Tennessee Titans 2024 Draft Preview by Position

The latest of my occasional posts about the Tennessee Titans.

One of the staples of my pre-draft coverage for years has been a draft preview by position, including a breakdown of what the Titans have at each position, what they might be looking for, and a probability the Titans draft a player (or two) at that position. See here for what this exercise looked like last year.

As of right now, the evening before the draft, the Titans currently hold seven selections in the 2024 NFL draft. Two of those selections are in the seventh round, Philadelphia’s acquired in the trade for Ugo Amadi and Kansas City’s acquired in the L’Jarius Sneed deal. My regular disclaimer in this post has included that selections that late in the draft (generally, anything outside the first 200 picks) should be considered a head start on undrafted free agency, ripe for doubling up on a need position or locking in a player at a position that may not be much of a need. Consequently, I don’t think it’s useful to consider those picks in calculating draft probabilities. It’s the earlier picks that are more likely to be used on players with a role to play on the 53-man roster. Because what I’m doing here is trying to figure out what the Titans think they want to draft, I decided to base my draft probabilities on the five picks the Titans hold in the first six rounds, where they’re most likely looking for key contributors for 2024 and beyond.

I say pretty much every year this is an exercise in (hopefully educated) guesswork. While Ran Carthon was general manager last year, in this year’s pre-draft press conference, he described this as basically his first draft as general manager. That’s the kind of statement it’s easy to read too much into, but he might have a legitimate point there. Further, this is Brian Callahan’s first draft as Titans head coach, and for that matter, his first draft as a head coach anywhere. We can try to project Carthon, Cally, and Chad Brinker (who kicked off that pre-draft presser and came from Green Bay, which definitely has specific physical thresholds they try to rely on) based on players they’ve been around in the past, but that may another example of reading too much into things.

One thing I’ve included almost every year I’ve done this, and that seems likely to continue to be important under Carthon, is a list of players linked to the Titans by a pre-draft visit to the team’s facility. Standard disclaimer: these are compiled based on media reports, and should not be relied on as either complete or completely accurate. But if they bring in six players at one position and one at another, it’s probably (supporting) information they’re probably more interested in the position where they’ve brought in a bunch of players. As the Peter Skoronski pick without a visit showed, though, a player getting a visit is not a requirement for the Titans to make them a high pick.

Repeated note: as much as I can, this post attempts to describe what the Titans might do based on how I think the Titans might think. Carthon and Callahan will be setting the direction and making the decisions for the team, so I try to think like they will think. What I would do if I were in charge of the Titans is (a) in some cases quite different and (b) completely irrelevant in terms of predicting what the Titans will do.

That said, on with the show.

Quarterback
Need at position: Low
Analysis: Will Levis is the starter. Mason Rudolph is the backup. The Titans have a ton of needs at other positions. If you think the Titans should want to upgrade on Will Levis, (a) they’ve given no public sign that they’re interested in such a thing and (b) even at #7, getting the fourth- or fifth-best quarterback in this class doesn’t (to me) make much sense. If they want to spend a 7th on a camp arm, sure, whatever, but I can’t see it happening with one of the picks that matters.
Visitors: none
Draft probability: 1%

Running Back
Need at position: Low-moderate
Analysis: Tyjae Spears will play a fair bit. Tony Pollard will play a fair bit after the Titans signed the former Cowboy in free agency to a significant contract. But Brian Callahan did indicate he’d like a back that’s more of a stylistic complement to those two, and the Titans have brought in a couple backs they’d probably have to take in the middle rounds. With as many other needs as the Titans have, though, it’s hard to make this a priority.
Visitors: Rasheen Ali (Marshall), MarShawn Lloyd (USC)
Draft probability: 19%

Wide Receiver
Need at position: High
Analysis: The Titans’ third receiver right now looks like a battle between Treylon Burks, whom OC Nick Holz noted in his presser earlier this month will get whatever he shows he deserves, Kyle Philips, offseason superstar who in two years hasn’t even played half as many snaps as Burks played last year, and Nick Westbrook-Ikhine, who is Nick Westbrook-Ikhine. Enter Brian Callahan from Cincinnati, where the Bengals ran an awful lot of three receiver sets. Of course, those Bengals teams generally had three good receivers, but see below about tight ends and the possibilities of 12 personnel. Last year was a good receiver draft, and the Titans didn’t hit the position until Colton Dowell in the seventh round. They can’t avoid the match of need and availability for a second consecutive season, can they? Obviously a possibility at any point in the draft, and with more picks I’d do what I did last year and give them the chance of taking a second.
Visitors: Xavier Legette (South Carolina), Malik Nabers (LSU), Roman Wilson (Michigan)
Draft probability: 90%

Tight End
Need at position: High
Analysis: This one is pretty simple. Callahan mentioned earlier in the month that he’d want five or six tight ends to take into training camp. The Titans currently have three tight ends on the roster. When I did my roster moves analysis, I highlighted tight end as one of the positions where they lost a major contributor and didn’t add anybody. Yes, there are still veteran tight ends on the market. But given where they are vs. where they want to be, the Titans could easily both draft a tight end and add a veteran. Given the other needs, I don’t see this as a priority, but if the right guy is there on Day Three, absolutely.
Visitors: none
Draft probability: 50%

Offensive Tackle
Need at position: High
Analysis: If the Titans had to line up and play tomorrow, I guess Jaelyn Duncan would be the starting left tackle. Based on what we saw last season, that’s not an acceptable option unless he’s made a massive offseason jump. Callahan praised the depth of the offensive line class and the ability to get contributors late (by which he meant not at #7, necessarily?), as long as you can pick the right players. But given the pedigree of offensive tackles and how incredibly annoying it’s been to watch the last two seasons of Titans offense with bad left tackle play, it feels like a lock in the first two rounds. And given that right tackle is Duncan or Nicholas Petit-Frere, a different Titans team with different needs and a deeper collection of draft pick could easily justify a pick there. As with receiver, though, I’m not giving them a chance of taking a second with these five picks and this many needs.
Visitors: Joe Alt (Notre Dame), Taliese Fuaga (Oregon State), Tyler Guyton (Oklahoma), J.C. Latham (Alabama), Jordan Morgan (Arizona)
Draft probability: 95%

Offensive Guard/Center
Need at position: Low
Analysis: Left guard is locked in with Peter Skoronski. Center is locked in with Lloyd Cushenberry. Daniel Brunskill returns and could start at right guard again. Free agent import Saahdiq Charles might have a chance to displace Brunskill. Again, a different Titans team could look for an option other than dumpster diving and justify a mid-round pick on an offensive guard, and a pick here shouldn’t be a shock. But there’s not that much need here, and there are big needs elsewhere.
Visitors: none (Fuaga, Guyton, Latham, Morgan all ALT: OG)
Draft probability: 10%

Defensive Line
Need at position: Moderate to high
Analysis: Jeffery Simmons is good, but he’s also missed time four of the five years he’s been in the NFL. Sebastian Joseph-Day is a veteran, but it’s hard to find a third player on the roster you (or at least I) feel good about. Not the biggest priority, but a position where you can justify a pick anywhere outside the first round.
Visitors: McKinnley Jackson (Texas A&M), T’Vondre Sweat (Texas)
Draft probability: 50%

Outside Linebacker
Need at position: Moderate to high
Analysis: Harold Landry had more sack production last year than I thought he might coming off a torn ACL. But the lesson of last year might have been that Arden Key is best suited as a complementary third rusher than a player suited for a big every-down role. And another lesson of last year is that last year’s coaching staff (at least) didn’t see Rashad Weaver as a player who deserved to play more snaps, even considering the above. If you absolutely had to, you could probably get by with those three as your basic rotation. But you probably wouldn’t if you had options. Like defensive line, not the biggest priority, but a position where you can justify a pick anywhere outside the first round.
Visitiors: Jalyx Houston (Houston Christian)
Draft probability: 50%

Inside linebacker
Need at position: Moderate-high
Analysis: The Titans have one inside linebacker they like in Kenneth Murray. They tried playing last year without a second starting-caliber inside linebacker, and I for one didn’t enjoy the results when they played with two inside linebackers on the field anyway. On the other hand, this is generally regarded as a terrible draft for inside linebackers. Like running back, the position may be somewhat devalued, but teams still want to add them to play roles and fill out their roster, and the lack of depth at the position may see the ones who are there get forced up the draft by need. If the Titans decide they should be one of those teams, a possibility as early as the second round. On the other hand, if they don’t let need dictate the board, it may not happen at all.
Visitors: Junior Colson (Michigan)
Draft probability: 70%

Cornerback
Need at position: Low?
Analysis: The Titans have three cornerbacks they really like between L’Jarius Sneed, Chidobe Awuzie, and Roger McCreary. On the other hand, McCreary is much better as a slot than he is on the outside, it’s hard to go through a full season using only three corners, and the fourth corner is Tre Avery? Eric Garror? Theoretical Caleb Farley? Bringing in draft prospects even after adding Sneed and Awuzie feels like a sign the Titans know they could use another player here. Not a priority given the other needs, but a definite possibility on day three.
Visitors: Kris Abrams-Draine (Mizzou), Terrion Arnold (Alabama), Jarvis Brownlee (Louisville), Caelen Carson (Wake Forest), Kool-Aid McKinstry (Alabama)
Draft probability: 30%

Safety
Need at position: Moderate to high
Analysis: I highlighted safety when I wrote about every Titans roster move as a position where they lost significant contributors (basically the non-Amani Hooker starter) and haven’t added anybody. The Titans do still have cap space, and there are still starter-type veteran safeties available, and the emanations and penumbras still suggest a match between A and B is likely to happen after the draft. But if you draft a player you feel is capable of starting, that doesn’t have to happen. Even if that player isn’t ready to start this year, Hooker hasn’t been able to stay healthy and it would be easy to cut him next offseason if you have a replacement in hand. Not a priority given the other needs and the ability to improve the position other than in the draft, but a definite possibility on day three.
Visitors: none
Draft probability: 30%

Some Macro-Level Thoughts

1. Some draft picks are about players on the roster. I make this point every year, even though I don’t see much room for this kind of pick this year. The Titans have so many holes at so many different positions I keep prioritizing the known and obvious holes over this type of pick, but this is definitely a thing that happens.
2. We don’t know what kind of time horizon Carthon is working with. As I wrote, the Sneed trade suggested a need to win in 2024, but the pre-draft press conference suggested that this won’t be J-Rob-esque taking the biggest current season needs and pretty much drafting off that list.
3. Special teams matters. A safety or linebacker might be as much a special teams player as a defensive contributor. Ditto a tight end on offense, especially given the new kickoff format. Do they have a returner they like on the roster, or would that be a potential bonus point for a wide receiver?
4. One of my goals for this exercise each year is to stack positional priorities. By that measure, it ended up about like this:
   WR + OT — LB — TE + DL + OLB — CB + SAF – RB – OG/C – QB

   The implication of that stacking is the Titans are likely to particularly prioritize a wide receiver and an offensive tackle, would really like to draft a linebacker, and could use a tight end, a defensive lineman, and an outside linebacker. That’s already six positions when the Titans only have five picks of note. Unless the Titans acquire an extra pick or three, it will be impossible for them to address all of what I think they see as their biggest needs. That’s true even if they ignore the other positions where they could justify a draft pick. I said this last year, but getting down to 5.0 was very difficult this year. I feel really good about the top two being huge needs, but that doesn’t require any special insight. While writing up this post, I’ve revised each of the top three defensive positions, increasing LB and lowering DL and OLB. Was I right to do so? I don’t know, and might change my mind back in the morning before publishing this post. Corner and safety in particular both feel too low. I’m locked into 5.0 as the total, and I’d have to lower some other positional probability to do that, and whatever I’d change already feels too low. Feel free to make your own adjustments, as you see fit, but they must be net-zero.

