with it, and I’ll see you guys in camp.”

While Simmons could be hinting that his team is negotiating a new contract with the organization, Mike Vrabel also said the defensive lineman’s absence doesn’t have anything to do with contracts. Rather, Simmons is “following the plan laid out by the team” that would have him ready for training camp, per McCormick.

The 2019 first-round pick had a breakout season in 2021. After collecting only five sacks through his first 24 games, Simmons finished the 2022 campaign with 8.5 sacks. He added 54 tackles, 12 tackles for loss, and 16 QB hits.

The Titans will see their first-round pick in practice for the first time soon. Jeffery Simmons will practice with the team this week, the Titans announced on their website.

Residing on the Titans’ NFI list, the rookie defensive lineman has been recovering from the ACL tear he suffered in February. NFI players can begin practicing with their teams after Week 6 while remaining off teams’ 53-man rosters.

Simmons’ debut would seem a ways away, given this injury’s timetable, but it’s nonetheless promising for the Titans to see him in on-field workouts. He traveled with the Titans to Denver this past weekend. Players have returned from ACL tears in playoff games in time for Week 1 of the following season, so a Simmons debut in the second half of this season would not be out of the question. That may also depend on Tennessee’s playoff prospects, which do not look especially promising after Sunday’s shutout loss.

The Titans will understandably want to be cautious with such a high-priority investment, so a full redshirt season — which was rumored in the offseason — should still be considered in play.

The Mississippi State-developed interior defender was viewed a potential top-10 pick before the injury and still went off the board 19th in a stacked class of defensive linemen. He registered 32.5 tackles for loss in three seasons.

Despite two major issues that damaged his draft stock, DT Jeffery Simmons was selected by the Titans with the No. 19 overall pick of this year’s draft. When team owner Amy Adams Strunk signed off on the selection, that helped Simmons put one of those issues, an assault against a woman that Simmons committed while in high school, in the rearview mirror. And now, Simmons is a little closer to overcoming his second hurdle, a torn ACL that he suffered in February.

In early June, Simmons told Erik Bacharach of the Nashville Tennessean that he had not yet started running or jogging. He said, “I’m not rushing anything. If I don’t play this year, I’m fine with it, but my goal is to get healthy on my time and on this team’s time. There’s no time limit [on] when I can come back. Every day I come to work, I’m putting my mindset, you know, ‘I want to get back today.’ That’s how I come to work everyday and try to get better.”

But Simmons recently posted to his Instagram account a clip of himself running across a football field (h/t Titans Tape on Twitter). The clip is not long, and much of it is in slow motion, but the fact that he has been cleared to run is a major step in the right direction.

Of course, as Josh Alper of Pro Football Talk points out, the fact that Simmons is running in a straight line does not mean that he will be ready to hit the practice field when training camp opens next month. He likely won’t be cleared until the end of the regular season, and depending on where the Titans are in the playoff race at that point, he may ultimately miss his entire rookie campaign. But progress is progress, and Tennessee is doubtlessly encouraged by this latest development.

The Titans’ D-line is still a bit thin outside of star Jurrell Casey, and Simmons’ presence could go a long way towards bolstering that unit.