Which is all to say: It’s complicated. No one taking a weight-loss drug should feel compelled to apologize for it, and yet, I still wish that celebrities — whom so many people idolize — didn’t actively sell them. Most of all, I wish we could get to a point where we didn’t equate thinness with health, beauty or moral superiority. On that front, I’m afraid we still have very far to go.
Mike McCoy takes easy way out when asked about game-changing Titans coaching decisions
Posted November 3, 2025
The Tennessee Titans lost again in Week 9, this time at home to the Los Angeles Chargers, 27-20. The good news is that they finally covered a spread! So that's good. The bad news is that the offense managed just six points, and it's now been a full calendar year since this team won a home game.
Things are bleak in Nashville. And in this game, the most memorable element of the offensive showing will be the play-calling on short-yardage situations. It was marred by trick plays doomed to fail from the start, way too much wildcat formation, and a refusal to run a simple QB sneak or tush push. When interim head coach Mike McCoy was asked to address these issues after the game, he took his typically unenlightening style at the podium to a new level.
Mike McCoy's coachspeak reaches new lows
The Titans ran three plays from wildcat in this game, and not one of them worked. But let me tell you, they kept going back to that weird well anyway. I guess they ran a lot of it in practice this week and really loved how it was working. Unfortunately, that wasn't the way it went in the game. Here's the only video of one such play I could find immediately after the game:
The reaction to these wildcat calls was, well... just read for yourself.
It's not like this is something the Titans have done a lot of before.
"Well, that's all part of game planning," said Mike McCoy, when asked about going back to wildcat calls repeatedly on Sunday. "I think, as the offensive staff, when you go look at a game plan, how you're going to attack a certain opponent, there's certain things you always put in. So, when the staff put the plan together, they had a lot of—they thought this was the best thing to do."
I won't pretend to know what compelled them to think this was the best thing for this game, but I do feel comfortable saying they thought wrong. Here's my favorite part: McCoy was then asked why the wildcat plays didn't work as they had hoped. His response, "The defense stopped them."
And then there was the issue of refusing to run QB sneaks on any of these short-yardage downs and distances. It reached a crescendo when Cam Ward and company reached the 1-yard line, poised to take a lead in the third quarter. They ran one of their wildcat plays on third down, which went nowhere. Then, on fourth down, they handed the ball to Tony Pollard instead of trying a QB sneak.
Or, perhaps better yet, running a tush push. You know, the play that's about to be outlawed for being too powerful an offensive tool? McCoy was asked about that after the game, too. Why not run a push play there? Are you guys against that kind of play, and if so, why?
"No, I'm all for it," McCoy said. "I'm not against it by any means."
Well then, why not run it?
The Price of Honesty: Celebrities and the Growing Backlash Against GLP-1 Drug Use
Once upon a time, a famous person might lose weight with alarming speed and say with a straight face that she’d done it by eating a balanced diet of smaller portions. Though we regular folks wanted that to be true — it gave us hope we could follow their simple steps and shrink ourselves — there was always a sense that they were gatekeeping other keys to success, like the employment of private chefs, extravagant at-home gyms and maybe even the sorts of drugs only the rich and privileged had access to. So it’s been a breath of fresh air to hear stars cop to using semaglutides, a.k.a. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro. But that openness has its downsides too.
When Serena Williams announced in August that she’d used Zepbound — and was now a celebrity patient ambassador for telehealth company Ro, which sells GLP-1s — backlash was swift, with detractors accusing Williams of everything from setting a poor example about body image to medical irresponsibility. A few weeks later, Williams — one of the greatest athletes in history — posted on Instagram about what a trying month she’d had, saying she was now prioritizing her mental health. It was impossible not to put the pieces together: Her honesty about using (and now selling) weight-loss drugs had not gone over as expected.
Others have been there before: stars like Rebel Wilson and Lizzo, who for so long were a North Star for fat fans more interested in changing society than their bodies. When both admitted to Ozempic (Wilson is now Noom’s chief wellness ambassador, touting the brand’s microdosed GLP-1 product), many took it as a betrayal. Here were two women who had previously given the middle finger to diet culture, said “take me as I am or GTFO,” now instead using those fingers to press down on an injector pen and, in some cases, encouraging us to follow. (Male stars who’ve taken GLP-1s, like Eric Stonestreet, a spokesperson for Mounjaro, and Charles Barkley, an ambassador for Ro, seem to avoid the backlash women endure. Black women, especially, thanks to misogynoir, get the most criticism.)
I am a fat person who has yo-yo dieted her entire life. After years of actively deprogramming from and rejecting dietculture, in 2023, I started Wegovy. I felt conflicted: On one hand, I am allowed to do what I want with my body. In fact, in a time of increasing control over women, the act felt in some ways transgressive. On the other, I wasn’t so much rebelling as I was embracing the oppressive, misogynistic diet industrial complex all over again.
The people suffering the most from the normalization of weight-loss drug use are people in fat bodies who don’t want to lose weight and already face medical indifference and legalized bigotry. (Title VII, the federal law that prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin, does not protect against size discrimination.) Cultural critic Virgie Tovar, an ambassador for Weight Stigma Awareness Week (Sept. 22–26), shared on Instagram her experience of fat-shaming at New York Fashion Week 2025, something she says had not happened before. “There are real-life, real-world human impacts for cultural shifts around the pro-weight-loss culture that we’re in right now because of GLP-1s and the way they’re being marketed,” she noted.