5. Beyond the normal online mechanical mocks, I did a 32-person mock without making any trades myself, and ended up with this:
   #7 OT Ola Fashanu, Penn State
   #38 DL Darius Robinson, Mizzou
   #106 RB MarShawn Lloyd, USC
   #146 WR Malik Washington, Virginia
   #182 TE Tip Reiman, Illinois
   #227 SAF Jaylon Carlies, Missouri
   #242 DL Khristian Boyd, Northern Iowa
   #252 CB Storm Duck, Louisville
   Based on my current thinking, the Titans might be more likely to go with Taliese Fuaga with Joe Alt off the board (Rome Odunze was also available). Lloyd is not a pick I would make, but the visit and Callahan’s desire at the position tells me the Titans might, and would probably have to take him there. One of the things doing this mock and the mechanical mocks has told me is the Titans shouldn’t be locked into any single conception of how the draft might unfold and should be prepared to adjust which position they take where based on who is available. That’s kind of a banal point, but I’ve done other mock drafts where I draft a receiver at #38 and the first three players on Day Three all play defense. With so many needs, the Titans could prioritize value over position and still get players who’ll play a role for them. (Procedural note: for ease of administration, we “locked” the draft from future NFL transactions before the Titans traded #227 to the Browns for Leroy Watson.)
6. One general note on this year’s draft class: the issue of age. With Brinker’s analytics-influenced background and Sarah Bailey, the Titans will probably be well aware that it’s more impressive to be good at a younger age, and this is a draft with a ton of overage players. I didn’t make it a repeated theme here, because this post isn’t focused on specific prospects I may or may not have watched in any detail. This is probably more of a focus for players early in the draft, and I wouldn’t overrate this idea-Fuaga being 8 months older than Fashanu probably shouldn’t matter that much. That Malik Washington turns 24 in October isn’t a reason to not draft him at all, but it might be a reason to draft him later or to prioritize a similarly-graded prospect over him (TE example: Dane Brugler’s TE6 Ben Sinnott is over three years younger than his TE7 Tanner McLachlan).
7. My baseline expectation is that the Titans will draft all but one of the positions I think they are likely to draft, while hitting one of the positions I think they are less likely to draft. That tends to be about how it goes. But we’ll see how it goes. As usual, I’m sitting on my couch trying to figure out what people who don’t think like I think will do rather than telling you how it will be.

Examining every Titans 2024 roster move (to date)

The latest of my occasional posts about the Tennessee Titans.

“If we’re going in, we’re going in full throttle.”

Instead of writing regularly about the Tennessee Titans, as I did in my regular team-blogging days, I’m writing a handful of posts a year, typically a season preview post (not last year, because I finally got COVID and didn’t just want to annoy people by predicting the Titans would go 6-11 and writing such a post wouldn’t be enjoyable), a draft preview post, and maybe a post if something major happens like they fire a head coach or general manager. Because I’m not writing regularly or trying to cover everything, I prefer to concentrate my more selective writing schedule on writing broader-scale posts rather than trying to cover every detail. Naturally, I’ve decided to break my latest pause by writing a post that addresses every single Titans roster move since the end of the 2023 season. Yes, all 34 of them.

Roster move (part one): Signed DB Shyheim Carter, CB Tay Gowan, WR Tre’Shaun Harrison, TE Thomas Odukoya, OLB Thomas Rush, and OL Lachavious Simmons to Reserve/Futures deals (all Jan. 8).
Roster move (part two): Practice squad contract expired for TE Devin Asiasi, LB Tae Crowder, C James Empey, DE David Moa, S Darius Phillips, G/T Jordan Roos, CB Kendall Sheffield, WR Shi Smith, and S Josh Thompson (all Jan. 15).
Roster move (part three): Non-tendered restricted free agents DL Ross Blacklock, DL Marlon Davidson, G Calvin Throckmorton (all Mar. 13).
Analysis: With the current era of NFL roster rules, there’s no longer quite the same distinction between the 53-man roster of players who are available to play in games on a regular basis and the practice squad that was once 8 players and is now 16, most of whom could be called up to the gameday roster on a selective and weekly basis. Consequently, the practice squad is no longer quite as much a purely developmental squad and group of players who help you get through practice each week over the course of a long season and prep for particular opponents but rather more like a group of 6-12 players who are those practice players and may be called up for specific matchups and a smaller group of the developmental players that may match the theoretical model of the “developmental” aspects of the practice squad. As an outsider, it can be hard to tell just which players fit in which category. The time we really get clarity on this split, between which players the front office and/or coaching staff may see as developmental prospects worth keeping and which are just there to help a team get through the course of the season, is which practice squad players the team chooses to re-sign at the end of their season and which the team chooses to let walk.

The split in terms of which players they chose to re-sign was not too surprising. Asiasi, Crowder, Phillips, and Roos were all on the veteran/exempt exceptions to the “practice squads should be for young players” rule, and players like Moa and Thompson were on the experienced side of things. Of the players they did retain, Harrison was a 2023 UDFA, Odukoya has been an exempt international player, Rush was a 2023 UDFA. Carter, Gowan, and Simmons were all on the older side (2020/21/20 draft classes, respectively), but all are at positions where the Titans were not necessarily deep (as of the end of the season, mind you), and I think it’s important to have those sorts of “you must be at least this good to make the team” benchmark players. And of the players the Titans did not re-sign, none of them were their UDFAs at any point, and none was particularly young. While they don’t officially fall in the same category as the practice squad players the Titans didn’t re-sign, I lump Blacklock, Davidson, and Throckmorton in the same group, players the Titans could have chosen to (attempt to) retain relatively cheaply but were instead not re-signed, not even by the Nick Westbrook-Ikhine non-tender and re-sign route.

The other half of this that particularly applied to the Titans this offseason was they fired the head coach and were turning over all/most of their coaching staff, and that’s often a key time where we learn which players the coaching staff may have valued relative to the front office and which are let walk because of that. When the Titans only retained 6 practice squad players, I thought we might see a new wave of low-end signings after the new head coach was hired, but that did not happen.

Roster move: Re-signed LS Morgan Cox to 1-year deal (reported Mar. 7).
Analysis: Cox was a pending unrestricted free agent, and it’s really useful to have a long-snapper on the roster. This is checking off a necessary box.

Roster move: Signed CB Chidobe Awuzie (ex-Bengals) to 3-year deal (reported Mar. 11, official Mar. 14).
Analysis: You need three corners in the NFL to start, and more as backups and for particular sub packages and as injury replacements. The Titans had one starter in Roger McCreary after Kristian Fulton and Sean Murphy-Bunting hit free agency. Awuzie is an obvious Brian Callahan fit coming from the Bengals and a veteran of the kind you want in a young secondary room. Part of free agency is that free agents are expensive. Them costing “too much” should be your baseline expectation, and the Titans had a bunch of cap space to use in 2024. The real concern is that you don’t Trent Baalke yourself, improving your team in this season but not leaving yourself enough room to fill in additional holes the next offseason. If you do that, your team stagnates and depends on nailing all your (non-low) draft picks and a ton of internal improvement, and you end up the 2023 and 2024 Jaguars, a team that should be in a peak stage of contention but whose immediate future does not look outstandingly bright. But Awuzie’s contract on its own doesn’t cost you that much, and it’s a totally reasonable deal for a player who’s ideally more a 1B-type corner. There’s a bit of age and injury risk here, and the 3-year deal is unsurprisingly “2 years and we’ll see,” but this was a totally fine signing at a position of need.

Roster move: Signed C Lloyd Cushenberry (ex-Broncos) to 4-year deal (reported Mar. 11, official Mar. 14).
Analysis: With the guard market exploding this offseason ($20M/APY for Robert Hunt was only the most dramatic example), getting the top free agent center at $12.5M APY looks like a much better deal. That’s especially true with a young quarterback with enough on his plate without having to worry about protections and when you’re rebuilding the offensive line in general. I wrote about this years ago, but the Floyd Reese era worked exactly like this. The Oilers signed Mark Stepnoski from the Cowboys when they were building a new offensive line, started late-rounders like Kevin Long and Justin Hartwig when the rest of the line was established, and eventually brought in a big-money free agent in Kevin Mawae when they were rebuilding the rest of the line again. Somewhat different eras of the NFL to be sure, but it’s a strategy that works theoretically and we’ve seen work in practice. I’m not going to scout Cushenberry myself, but unless they missed on the evaluation of the player, something I’m less worried about than in the past because of the presence of Bill Callahan, this looks like a smart signing.

Roster move: Signed LB Kenneth Murray (ex-Chargers) to 3-year deal (reported Mar. 11, official Mar. 14).
Analysis: On the one hand, the Titans had a clear need at (inside) linebacker after failing to re-sign Azeez Al-Shaair and spending 2023 with only one real linebacker on the roster. On the other hand, have you seen Murray play? Actually watched him try to cover in space and play with recognition? To put him in the context of past Titans linebackers, he’s somewhere in the range of Colin McCarthy and Rashaan Evans but with better timed speed. He goes downhill and hopefully hits what he’s aiming at, and the less you ask him to do of other things, the better he is.

Part of Murray’s appeal depends on how you want your defense to play. My base perspective is that Jim Schwartz is fundamentally correct, that the best way to play defense is to rush with four specialized pass rushers and cover with seven specialized coverage players, and to just do that most of the time. You can mix up your coverages within that scheme, to the extent your players permit that, but that you should min-max your roster-building to achieve that end. New defensive coordinator Dennard Wilson comes from Baltimore, where that hasn’t been the dominant mode of defense (I don’t want to overstate this point-John Harbaugh was a special teams coach rather than a DC and they’ve run through a raft of different DCs over the years rather than a KC-style Andy Reid-Steve Spagnuolo pairing). I’m trying not to let my personal bias affect my evaluation here too much, but Murray is a player with defined weaknesses and strengths that I haven’t always seen show up even when they should in my (non-studied) watching of the Chargers. There’s hopefully more of an idea behind the signing and the Titans hopefully know all of my concerns and decided to sign Murray anyway, but of course that’s not always the case.

Roster move: Signed RB Tony Pollard (ex-Cowboys) to 3-year deal (reported Mar. 11, official Mar. 14).
Analysis: ICYMI, former running back Ran Carthon likes having running backs. I thought the Titans might go cheap after spending a third-round pick on Tyjae Spears last offseason and pair him with more of grinder back, where Hassan Haskins and maybe Julius Chestnut are already-on-the-roster options. Brian Callahan has indicated recently he still wants this sort of back, which is probably why the Titans are having pre-draft visits with backs in that mold. The obvious appeal of Pollard is that, like Spears, he has some ability both as a runner and as a pass-catcher, so his presence on the field does not tip the defense toward either defending the run or defending the pass. There are a couple risks here. One is that Pollard struggled some on the field in 2023. This was likely due to his 2022 fractured fibula and high-ankle sprain, and you can find stats showing he was a more effective player the second half of the season. If possible improvement was a small sample-size fluke, there’s a chance this signing immediately looks like a stupid mistake. The second point is whether Spears or Pollard turns into a premium pass protector-for most of Pollard’s Cowboys career, Zeke Elliott was that player and he’s awesome at that, and the Pollard snaps were a noticeable downgrade. That Joe Mixon, despite being a useful runner and pass-catcher, was not that player held the Bengals’ offense back somewhat, and forced them to be more predictable. We’ll see if Pollard and/or Spears becomes that player, or if the Titans end up settling on precisely one of those players or even using a third player in that role. So, this could end up looking anything from great to awful; if the Titans did their due diligence, it would hopefully rule out the worst cases.

Roster move: Signed G Saahdiq Charles (ex-Commanders) to 2-year deal (reported Mar. 12, official Mar. 15).
Analysis: Charles was an LSU teammate of Cushenberry, and he’s a player I would have had a much stronger take on when I followed the entire NFL much more attentively cough a decade ago. We finally got some clarity on exactly what he is from Nick Holz last week, that he showed flashes of being a terrific power player in Washington, and if he does that consistently he’s a starting guard in the NFL. IN that case, scratch any initial idea he’d be a candidate for the swing tackle spot and maybe a third body at right tackle for the competition between Jaelyn Duncan and Nicholas Petit-Frere, and file him as a developmental project for Bill Callahan and competition for Daniel Brunskill at right guard. And, uh, they’re doing something at left tackle before the season starts, right? Hopefully Ran Carthon learned the lesson from last offseason that you need more than five offensive linemen to make up an offensive line room (see also the 2022 Bengals, who did a great job of improving their starting five but only their starting five and ended up with a massive problem in the postseason when they had a couple offensive linemen get hurt). If this ends up a move with a major downside on the field, it will be because at least one other thing went badly wrong.

Roster move: Re-signed K Nick Folk to 1-year deal (reported Mar. 13, official Mar. 20).
Analysis: See also Morgan Cox above, checking a necessary box to check. One thing I noted on Twitter: Folk was a better kickoff man than I thought he might be last year, but the NFL’s Hybrid Kickoff adaptation of the XFL’s Low Impact Kickoff places a higher value on placement and accuracy than on “kick the ball really far,” and that should benefit a veteran like Folk who doesn’t have the strongest leg.

Roster move: Tendered ERFA Jack Gibbens, who re-signed (tender official Mar. 13, re-signing official Mar. 14).
Analysis: Sometimes the restricted free agent and exclusive-rights free agents market is interesting, or at least produces a more interesting result like the aforementioned NWI non-tendering and re-signing. But sometimes there’s only one and it’s a re-signing. The new kickoff rule might have an interesting impact on roster construction, and a relatively slower player like Gibbens might be more valuable in a scheme where “run down the field 40 yards” is less important. Or maybe he gets cut at/before the cut to 53, and that would be fine.

Roster move: Signed WR Calvin Ridley (ex-Jaguars) to 4-year deal (reported Mar. 13, official Mar. 15).
Analysis: The big move of free agency. As I said before, the money is the money. Yes, the contract is an “overpay.” Ridley is in the abstract not one of the ten best receivers in the NFL, or necessarily even one of the ten best receviers in the NFL on a veteran contract. But the Titans had plenty of cap space, so that doesn’t matter unless it constrains their future actions. And Ridley is a vastly better separator than any receiver the Titans had on their roster. He’s not a perfect player by any means, with a persistent problem of having a few more concentration-style drops than you’d prefer.

As Josh Norris and the fine folks at Underdog Fantasy pointed out, he was a more consistent producer for the Jaguars in 2023 when they had Zay Jones in the lineup as a pure outside receiver. Simple demonstration: looking only at the passes Trevor Lawrence attempted, without Zay in the lineup, Ridley had 9 first downs on 39 non-penalty targets. Same split but with Zay, 35/84. That’s 23% vs. 42%. I don’t have full route data for with and without Zay splits, but in the games I do have (which is still most of them), Ridley ran Go and Hitch routes on 46% of his targets with Zay in the lineup vs. 62% without Zay in the lineup. A good chunk of that difference was made up of in-breaking routes like slant, cross, and post. The Titans aren’t going to be running the same offense Doug Pederson and Press Taylor ran in Jacksonville, but that does suggest keeping Ridley outside as a Mike Williams-style pure outside the numbers receiver would not be the best use of his talents.

I don’t have people telling me things, so I can’t comment on Paul Kuharsky’s reports that some people have concerns about how Ridley will react to getting paid a chunk of change. I’ll also note that receivers recently have tended to see their production fall off in their early 30s. Like most free agency contracts, this is very much in the “two years and we’ll see” range, and there’s also the chance that Ridley’s decline in Matt Harmon’s charting for Reception Perception and his worse Open Score in ESPN’s receiver tracking metrics means this looks like a bad decision by year two. But as a baseball exec mentioned, if you don’refuse to overpay for anybody, you finish third in the race to obtain any significant free agent. This signing is a gamble, but (a) the Titans had the cap space, (b) Ridley is good at something that’s important that the Titans didn’t have anybody who was good at, (c) he’s a clear upgrade on what they had or what their obvious next best available option was, and (d) one of the ways to get a QB evaluation wrong is to lie to yourself that he’s failing because of his teammates, and this helps obviate that excuse. That it hurts the division rival Jaguars is a nice bonus, but that should be regarded as a nice bonus rather than something that helps actually justify the signing. The bottom line to me is that as far as gambles go, this one looks to me like one worth making.

Roster move: Signed QB Mason Rudolph (ex-Steelers) to 1-year deal (reported Mar. 13, official Mar. 15).
Analysis: The Titans were not going to go into the season with Malik Willis as the only option at backup quarterback behind Will Levis. The backup QB market got pretty picked over pretty quickly, but Rudolph checks the most important boxes for a backup quarterback in today’s NFL: (a) the head coach won’t be asked any questions about him at press conferences, (b) he didn’t completely annoy his previous NFL coaches, and (c) he didn’t faceplant or otherwise look completely overwhelmed when asked to play in a regular season game. In an alternate world, the Titans look at backup quarterback as a priority and go after one of the higher-end options. But Rudolph should be fine for what he’s expected to be.

Roster move: Re-signed WR Nick Westbrook-Ikhine to 1-year deal (reported Mar. 14, official Mar. 15).
Analysis: If Nick Westbrook-Ikhine ends up playing 611 snaps on offense despite missing three games, as was the case in 2023, at least one thing will probably have gone badly wrong in 2024. I trust that Ran Carthon and Brian Callahan know that, and in that context this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Roster move: Released OT Andre Dillard (reported/official Mar. 15).
Analysis: This was an obvious failure waiting to happen from the day the deal was announced, and it took until the end of September for everybody to recognize it was an obvious failure that had indeed happened. The only partial surprise was the release didn’t happen earlier. I know part of my thing is I love to rehash old decisions, but I don’t have any non-obvious points to make about this one.

Roster move: Signed Sebastian Joseph-Day (ex-49ers) to 1-year deal (reported Mar. 19, official Mar. 20).
Analysis: The Titans saw eight different defensive linemen play at least 100 snaps in 2023. Of those eight, six were available to other teams at some point during the 2023 season, either as a street free agent, on the Titans practice squad, or on waivers. One of the other two was a free agent who saw his contract expire at the end of the 2023 regular season and signed away with a division rival (farewell and thanks for what you brought to the team, Denico Autry). I don’t want to suggest the Titans’ defensive line depth chart is Jeffery Simmons and the seven dwarfs, because 2023 was the third consecutive season the Titans churned through a bunch of defensive linemen, and they’d gotten decent results before with some of the guys they brought in. But it stood out to me before last season as a position that needed additional depth and competition, and Joseph-Day is the sort of NFL veteran who’s been in the league before and provides as least a baseline level of play. The Titans still need more at the position in my view, but this was a completely reasonable signing that provides needed depth.

Roster moves: Acquired L’Jarius Sneed + 2024 seventh-round pick (#252 overall) for 2024 seventh-round pick (#221 overal) and 2025 third-round pick (reported Mar. 22, official Apr. 1), and signed him to a four-year contract.
Analysis: Oh boy, now this was the move that I thought the Ridley signing has precluded, that looked quite possible earlier in the window but seemed less likely once the Titans had made the financial commitments they’d made to other players. I mentioned this on Twitter that I had what felt like a weird reaction to this trade: it makes the Titans better in 2024 but I’m pretty sure it’s a mistake anyawy. This is a longer format, so let’s unpack that a little.

I mentioned this in the Awuzie writeup, but the Titans entered this offseason in need of two starter-level corners and could also use improved depth at the position. Awuzie qualifies was one of those starter-level types, but they still had a need. And with multiple remaining needs and only two picks in the top 100 picks of the NFL draft where you more reasonably hope to find immediate major contributors, they could still justify a major investment at an important position like corner. The Titans are unquestionably a better team on the field in 2024 with Sneed compared to a 2025 3rd-round pick, and if your analysis ends there, you give the Titans an A and the Chiefs an F. And if your analysis ends there, your grades aren’t worth a tinker’s damn to me.

I don’t want to turn this into an extended philosophical discussion of the meta about trading players, and let’s exclude the seventh-round pick swap from this discussion. For purposes of this discussion, I’ll also exclude the status of Sneed’s knee, and whether that’s a “degenerative” condition that will make any long-term contract for him a major risk (throwback note: the Titans gave Tony Brown a three-year extension, thinking he likely had two years left as a productive player, and he lasted six games before getting hurt). Those aside, the Titans gave up a 2025 3rd-round pick for the right to pay Sneed a “market”-value extension. Draft picks are never a guarantee, at any point in the draft, but 3rd-rounders are relatively valuable. Put it in concrete terms-would you trade Tyjae Spears for L’Jarius Sneed, knowing you don’t get Sneed cheaply? If that 3rd-round pick is Monty Rice or Jeremiah Poutasi, sure. If that 3rd-round pick is Kevin Byard or Jonnu Smith or Nate Davis, getting those players cheap for four years, not so much. To justify that future value, Sneed has to be not just an excellent starting corner of the sort you’d have to get for $76 million over four years, but to have more of a transformative effect for the defense.

An important reason I think this trade is likely to be a particular mistake for the Titans is that acquiring Sneed makes them better in 2024 but trading a third-round pick in 2025 makes them on average worse in 2027 and 2028, is that timeline doesn’t matchup with what I think the Titans should be valuing. It’s extremely unlikely the Titans are going to compete for anything interesting worth winning in 2024-the scenario where they are competitors in a loaded AFC is somewhere in the realm of “Brian Callahan may be a better offensive designer and playcaller than Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan” and/or “Will Levis is one of the top half-dozen quarterbacks in the NFL, and we’re sorry we pumped up C.J. Stroud last year because Levis is probably better.” As a Titans fan, I’d love for either/both of those to be true, but I wouldn’t bet on either happening at any odds anybody would give me.

The Titans are not good enough around Levis to be a competitor even if he’s an average starter (which is why I wrote before last draft the Titans should take a QB in the first round (impliedly because he’s a probable future top-eight QB) or not at all). It’s possible that Sneed helps improve the defense so much that it’s a success if their goal is to try to win 10 games and compete for the playoffs in 2024. But if that and not winning the Super Bowl is their goal, the Titans spent the past three months us they were trying to win a Super Bowl instead. I don’t mean to dismiss making the playoffs as a goal for a team-when your team hasn’t been made the playoffs in a long time, like the Titans missed from 2009 through 2016, simply entering the postseason tournament counts as a big success. But when you’ve had a bit of a run recently and failed to get over the hump, and when ownership is telling you that winning the Super Bowl is the goal, doubling down on trying to make the playoffs the next year by sacrificing future assets looks like a dumb move.

Going further on that, if Levis isn’t the answer at quarterback, the Titans are spending additional draft assets on a quarterback, and that third-round pick would either be fodder for a trade up for the next future signal-caller or to help build a team around him like the Colts spending a 3rd-round pick on T.Y. Hilton to help Andrew Luck. If Levis is the answer at quarterback, the Titans will start paying him a bunch of money and will need premium draft picks in the top 100 to help build a quality team around the now expensive QB, and the third round pick will be really valuable. I don’t want to say the Titans have to win a Super Bowl in the next three seasons for me to view this trade as a correct thing to do (now), but nor can I convince myself that’s the wrong way to view this trade.

Roster move: Acquired OT Leroy Watson from the Cleveland Browns for a 2024 seventh-round pick (#227 overall) (Apr. 12).
Analysis: A project tackle for offensive line coach Bill Callahan to continue to work on. Watson has barely played any snaps in the NFL, and the Browns by accepting this sort of draft pick compensation clearly weren’t planning on him to be a major part of their present or future. One of the implications of this trade might be to scratch “developmental tackle” off the priority list for the Titans’ remaining seventh-round selections. I’m not going to watch Watson, but throw him in the “maybe RT competition, more likely possible swing tackle” candidate. But remember the baseline for seventh-round picks is no guarantee to make the roster, and judge him accordingly.

How to Think About This

Okay, so how should we think about these moves?

Basic Version

The most basic way to think about how an NFL team should handle the offseason is that when they lose a contributing player at a position, they need to replace that player. Looking at the offseason that way, and using my old threshold of “contributor = 300+ snaps” for losses and a subjective rating of the acquisitions, here’s the rundown:

QB: Ryan Tannehill out, Mason Rudolph in
RB: Derrick Henry out, Tony Pollard in
WR: Chris Moore out, Calvin Ridley in
TE: Trevon Wesco out
OL: Aaron Brewer + Andre Dillard + Chris Hubbard out, Saahdiq Charles + Lloyd Cushenberry in
DL: Denico Autry + Kyle Peko out, Sebastian Joseph-Day in
OLB: (none)
LB: Azeez Al-Shaair out, Kenneth Murray in
CB: Kristian Fulton + Sean Murphy-Bunting out, Chidobe Awuzie + L’Jarius Sneed in
SAF: Kevin Byard + K’Von Wallace out

From this perspective, the Titans have done a good job of replacing what they lost on the whole, but still have some work to do. They need another tight end (or more than one, as Brian Callahan emphasized at his OTA press conference), that obvious left tackle need, another player for the front four in pass rush situations to replace Autry, and a starting safety. With three picks in the top 100, they can hit those three significant needs, and add another tight end on day three of the draft and/or in post-draft free agency where players like Wesco can still be found.

Different Version

Yes, it’s necessary to fill out a roster of contributors, but I’m reminded of the quote allegedly given by Napoleon or Frederick the Great, that an army dispersed around the frontier looks like it’s designed to prevent smuggling rather than to win a conflict.

A couple obvious points: the 300-snap threshold, which I’ve used to provide a consistent baseline, is incomplete and not always a helpful guide. The Titans once again went through a rotating cast of defensive tackles, and Jaleel Johnson at 270 snaps doesn’t quality. If you look at aggregate snaps lost, the continuing need there becomes more apparent. This is also a poor guide to positions where the team was not very good and could use improvement. Linebacker does not appear on the above list, but almost everyone would agree the Titans could use another starter-type in addition to Murray because the players they have on the roster (returner Jack Gibbens is the one who met the threshold based on 2023 snaps, and nobody else made it to 100) were not at that level in 2023. The in vs. out method also does not fact at all player quality. The swap of Calvin Ridley for Moore should be an upgrade. Kenneth Murray in for Al-Shaair looks like a downgrade. Both are mere 1-for-1 swaps by that method.

Another point: not all positions are equally valuable. There should be positions you value more and positions you value less, and there would ideally be an integrated idea of how to play as a team. That was one of the criticisms leveled at the Titans in Mike Sando’s piece at The Athletic, paying a receiver, two corners, a running back, and a linebacker. Watching Brian Callahan’s Bengals offense and listening to him talk about receivers and how they spent on two corners might make you think winning the perimeter was a big strength. Investing heavily in middle of the field players on both sides of the ball, at positions where some teams may try to get by cheaper, cuts against the implied philosophy the other moves might suggest.

That’s the difficulty I have-they’ve added a bunch of (mostly) good players to fill a bunch of needs, but how far does it go to improving the team in the long run, and what’s the goal of this team? My old Football Outsiders colleague Mike Tanier was dismissive of what they did in his new Substack, dismissing the Titans to their normal home of “nobody’s going to pay attention to them.” My personal attitude to that is (a) fine, whatever and (b) I don’t care. More specifically, Tanier took on the big picture: “Building around Levis makes as much sense as the Falcons building around Desmond Ridder or the Commanders around Sam Howell in 2023: it’s wishful thinking disguised as cautious player development.” As I wrote above, I agree, the Titans should not have taken Levis last year. But what are their options this year? It’s a QB-heavy draft at the top, but even at 7th overall, it would be very difficult for the Titans to get one of the top couple passers. Nothing Levis did last year changed anybody’s mind on who he is and what he’s likely to be, but nor is spending the 7th pick on Bo Nix or Michael Penix or maybe getting the fourth quarterback by outspending the Giants or the Vikings or the Broncos or the Raiders for the fourth-best QB in the draft a good bet on success. Given that they already picked Levis, they’re doing something right.

And that’s where we are with the Titans, evaluating Levis. What they did on offense, pending a starting left tackle to come with that seventh overall pick (or something close to it), is give them the environment they need to not lie to themselves about how close they are at QB. Callahan is new, and he’s not tied to Levis. An apparently empowered Carthon and the people around him could survive a second-round quarterback not succeeding (probably, as long as they’re being clear with ownership about where they are and might end up). This is the goal for 2024, and it’s a goal that makes sense for a team that entered the offseason needing an awful lot and still has a few significant needs. Now about that Sneed trade, though…

On the Titans firing Mike Vrabel

The latest of my occasional posts about the Tennessee Titans.

So why did the Titans fire Mike Vrabel?

Thirteen months ago, I wrote a post on the Titans firing Jon Robinson that started with this exact question for him. My answer at the time was “The only answer I can give you is I don’t know anything beyond what Amy Adams Strunk said in her statement that came with the official announcement of the firing.” This time around, the only difference in my answer is, in addition to that statement, we have an interview segment with Mike Keith. The key paragraph is

As the NFL continues to innovate and evolve, I believe the teams best positioned for sustained success will be those who empower an aligned and collaborative team across all football functions. Last year, we began a shift in our approach to football leadership and made several changes to our personnel to advance that plan. As I continued to assess the state of our team, I arrived at the conclusion that the team would also benefit from the fresh approach and perspective of a new coaching staff.

In a later paragraph, while also citing the Titans’ disappointing record the past two seasons, she adds firing Vrabel was about her “recognition that further changes are necessary to fully achieve our vision.”

Fine, so what does all that mean? The best answer is, still, I do not actually know. But what I’m going to do here is try to parse what she said and why she might have fired Mike Vrabel.

In the interview with Mike Keith, one thing she stressed about the next head coach is a high level of interest in what kind of staff he might be able to put together. This was one of my concerns when the Titans hired Vrabel, that he had a pretty thin history of coaching at the NFL level, only coaching with one team and under one head coach, and did not coach with many different people. It seems fair to point out that one of Vrabel’s downfalls was failing to find an offensive coordinator who could fix what ailed the Titans after both Matt LaFluer and Arthur Smith were hired away as head coaches, and that he seemed to hire largely from the thin pool of people he’d work with in Houston. Of course replacing people you lose when you’ve been a head coach for three to five years is a different story than assembling a staff as a new hire, but this is maybe a reason.

Going back to Jon Robinson’s firing late in 2022, the line about “empower[ing] an aligned and collaborative team” stands out to me. Robinson developed a reputation for using his scouts as information gatherers only and making all the critical decisions himself. By reputation, Vrabel’s enthusiasm for getting heavily involved into all aspects of coaching every position might have had results along the same lines, a kind of siloing of all authority in a single person.

Though not highlighted by anything Adams Strunk said, one aspect of Vrabel’s personality that might also have played a role is his extreme competitiveness. I described Robinson’s apparent strategy as tending to favor maximizing the current year while generally preserving long-term flexibility. This seemed like a strong match with Vrabel, and a fine thing to do if your goal is to try to go 10-7 every year. It’s also, in my view, a terrible way of trying to win a Super Bowl. At some point, the “let’s try to make the playoffs every year, even if only as a wild card” and “let’s try to win a Super Bowl” may conflict. It seems likely that Vrabel would have been content with the former goal. Adams Strunk’s statement on firing Vrabel made it clear she is prioritizing the latter, writing

I will never shy away from acknowledging that I have unapologetically high expectations for the football team and every aspect of the Titans organization. Our vision is not simply to produce more wins than losses, it is to regularly compete for championships.

This is admittedly partly speculation on my part, but it seems to fit with the statement and what’s been reported.

What was Ran Carthon’s role in all this?

After Vrabel was fired, it became general manager Ran Carthon’s job to do the season-ending press conference. This unsurprisingly ended up being about Vrabel’s firing rather than a more conventional season wrap-up. It was, frankly, a little strange. Carthon’s introductory statement began with him mentioning he was in “lockstep” with Vrabel on roster building and player selection. When pressed on the subject, Carthon failed to discuss any areas where he and Vrabel might have disagreed, whether about Carthon’s reported interest in trading Derrick Henry last offseason, or asking Kevin Byard to take a pay cut, or trading Byard during the season, or the Vrabel-approved signing of Andre Dillard, or frankly anything else. If you hadn’t known this was a “Vrabel just got fired” press conference, you’d be hard-pressed to figure it out from listening to Carthon.

This is strange on a couple levels, but it’s not just the press conference that was strange. Adams Strunk mentioned the “aligned and collaborative team across all football operations,” and Carthon did nothing to rebut the idea that was already in place. Even beyond the press conference, we haven’t gotten hints of that. It’s too simplistic to say Ian Rapoport = Carthon and Dianna Russini = Vrabel, but both spoke about what they’d heard about the Carthon-Vrabel relationship (Rapoport on The Insiders and Russini on 102.5 and The Athletic Football Show) and said they’d never heard any issues. Carthon’s job as the general manager is in part to make appearances and answer questions the owner doesn’t want to answer, but his “Vrabel and I got along great, what are you talking about?” story from the press conference (a) might actually have some truth to it?, and (b) kind of throws Adams Strunk in the bus, in his failure to articulate any of the reasoning behind a not-totally-expected and potentially quite controversial decision.

One thing I’ve thought about my work writing about the Titans over the years is that I have no effect on what happens on the field, but by what I write I can potentially affect what you think about what happened on the field (that “you” also includes me; writing these pieces normally forces me to think through and articulate what I think about different things, and what I end up writing doesn’t always end up being exactly what I thought I’d write). Carthon had a similar opportunity on Tuesday, to help build a positive image for the team and their future, and declined to do so. I previously wrote about his post-draft press conference and how he flatly declined to cite an example of how analytics played a role in any of his draft picks, so this isn’t the first time he’s been given an opportunity to make his case in public and simply refused. Carthon’s job is not quite the same as the one Detroit Lions and Tigers owner Spike Briggs once explained to Ron Luciano, that “You try to get the town to come see the ballplayers, and you try to keep the ballplayers from destroying the town.” But it’s not not the first half of that description (that’s why he was the one up there on Tuesday!), and it seems he has no interest in that part of the job. If he gets the rest of the job right (unlike me, he does affect what happens on the field), that can be fine, but it’s a missed opportunity to make himself and the team look better.

What do the Titans brass think of the Titans?

I never got my post on the Titans hiring Ran Carthon to a state I considered publishable, but one thing I noted in that draft was he made no commitments when he was hired about how good the 2023 Titans would be. This was, in my view, correct. As I wrote when J-Rob was fired, and was made even more clear by the rest of the 2022 regular season, the time when the Tannehill-Henry Titans could aspire to being AFC contenders was dead and gone. I was more explicit in Aaron Schatz’s FTN Football Almanac 2023, concluding my Titans essay with the thought that “next year’s version of this book will wonder what—other than Mike Vrabel’s competitiveness—convinced a mediocre team to try to squeeze out one last low-ceiling run.” Ryan Tannehill’s injury gave us more of a look at Will Levis than I thought we’d get at the time I wrote that last offseason, but I dubbed the 2023 season “stupid and pointless” in a tweet during the Week 17 loss to the Texans. The Titans are set to see 42% of their snaps head to free agency, the second-highest total of any team. Part of that is veterans like Henry and Tannehill, and part of that is the Titans didn’t have the money to bring in players like Azeez Al-Shaair or Sean Murphy-Bunting on multi-year deals because they were keeping the veterans around. Many of the defenses of Mike Vrabel center around how bad the Titans roster was; some of those roster issues were failing to make some difficult decisions that wouldn’t have helped the Titans win even as many games as they did in 2023.

My verdict is this question ends up pretty much a red herring. Adams Strunk, like everybody else, wasn’t happy the Titans weren’t good in 2023. But by the terms of her statement, she fired Mike Vrabel at least as much because she didn’t think he was the right coach going forward.

Is this just the latest stage of Amy Adams Strunk changing who she trusts?

Adams Strunk became the Titans’ controlling owner during the 2015 season. She conducted a legitimate GM search after letting Ruston Webster walk and then hired an apparently pre-selected Mike Mularkey as head coach. Then Jon Robinson apparently won a power struggle and Mularkey was fired after 2017 despite making the playoffs and winning a postseason game, and got to hire his apparently pre-selected candidate of Mike Vrabel. When Jon Robinson was fired, a common explanation for what happened was that Vrabel had a role in the firing and won something of a power struggle. And now, a year later, Vrabel has been fired and Ran Carthon is still in place. A plausible reason of this is:

2015-16: Mike Mularkey up, Ruston Webster out
2017-18: Jon Robinson up, Mike Mularkey out
2022: Mike Vrabel up, Jon Robinson out
2023-24: Ran Carthon up, Mike Vrabel out

This is a common pattern, that GM-coach pairings don’t last long when the GM is hired after the head coach, and it’s hard to deny the larger pattern (though last year’s J-Rob firing did not lead to the most Vrabel-friendly general manager being hired). Perhaps Adams Strunk’s emphasis on a more collaborative front office is designed to avoid this problem. But the simple facts, and the lack of a broader explication about her thought process over the years, makes it difficult to counter the general impression.

Were the Titans right to fire Mike Vrabel?

This is the big question. I don’t think anybody thinks Mike Vrabel is a bad coach. I don’t think that. Carthon didn’t say that. Adams Strunk didn’t say that. The 6-18 stretch was terrible, but the season-ending win over the Jaguars showed the players would still play hard and try to win games the Mike Vrabel way. This wasn’t Ken Whisenhunt, losing almost every game outside of Week 1.

But this was like Ken Whisenhunt, in terms of QB injuries. Ryan Tannehill got hurt in 2022, missed time, returned, and then got hurt again. And again in 2023. Will Levis came in, got hurt, returned, and got hurt again. Unlike under Whisenhunt, the Titans tried to prevent their offensive line failures, but sometimes there’s only so much you can do about that. And like with Whisenhunt, offensive line coaching seemed like an issue, with Keith Carter a convenient and possibly deserving scapegoat after his departure and 2023 hire Jason Houghtaling unable to make the league’s worst unit heading into the season anything other than a bad unit. And in a multi-coordinator trend, running the ball ineffectively was no reason not to keep running the ball, as the Titans were disposed to run the ball often on first downs and run the ball on second-and-long. There’s a deeper discussion to be had here about offensive philosophy and personnel, but Vrabel’s never changed.

One other note: among coaches hired in the Super Bowl era, the list of coaches to win their first Super Bowl more than five years into their tenure with that team is Chuck Noll (took over sad sack team in pre-free agency and won it in year 6) and Bill Cowher (who made it to the Super Bowl in year 4). Would Vrabel have any interest in participating in a sort of franchise reset in Tennessee, built around Will Levis or maybe even his eventual successor? And is the ceiling with that high enough to be worth it if winning a Super Bowl is what matters? It’s hard for me to say the answer to the second question is yes, even if Vrabel answers in the affirmative on the former.

I think it’s plausible the Titans were correct to fire Vrabel. I’m also uncertain whether what I think were reasonable reasons to fire Vrabel were why the Titans did fire Vrabel.

What happens next?

The Titans hire a new head coach, obviously.

As a guide for what to expect there, we have Adams Strunk’s comments in her interview, which also included rejecting the idea that the next head coach would necessarily have an offensive background. And we also have Carthon’s comments in the presser, where he declined to articulate what characteristics the Titans would be looking for in the next head coach, and where he also declined to specify anything about the vision the Titans had for their next head coach aside from that the next head coach would share that vision. Very helpful of him.

I will of course be watching to see what happens. After a couple coaching searches that looked extremely pre-selected, the Titans seem to be casting a wider net this time. They reportedly sent out seven interview requests on Wednesday. If they go on to interview all of those men, that matches the number they interviewed in 2016 and 2018 combined, and those 2016 and 2018 totals include the required Rooney Rule conversations. We’ll see if they follow through on that level of depth and breadth, and just what sort of characteristics the next head coach brings and what sort of vision he fits.

Notes on Aaron Schatz’s FTN Football Almanac 2023

For those who may not be aware, Football Outsiders kind of imploded since the season ended because the people who own it (not Aaron Schatz) don’t have any money and are having trouble paying their employees and freelancers (by which I mean “not necessarily paying them at all”). My “not writing anything regularly for FO” meant I avoided the bad parts of that mess and am not owed potentially large sums of money like my colleagues. But I had provisionally agreed to write for Football Outsiders Almanac 2023 before all that happened. Like the other freelancers, I was not interested in putting in a bunch of work writing that and then not getting paid by the corporate overlords, so doing a book for FO the corporation was not happening. Given the state of play, Aaron resigned from FO and signed a contract with FTN Fantasy to write a preview book. Thus, Football Outsiders Almanac 2023 does not exist, but the pretty-similar-to-what-that-would-have-been Aaron Schatz’s FTN Football Almanac 2023 does (minus the college preview content; also available in dead tree).

For various reasons, primarily related to significant book timing changes arising from the whole “Are we going to do a book this year?” stuff, I ended up writing only one chapter for this year’s Almanac instead of the two, sometimes three I wrote when I was a contributor from 2010 through 2019. That chapter was about the Tennessee Titans. When I was a regular contributor, I always meant to do a sort of “director’s cut”/commentary on what I wrote, but never bothered to do that. Jumping back into the book authorship this year, I decided to go ahead and do that.

Rather than a straight commentary on what I wrote, though, I decided to instead write about some things I could have written about but did not. I previously covered most of these on Twitter, but this is an expanded version of that, in terms of both the number of topics I discuss and the depth in which I’m able to discuss them. So, on with that show.

1. The greatness of David Long

The goal for a chapter in the Almanac is to give you a preview of what we think is likely to happen in 2023 (the season about to start), or what will determine how good the 2023 team will be, and not to just give you a recap of what did happen in 2022 (the previous season). This means, among other things, that the chapter may include anything from (a) only a little bit to (b) quite a lot about how the team performed on the field in 2022. I would say my Titans chapter this year is probably lighter on this scale, for obvious reasons-if the Titans on the field in 2023 look like they did in 2022, it probably won’t be great. For this reason, we (or at least I) tend not to write a lot about departed free agents. This meant I didn’t take the time to highlight how great David Long was at key, diagnose, and close to destroy. He ranked #1 among all linebackers in stop rate on run tackles, which measures the percentage of tackles make the play “unsuccessful,” and also had the lowest average depth of tackle on run plays for all linebackers. And while his individual pass coverage metrics weren’t great, the Titans had the fifth-best pass defense DVOA on targets to running backs, and that wasn’t because of Dylan Cole and Monty Rice, the other two LBs with enough pass coverage targets to be ranked. Tennessee will miss his play on the field, even if Mike Vrabel will not miss his difficulty staying there.

2. Broken tackles

We mention in the Strategic Tendencies section that the Titans defense has the league’s most missed tackles and was 31st in broken tackle rate, but I did not make the opportunity to discuss this anywhere else. Part of the reason is there wasn’t a single player to highlight for this. In the Statistical Appendix at the back of the book, we list the 20 players with the worst missed tackle rate, and there are no Titans on that list (min. 40 solo tackles). This was a team-wide issue. The only real exception was Kevin Byard, who had one of the league’s best missed-tackle rates. If you wanted to highlight a returning player with missed tackle issues, it might be Rashad Weaver, whose rate would have been high enough to qualify for the table had he made the threshold (though I didn’t check everybody else to see if he would have made the table with a smaller threshold). Also, highlighting Weaver would have felt wrong to me-it literally was almost everybody other than Byard. I haven’t listened to much of Mike Vrabel this training camp, but if he was putting a team-wide emphasis on better tackling by the defense, that would make sense. And if the Titans’ own charting of their players says they didn’t have a fundamental tackling issue, well, I can’t tell you for sure they’re wrong about that.

3. Caleb Farley

For people unfamiliar with the general structure of the book: a team “chapter” comprises a main chapter essay of some length (including the stat tables, mine this year was about 2800 words) and unit comments on the offensive line, defensive front seven, secondary, and special teams (plus individual player comments, which appear later in the book grouped by position). In rare cases, one person may write the main essay and not the unit and/or player comments, but generally the same person does both (and I did both for the Titans chapter this year). With the issues related to this year’s book, we did shorter unit comments to save time (plus Aaron drafted all the special teams comments, because those are generally heavily stat-based, in addition to the Strategic Tendencies section he’s always written). This meant we didn’t have as much space as we have in the past to mention depth contributors, so players who might have been mentioned normally are omitted. Farley didn’t play enough snaps last year to make the table of secondary players, and he doesn’t seem likely to play a major role this year, so I simply did not mention him. There are other players in a similar category-we have stats in the table for players like Tre Avery, Kevin Strong, and Mario Edwards, but I did not write anything about them.

4. Will Levis

I mention his draft selection in the chapter, and he does get a player comment as the Titans’ projected backup quarterback, but I did not discuss him in detail. The reason I did not is I do not expect him to play much as long as Ryan Tannehill is healthy. My working hypothesis is Tannehill will play as long as he’s healthy and the Titans have any shot at the postseason. The specific scenario I had in mind: if the Titans are 6-8 and the Jaguars are 8-6, who does Tennessee start at QB if all QBs are healthy? My answer is Tannehill, as the Titans at that point would still have postseason aspirations. If at the end of the season I regret not having mentioned something in the main essay or unit comments, this is probably it. But there’s always going to be something that fits that category, and I’m fine with this being it. More likely, though, he’ll rightly be a focus of next year’s main essay.

5. Mike Vrabel’s “outrush the opponent, better passer rating, win TO battle” formula to win

I know, this almost feels like a gimme topic for a stat-based site, useful as a foil akin to how I used Mike Munchak’s emphasis on time of possession in 2013. But this feels like hoary ground for a stat site-it’s not some niche topic we’ve been looking for an excuse to cover like what really bad third-down defenses do the next season in my Colts essay for 2018. If I wanted to cover this topic, it would have taken over the essay, because I would have turned it into a proper analysis of how these things reflect and are reflected by game state. Here’s an example of how that works for college, looking at interception rates by half and score differential, and I decided to see what the same type of breakdown would produce for the NFL.

INT Rates by Quarter and Game Situation, 2022 NFL

Quarter	Tied/Trailing	Winning
1st	1.7%	1.0%
2nd	2.2%	1.8%
3rd	1.8%	1.8%
4th	3.2%	2.1%
OT	2.8%	n/a

This is not quite apples to apples to what StatsBomb did in the linked article-I used all pass plays, which includes scrambles and sacks, instead of just passing attempts, but it does get across the basic idea that interception rates are not that different when tied/trailing or winning before the fourth quarter. The first quarter rate is possibly partly due to a sample size-related fluke. Only 15% of first quarter pass plays come from a team with the lead, while the equivalent figure for the fourth quarter (excluding OT) is 23%.

I haven’t seen (but also haven’t looked for and could easily have missed) any good deep dives into, say, pre-4th quarter rushing, passer rating, or TO split stats. If somebody else has done that work, I’d be interested in looking at it. But I had plenty to write about without turning the whole chapter into a deep dive on Vrabel’s formula to win.

6. The Titans’ analytics hires

The Sarah Bailey hire was announced after I’d planned what I was going to write, but I could have and did not cover the hiring of Chad Brinker as assistant GM either. Like Vrabel’s formula to win, this seems like an easy thing to write about for a stat-oriented site. But if you watched Ran Carthon’s post-draft press conference, you might have noticed a reporter asking for an example of how analytics influenced one of their draft picks that year, akin to the anecdote Carthon shared when he was hired about how the 49ers had selected Elijah Mitchell. Carthon’s answer to that question was effectively “No, I won’t give you an example.” And without the hook to any specific move that looked like it could have been particularly analytics-influenced, I didn’t have a good way to integrate it into the chapter. Like Will Levis, though, this could end up being a focus of next year’s essay.

Also, if they want to look into the truth(s) behind Vrabel’s formula to win, that’d be cool, too.

7. A single chapter narrative

My favorite essays, both to read and among the ones I’ve written, are driven by a single strong storyline that covers almost the entire essay. Mike Tanier’s great Bears essay on Justin Fields is a good example of that this year, while I’m still fond of my Blake Bortles-centric Jaguars essay from 2017. These are most useful when the QB’s career is still in flux, as it is for Fields and was for Bortles, or it’s useful to take a step back from the now and re-evaluate where the QB is (my 2016 Colts essay on Andrew Luck). There are essays like this that aren’t just about the QB, but the formula works best either when it’s about a QB or a franchise comprehensively changing directions. That’s not Tannehill, and that’s not the 2023 Titans. We know what Ryan Tannehill is at this point, and there’s not much to change your mind on-my player comment on him gets into this “let’s not kid ourselves” stuff. And the 2023 Titans are one foot in continuing to try to win, and one foot in trying to rebuild on the fly. Trying to write a strong Tannehill-centered chapter would have been a mistake, writing a Will Levis chapter would have been wrong, and the Titans aren’t going for one last big push in a closing window. Instead, the essay looks at a few different pieces that deal with different aspects of the team. It makes me kind of cranky, because this is a longer essay for me and I like writing the unified essays. But if it didn’t fit, I wasn’t going to do it, and I didn’t think it fit.

8. Me just telling you what I thought

I have forums where I can feel free to just tell you what I think. That’s mostly what I use Twitter for (yes, I’m still calling it that), and mostly what I use this blog for. I have many strong opinions about the Tennessee Titans that may or may not be shared by other people, and I can tell you about them there. The Almanac is not a format for me to do that. The goal for what I write for that is to tell the story of the team in a way that’s open to everybody, while also telling a story of the team that fans of the team recognize while also hopefully telling them something non-obvious and interesting (and true!).

Another way to think about this: the level of embedded knowledge that’s necessary to understand what I write here may be high, and I don’t apologize for it. The level of embedded knowledge necessary to understand what I’m trying to get across in an Almanac chapter is more along the lines of “general reader who is probably not a fan of the team but interested enough in football to read our book.” As somebody who follows closely one specific team, for me as a writer, this challenge comes in two different forms. When writing about the team I’m a fan of, it’s about making the chapter accessible to everybody. When writing about one of the other 31 teams, which I’d done every year I’ve contributed to the book before this one, it’s about making sure I’m writing about the team in a way that people who follow that team as closely as I do the Titans recognize as being about the team they follow. This doesn’t and won’t mean that fans will always be happy with what I write about the team they support. I recognize and accept that, and try to keep in mind which parts may annoy fans of that team. That’s also probably why I most enjoy writing about teams I know well-I know better where those fault lines are and how to handle them.

TL;DR on this point: Almanac chapters include permitted hobbyhorses. What I write and tweet about can feature any or all of my personal hobbyhorses.

9. Nate Davis

His departure in free agency is briefly mentioned, but I did not discuss him in any detail. If I were doing positional analyses as I did in my team-blogging days, or struggled for something good to write about in the main essay, I could have written about him in detail, his career arc, Mike Vrabel’s management style, Vrabel’s frustration with injuries in a way that also mentions players like David Long and Kristian Fulton, or more along several of those lines. Like not writing about David Long, though, I was writing a 2023 preview rather than a 2022 recap or 2019 draft retrospective. Also, any section would have been very much a Tom section and involved some of those personal hobbyhorses I just mentioned I try to avoid.

10. Chris Harris

When I first contributed to the Almanac in 2010, we were still doing a piece in the unit comments specifically on the coaching staff. This would have been a great place to mention the hiring of Harris from Washington as DB coach/pass game coordinator, or Jason Houghtaling’s promotion to offensive line coach. With much longer unit comments I would have probably tossed in a mention of both. But with the condensed format, I didn’t mention either. I did mention Shane Bowen and the departure of Jim Schwartz in the main essay, as well as Tim Kelly taking over as OC, and that was enough. If either/both units show dramatic improvement, it’ll probably be worth mentioning the assistant in next year’s book. Overall, though, almost all position coach hires are too insignificant in context to be worth focusing on in this kind of project.

DISCLAIMER: Opinions posted above are mine and may or may not be shared by anybody.

Tennessee Titans 2023 Draft Preview by Position

The latest of my occasional posts about the Tennessee Titans.

One of the staples of my pre-draft coverage for years has been a draft preview by position, including a breakdown of what the Titans have at each position, what they might be looking for, and a probability the Titans draft a player (or two) at that position. See here for what this exercise looked like last year.

As of right now, the evening before the draft, the Titans currently hold six selections in the 2023 NFL draft. One of those selections is their natural seventh-round pick, 228th overall. My regular disclaimer in this post has included that selections that late in the draft (generally, anything outside the first 200 picks) should be considered a head start on undrafted free agency, ripe for doubling up on a need position or locking in a player at a position that may not be much of a need. Consequently, I don’t think it’s useful to consider those picks in calculating draft probabilities. It’s the earlier picks that are more likely to be used on players with a role to play on the 53-man roster. Because what I’m doing here is trying to figure out what the Titans think they want to draft, I decided to base my draft probabilities on the five picks the Titans hold in the first six rounds, where they’re most likely looking for key contributors for 2023 and beyond.

I say pretty much every year this is an exercise in (hopefully educated) guesswork. While Mike Vrabel returns as head coach, this will be the first draft Ran Carthon runs as Titans general manager. Further, he has not been a general manager before. Trying to figure out what he’s likely to do based on his past actions as general manager gives us basically no useful information for predicting what he’s likely to do. Jon Robinson had some tendencies that became apparent through his tenure, like valuing college production more than athleticism and putting a lot of emphasis on specific postseason all-star games (notably the Senior Bowl in 2020 and the East-West Shrine Game in 2022), but we’re waiting to see what those will be for Carthon.

One thing I’ve included almost every year I’ve done this, and that seems likely to continue to be important under Carthon, is a list of players linked to the Titans by a pre-draft visit to the team’s facility (compilation via Titans Report). Standard disclaimer: these are compiled based on media reports, and should not be relied on as either complete or completely accurate. But if they bring in six players at one position and one at another, it’s probably (supporting) information they’re probably more interested in the position where they’ve brought in a bunch of players. It seemed like Robinson also put particular value on players who did private workouts; post-COVID, it seems like there may be fewer of those happening, or at least we may be getting less comprehensive information on those when they do happen. This is definitely something where I’ll be paying attention to what prospects say after they get drafted, when we’ll get the most complete information on what sort of pre-draft contract they had with the Titans.

Repeated note: as much as I can, this post attempts to describe what the Titans might do based on how I think the Titans might think. Carthon and Vrabel will be setting the direction and making the decisions for the team, so I try to think like they will think. What I would do if I were in charge of the Titans is (a) in some cases quite different and (b) completely irrelevant in terms of predicting what the Titans will do.

That said, on with the show.

Quarterback
Need at position: Low-moderate
Analysis: Ryan Tannehill is the starter. Malik Willis was a third-round pick last year and could be the backup. But Tannehill’s contract expires after this season, and Willis face-planted when the Titans needed him to play functionally in Tannehill’s absence last season. The Titans could easily use the 11th pick on their next starting quarterback, or even trade up from #11. But this isn’t 2015, when they had to draft a quarterback with their first-round pick. And Willis last year is what you get with mid-round quarterbacks. It could very easily happen in the first, but if it doesn’t, it should happen at all.
Visitors: Hendon Hooker (Tennessee), Will Levis (Kentucky), Anthony Richardson (Florida)
Draft probability: 20%

Running Back
Need at position: Moderate?
Analysis: Derrick Henry is the starter. He’s not going anywhere via trade unless the Titans eat a bunch of his salary. The Titans played Dontrell Hilliard as their third-down back last year; they let him hit free agency. Hassan Haskins was a fourth-round pick last year, and spent time as the pass game back after Hilliard went to injured reserve. If the Titans liked Haskins that much in that role, they could have used him over Hilliard. Henry’s out of contract after this season. This frankly feels like a position where the Titans could go a bunch of different directions and justify almost anything they wanted to justify. But if they like Haskins at least a little bit, or want to bring back Hilliard or another similarly modestly-priced veteran for a high-trust pass protection role, they don’t need to take a back at all. With more picks, this would get a higher probability. But given all the other areas of need, I kept moving this probability down.
Visitors: Tyjae Spears (Tulane)
Draft probability: 30%

Wide Receiver
Need at position: High
Analysis: The Titans’ current top four at wide receiver is Treylon Burks, Nick Westbrook-Ikhine, and Kyle Philips. Yes, that list has three names on it. Yes, I’ve used this gimmick multiple times before. Yes, including wide receiver last year. And Burks is a rookie, NWI is NWI, and Philips was a fifth-rounder who played 64 snaps as a rookie and spent most of the season injured reserve. The Titans could really, really, really use a player capable of playing a major, starter-type role as a rookie, and could easily justify a second pick as a receiver. But after taking two receivers last year, are there enough developmental reps to justify two players even if the depth chart could use them? If I had my druthers, they’d add a rookie and a veteran to the top four. But yeah, the depth chart could justify drafting two receivers. And one of those guys needs to come in the first three rounds.
Visitors: Tank Dell (Houston), Zay Flowers (Boston College), Quentin Johnston (TCU), Jonathan Mingo (Ole Miss)
Draft probability: 90% of one, 20% of a second

Tight End
Need at position: High
Analysis: The Titans’ current top three… oh, forget it, I just used that gimmick. They have pure blocker Trevon Wesco and H-back/move Chig Okonkwo, a fourth-round pick last year. They could really use a player capable of serving as a combo/Y tight end to replace Austin Hooper, lost to free agency. Okonkwo doesn’t have the size to be that player on the line. This is another good and deep tight end class. Probably on day two given they don’t have a fourth-round pick.
Visitors: Payne Durham (Purdue), Tucker Kraft (San Diego State)
Draft probability: 90%

Offensive Tackle
Offensive Guard/Center
Need at position: Moderate? + moderate?
Analysis: There are five starters here. Grouping them together is bad practice. But like last year, the Titans probably are looking at four starters between Andre Dillard, Aaron Brewer at center, Daniel Brunskill, and Nicholas Petit-Frere (at right tackle, I hope). Dillard was drafted as a tackle, but has also played left guard before. If the Titans want to prioritize finding a left tackle, like at #11, they’d play Dillard at guard. If they want to go elsewhere at #11, they could draft a guard like Cody Mauck in the second round and leave Dillard at tackle. And, yeah, if they had to play a game Thursday morning, Jamarco Jones is probably starting at guard (don’t count on Dillon Radunz given his ACL injury). This feels like a place where they’re adding a starter as a priority, so in the first three rounds, but with some flexibility on exactly what position that will be. And if the Titans had more picks, I’d have the draft probability of a second offensive lineman, like a tackle early and developmental interior guy, or vice versa, higher. They’ve been sniffing around some of the late-round developmental athletes, so that’s probably my favorite for the seventh-round pick.
Visitors: Anthony Bradford (OG, LSU), Jaelyn Duncan (OT, Maryland), Joey Fisher (OT, Shepherd), Broderick Jones (OT, Georgia), Carter Warren (OT, Pitt), Darnell Wright (OT, Tennessee)
Draft probability: 60% (OT) + 50% (OG/C)

Defensive Line
Need at position: Low
Analysis: Jeffery Simmons got paid. Teair Tart is coming back. Denico Autry should return to being more of an inside guy if the depth at outside linebacker holds up. Yeah, they could use another body after losing Mario Edwards (if you think of him as a DL). But given all their other needs, I can’t think of this as a priority.
Visitors: Gervon Dexter (Florida), Devonnsha Maxwell (Chattanooga)
Draft probability: 10%

Outside Linebacker
Need at position: Low
Analysis: Harold Landry’s coming back from his torn ACL. Rashad Weaver isn’t a star, or even an ideal starter, but he wasn’t a total liability in 640 snaps last year. Arden Key was a significant free agent signing from the Jaguars. Yeah, this is position where you could always use a guy. But getting down to 5.0 is BRUTAL this year, and this is one of the positions that I kept moving down because it feels more like a “like to draft, if the right player is there” than a “need to draft.”
Visitors: Junior Fehoko (San Jose State, ALT: DL/Autry), Keion White (Georgia Tech, ALT: DL/Autry)
Draft probability: 10%

Inside Linebacker
Need at position: Moderate-high
Analysis: So what do the Titans think they need here? Monty Rice is a third-round pick entering his third season; ideally, that’s a guy who’d be a starter. Carthon brought Azeez Al-Shair along with him from San Francisco as another potential starter. But who knows how much they trust Rice, Al-Shair isn’t a long-term player, and it feels like they could really use a pure coverage player after losing David Long in free agency. Given their other needs, I don’t think this is likely to be a priority, but adding a situational player with a later pick is a definite possibility.
Visitors: Mohamoud Diabate (Utah), Marte Mapu (Sacramento State, ALT: SAF)
Draft probability: 50%

Cornerback
Need at position: Moderate?
Analysis: Some positions as a need is about known holes on the depth chart; see wide receiver. Some positions as a need are more about what the Titans think about the players they have on the roster. Kristian Fulton was hurt almost all of his rookie season and missed plenty of time in year three; he’s been solid when on the field, but if Mike Vrabel’s annoyance with injury issues is as bad as we think, he’s not a player they want to count on. Elijah Molden played only 82 snaps last year because of injury. Roger McCreary was a member of the “much better in September than December” club as a rookie, though he kept getting trotted out there. Free agent import Sean Murphy-Bunting is on a one-year deal. Tre Avery was a UDFA. The Titans could decide to make do with what they have here, but this is also another position they could choose to make a priority at any point in the draft where their evaluation of the available players says it could be a good idea.
Visitors: Deonte Banks (Maryland), Julius Brents (Kansas State), Emmanuel Forbes (Mississippi State)
Draft probability: 40%

Safety
Need at position: Moderate?
Analysis: Ran Carthon didn’t say a lot at his pre-draft press conference, but one thing he did do was confirm he’d asked Kevin Byard to take a pay cut. The former Blue Raider declined, but that’s probably a sign the Titans are thinking about moving on from him sooner rather than later (bold prediction: he won’t be on the 2024 Titans at his currently-scheduled base salary of $13.6 million). And Amani Hooker was another member of the injury brigade last year. And the only other pure safety listed on the roster is Mike Brown, who was inactive for the season finale in his only game on the roster last year. With two starters in place, I don’t think this is a priority, but a pick on day three is easy to justify.
Visitors: Quan Martin (Illinois)
Draft probability: 30%

Some Macro-Level Thoughts

1. As mentioned in the CB section: some draft picks are about players on the roster. A pick of a running back is about Henry and/or Haskins. A safety pick might be about Byard. An earlier than expected center pick might be about Aaron Brewer. The Titans have so many holes at so many different positions I keep prioritizing the known and obvious holes over this type of pick, but this is definitely a thing that happens.
2. We don’t know what kind of time horizon Carthon is working with. It was striking to me that his introductory press conferences didn’t feature one word about how good he expected the 2023 Titans to be. But if winning games in 2023 isn’t at all a priority, Tannehill, Henry, and Byard would all be cut (now that the Jets have acquired Aaron Rodgers, I don’t know who’d be in the trade market for Tannehill, even at a reasonable price for a high-end Tier 3 starter). Jon Robinson was largely focused on immediate needs, but that wasn’t a thing I figured out until his first draft pretty much went immediate needs from biggest on down. Given where the Titans are (not serious contenders in 2023 even with the three veterans), it’d make sense if Carthon prioritized players who wouldn’t be immediate contributors more than J-Rob did.
3. Special teams matters. A third safety would probably be counted on as a key special teams player. Ditto a linebacker pick (in addition to free agency addition Ben Niemann). If they don’t want Philips returning punts, then return ability could be a bonus for any wide receiver or defensive back.
4. One of my goals for this exercise each year is to stack positional priorities. By that measure, it ended up about like this:

WR1 + TE – – OT – OG/C + LB – CB – RB + SAF – QB + WR2 – DL + OLB

The implication of that stacking is the Titans are likely to prioritize a wide receiver, a tight end, and probably an offensive lineman (considering OT and OG/C together) as their highest needs, would like a linebacker, a cornerback, and either a running back or safety as their next priorities, and picks at other positions are more likely to be players of particular value on their board. I hate all these numbers, because getting down to 5.0 was very difficult this year. I feel really good about the top three needs, much less so about other positions. RB is particularly difficult-the draft is likely to be deep at the position, and they could find a use for a player if they wanted to, but they don’t have to and what they need could be filled by a cheap veteran instead. OLB in particular is another position where I keep wanting to up the probability. But I’m locked in to 5.0 as the total, and I’d have to lower some other positional probability just to do that, and I don’t want to. Feel free to make your own adjustments, as you see fit, but they must be net-zero.
5. Beyond the normal online mechanical mocks, I did a 32-person mock without making any trades myself, and ended up with this:
#11 OT Paris Johnson Jr., Ohio State
#42 TE Luke Musgrave, Oregon State
#72 WR Jonathan Mingo, Ole Miss
#147 LB Mohamoud Diabate, Utah
#186 C Ricky Stromberg, Arkansas
#228 CB Art Green, Houston
In hindsight, I should have prioritized a cover linebacker like Ivan Pace or Dee Winters over Diabate, and Green’s a guy I have almost no feeling for beyond knowing that he’s a fast CB and the Titans have shown an interest in some fast CBs. But I’d sign up for those first three picks right now, no question.
6. My baseline expectation is that the Titans will draft all but one of the positions I think they are likely to draft, while hitting one of the positions I think they are less likely to draft. That tends to be about how it goes. But we’ll see how it goes, especially with that whole QB question hanging over the draft. If that was a priority, though, I think the Titans would have emphasized that more in their pre-draft messaging. As usual, though, I’m sitting on my couch trying to figure out what people who don’t think like I think will do rather than telling you how it will be.

More on the Titans firing GM Jon Robinson

The latest of my occasional posts about the Tennessee Titans.

A couple days ago, I wrote about why the Titans fired general manager Jon Robinson, at least in the sense the Titans fired Jon Robinson and I wrote about some of the reasons the Titans might or might not have chosen to fire Jon Robinson. There were some things I did not cover in that post, and some things that have come out since then, that make writing another post with additional thoughts a useful enough use of my time for me to want to make this addition. The most important news to come out since that post was Amy Adams Strunk (AAS) going on the record with Teresa Walker with more details on why she made the decision, and made the decision now.

So how did Jon Robinson go from getting an extension in February to getting fired in December?

This is, by far, the most important question I did not concentrate on in my previous post on J-Rob’s firing. I concentrated primarily on Robinson’s mis-steps over the 2020 and 2021 offseasons, in both veteran free agency and the draft. Since then, the 2021 draft class that disappointed as rookies has disappointed even more in their second season, the 2022 draft class looks quite reasonable as rookies, and the Titans traded A.J. Brown.

In her interview, AAS wanted to make it clear that the decision was made prior to the AJB’s great game for the Eagles against the Titans last week, and this wasn’t a billion dollar lemonade stand knee-jerk reaction to being serenaded by a bunch of drunks. Unfortunately, if Walker asked AAS to address how things changed over 10 months, her answer (or non-answer) did not make it into the article.

The relatively quick turnaround from long-term extension to firing naturally, if it wasn’t about the AJB trade, led me and others to speculate about whether Robinson’s firing was (1) the result of a Mike Vrabel power move, (2) connected to Todd Downing’s DUI, perhaps because of the Titans violating rules by serving alcohol on the team plane, or (3) something else bad behind the scenes that we did not know about. The emanations and penumbras we’ve gotten from NFL insiders, who typically know much more than they report publicly and only mention some things after the fact, plus AAS’s comments suggest (1) this was a pure AAS decision and not the result of a Mike Vrabel power move, (2) she did not want this to be known as the result of Downing’s DUI, and (3) we do not know that this may have been even vaguely connected to something bad or nefarious behind the scenes. The most we’ve gotten about anything related to that is Adam Schefter suggesting on NFL Live that Robinson could have been more proactive in how he communicated some of the details of what he did and/or what he was planning, even if the “AAS didn’t know about the AJB trade until it happened” was an exaggerated misreading.

One thing Walker mentions in her article, though not associated with any AAS quotes, is that the Titans used 91 players last year and have already used 76 this year.

Maybe we’ll get more details on this at some point in the future, in the coming weeks, months, or even years, that will help explain the change from long-term extension to firing in less than a season without the team’s record collapsing. With what we know right now, the change from extension to firing in 10 months looks under-justified. Either the extension was a mistake, though probably one meant to emphasize that AAS was not picking Vrabel over Robinson, or there’s more we don’t know about why Robinson was fired.

So what does come next for the Titans?

Mike Keith is not always the most accurate guide for what comes next for the Titans (I’m still waiting on Hassan Haskins’ post-bye workload increase), but part of his job is unquestionably to help prepare fans for what comes next (e.g., hinting the Titans might draft Caleb Farley in 2021). One thing he’s emphasized this week is the Titans will start this coming offseason over the cap, and the team will have to get some difficult decisions right in terms of which of their current players to keep, which to extend, and which to thank for their services, and how to replace the players they lose.

This is the part of his job in 2020 and 2021 where I concentrated on Robinson’s struggles. I would particularly highlight the Titans’ offense as the focus of a new GM’s issues. I maybe concentrated my previous post a bit on the defense, because I thought this was where Robinson concentrated his asset allocation those two crucial offseasons. I think that was directionally correct-the offense was better than the defense in the 2019 regular season once Tannehill took over, and unquestionably much much better in the 2020 regular season-but outside of the offensive lineman misses in the draft and the Julio Jones trade, the offense didn’t have as much attention addressed to it. Unless the Titans do ride the Ryan Tannehill-Derrick Henry offense into the ground after the window has closed, as I said in my previous post, the difficult decisions for the new GM start with those two players (and if they’re thinking about the QB for when the new stadium opens, then that decision becomes more interesting). Keith commented (and I’m concentrating on his appearances on 104.5 and The OTP) that AAS intended for the Titans to continue to be competitive. If the goal for 2023 was to use it as more of an evaluation season, even if that meant losing a few more games than you might prefer, my guess is he’d be instructed to make that part of his message.

But it may simply be premature to declare that at this point; if this wasn’t a Mike Vrabel power move, then the new general manager will be someone who can work successfully with Mike Vrabel, very good head coach, but may not necessarily be Mike Vrabel’s guy. Unless the search does go differently, and this was more of a Vrabel move than the recent comments suggest. Again, to be updated as and when more things happen, more significantly the hiring of the next Titans GM.

First-Round Pick Capsules

I wasn’t sure how I wanted to write up my initial post on J-Rob’s firing, but to get myself putting words on the screen, I decided to start by writing up capsule comments on each of his first-round draft picks. That was the locus of much of the criticism, especially because “he never signed any of his first-round picks to a second contract” is a good one-liner for GM failure. Had I incorporated these into the actual post, I would have edited all of them and re-written some of the segments. But because they’re just standalones, I’m publishing them largely as-is. I think the bottom line is that Robinson made some evaluation mistakes, which are inevitable; made some valuation mistakes; and took some gambles, some of which did not succeed. Ultimately, I believe, his first-round mistakes were less important to why he got fired than the 2020 and 2021 offseason mistakes (which, yes, included first-round draft failures), but decided to publish these anyway. Enjoy them for what they’re worth.

Jon Robinson vs. The First Round

Player: Jack Conklin, RT
Year: 2016
Valuation: Conklin was the 8th overall pick, selected after Robinson gave up a third-round pick and a future second-round pick to move up from the 15th overall pick (acquired in trade from the Rams after moving out of the first overall pick) to pick him. Conklin was widely reported to be one of the two players the Giants were strongly considering with the 10th pick, and would almost certainly not have been available at #15. (With Conklin unavailable, the last of the top tier at OTs who would have been available at #15 was Taylor Decker, still the Lions left tackle. My “shadow draft” scenario with no trade up had the Titans ending up with Taylor Decker, Austin Hooper, and Zach Cunningham. Funny the Titans ended up with two of those players later.)
Evaluation: Conklin when healthy was a quality player, named first-team All-Pro as a rookie. While I give most of the credit for that to the Titans’ coaching staff for not asking Conklin to win in different ways, he was a quality player. No concerns with the pick from that perspective when he was healthy.
Second contract: Coming off a torn ACL, Conklin had a poor season in 2018 and Robinson unsurprisingly declined his fifth-year option, which as a top ten pick would have been $12.866 million (as opposed to $10.35 million had he been selected without a trade up). Conklin rebounded strongly in 2019 and Robinson made the decision to let him walk in free agency, where he signed a 3-year/$42 million contract with the Browns. I thought Robinson’s decision to decline the fifth-year option was correct at the time, and won’t second-guess that now. The decision to not pay him $14 million APY was also correct. But that Conklin would reach free agency rather than sign a second contract in Tennessee was almost inevitable the day he was drafted as a right tackle in the top ten, and why I thought the combination of trade and pick was a mistake.

Player: Corey Davis, WR
Year: 2017
Valuation: Davis was the 5th overall pick, selected with the future first-round pick the Titans got from the Rams in their trade for the first overall pick in 2016. The Titans had a significant need at wide receiver, and with a perceived top tier of three wide receivers (also Mike Williams and John Ross), chose to take their pick instead of hoping one might be left with their second overall selection. Robinson precipitated a run on receivers, with Williams going 7th overall and Ross 9th, though of course that may have happened anyway.
Evaluation: The Titans were in need of a pure X iso-type player for Mike Mularkey’s offense, capable of lining up outside and winning 1v1 matchups. Robinson et al. presumably thought Davis would be that player. He was not, but became a good player as the Z once A.J. Brown was drafted to fill that X iso role. Williams, though he’s not great, would have been a better fit, and the Titans should have drafted him as long as they were not concerned by his neck issue (which has not been reported, AFAIK). A partial miss.
Second contract: After his struggles his first two seasons, and with a fifth-year option amount of $15.68 million as a top ten pick, and with AJB quickly emerging as the primary option, it wasn’t a surprise that Robinson declined the fifth-year option for Davis. He signed a 3-year/$37 million contract with the Jets, so less on a per-year basis than he would have gotten on the franchise tag had the Titans given him the franchise tag as the second receiver in a low pass-volume offense. I didn’t regard either the decision to decline the fifth-year option or to let him walk, knowing he’d almost certainly end up elsewhere, as a mistake at the time, and won’t second-guess that now. But had the Titans taken Williams instead, he’d probably still be on the team (and maybe they wouldn’t have drafted AJB).

Player: Adoree Jackson, CB
Year: 2017
Valuation: Jackson was the 18th overall pick, selected with the Titans’ natural first-round pick. The Titans had a significant need at CB, and most mock drafters thought they might pick Marshon Lattimore with the 5th pick used on Davis to fill that need. The next couple corners to go were Gareon Conley (24th to the Raiders) and the player I wanted, Tre’Davious White (27th to the Bills). Had the Titans not taken him, Jackson would likely have been selected by the Cowboys with the 28th pick (which they ended up using on DE Taco Charlton).
Evaluation: Jackson showcased intriguing two-way potential as an explosive return man and offensive threat, but was barely used on offense (5 carries in 2017) and struggled as both a punt and kick returner. The case for taking him over White was probably based more on his potential as a man cover corner, which was intermittently fulfilled. It’s tough to sum him up, but Jackson was overall okay not great before a rough final season where he struggled with injury the Titans coaches apparently thought he should play through.
Second contract: The Titans actually exercised Jackson’s fifth-year option in March 2020, but cut him after the difficult 2020 season. Neither move was a surprise, and Jackson’s departure after the coaching staff clash was inevitable. Despite their difference as players, man, it would have been nice to have White with this pick.

Player: Rashaan Evans, LB
Year: 2018
Valuation: Evans was the 22nd overall pick, selected after the Titans swapped a fourth-round pick for a sixth-round pick to move up three spots. It was reported the Steelers were also trying to trade up to get him, so Evans would likely not have been available had the Titans not traded up. Inside linebacker looked like a strong need for Tennessee, especially if they wanted a good one who might be able to play on three downs.
Evaluation: I’m trying on these writeups to not be too detailed and not just spew out my possibly idiosyncratic opinion, but let’s just say Evans had a rough start, improved especially against the run, then regressed on run defense and was never strong against the pass. The Dont’a Hightower comparisons were always ridiculously off based on size, but if you wanted a Bama ILB comparison, the correct one was always Reggie Ragland, a second-round pick traded for a fourth-round pick after one season and a scheme change. Unquestionably a missed evaluation.
Second contract: No chance his fifth-year option would be picked up, or that he would be re-signed. He ended up in Titans Cast-Off Central in Atlanta for 1-year/$1.75 million (and I haven’t paid much attention to precisely how good he is this year).

Player: Jeffery Simmons, DL
Year: 2019
Valuation: Simmons was a draft wild card coming off a torn ACL in February. His tape at Mississippi State showed a high ceiling, potentially a top-five player if you though he could develop as a pass rusher, but his draft stock was a total wild card. A tanking Miami at #13 felt like it should have been an option, but I never got a good sense for where he might have been drafted had the Titans not taken him at #19. This was definitely a gamble for J-Rob though.
Evaluation: He’s been really good. Returned late in his rookie season, looked like a solid player. The pass rush came together in 2021, and this year he looked like the winner of Best DT In The League Not Named Aaron Donald. Home run of a pick and everything J-Rob wanted when he took the risk.
Second contract: Fifth-year option was picked up, and presumably will be getting a mega-deal to stay in Nashville for the long term when the Titans shed enough salary to make that an option.

Player: Isaiah Wilson, OT
Year: 2020
Valuation: The kind of player a run-first team would love, a massive right tackle who maybe wasn’t the greatest in pass protection but would have been a great guy to run behind. The kind of player who could go anywhere from the late first round like the 29th pick the Titans used on him to somewhere on Day 2, depending on need and fit and character evaluation.
Evaluation: 2020 seemed like a particularly calm year for chucklehead behavior off the field by NFL players. For everybody other than Wilson. He played four snaps-three kneeldowns on offense and an extra point. He got pancaked on the extra point. Frankly, it’s impossible to tell if he could have been a useful player on the field because he was enough of a chucklehead otherwise that nobody wanted to find out. In partial defense of J-Rob, this wasn’t a Pacman-style pick where the Titans took somebody whose past behavior suggested he might be a horrible person and, somehow, they found out he might be a horrible person. There have been bigger draft busts in NFL history, but not many and not this late in the draft and not by the Titans.
Second contract: Wilson was traded with a seventh-round pick to the Dolphins for a seventh-round pick after his first season. Frankly, finding a team that would accept Wilson’s future guaranteed salaries without having to give up any real draft capital was one of J-Rob’s best deals.

Player: Caleb Farley, CB
Year: 2021
Valuation: Farley was another boom-or-bust pick, with the sort of enviable speed turn almost no corners possess, and about as thin a record of playing time as you’ll ever see from a first-round pick after a back injury at Virginia Tech and opting out in 2020. Like Simmons, Farley had the theoretical talent to be a top-five player from the draft class and a floor much, much lower than that. Also like Simmons, his draft fate was a wild card. No clue where he goes if the Titans go elsewhere at 22nd overall.
Evaluation: Struggled to get on the field early before tearing his ACL as a rookie, and can’t find the field in year two. He seems to be healthy, but the Titans prefer everybody else, including UDFA rookie Tre Avery, over him. For a fast player with that speed turn, has shown a shocking propensity to get beat deep when he has been on the field. It’s not over yet, but it feels like it could be over for him in Tennessee at any point.
Second contract: Too early to say with any confidence right now, but see above.

Player: Treylon Burks, WR
Year: 2022
Valuation: Use the 18th overall pick acquired from the Eagles for A.J. Brown on the college prospect who most similarly mimics AJB’s profile. It made perfect sense, and Burks likely goes soon after if the Titans don’t take him there.
Evaluation: A bit of a shaky offseason, and injuries early, but Burks has flashed some of those AJB-style traits we saw, including the ability to make contested catches in tight quarters.
Second contract: Way too early to say.

On the Titans firing GM Jon Robinson

So why did the Titans fire Jon Robinson?

The only answer I can give you is I don’t know anything beyond what Amy Adams Strunk said in her statement that came with the official announcement of the firing, that she believes “there is more to be done and higher aspirations to be met.” The statement specifically mentions “results (wins and losses) and team construction/roster building,” so there you have it.

There are many ways to parse what she said, and that the results (wins and losses) have been pretty good during Robinson’s tenure, including this season(!), suggest the firing may have been more about Robinson’s team construction/roster building. As a known and admitted jerk hater over-thinker critic, I have my own views for why it might have been correct to fire Robinson. But I have no idea if my reasons for why the decision might reasonably have been made have anything at all to do with why the decision was actually made. The rest of this post is speculation on my part, and may or may not have anything to do with what happened and why it happened. Read on at your own risk.

It’s worth emphasizing that we don’t know how much deliberation there was on this decision. The past two firings of AAS’s time as owner have been pretty explicable. Ken Whisenhunt kept losing games and getting his quarterbacks hurt, and it was a question of when ownership (which had previously been controlled by Tommy Smith) was willing to eat his contract. Mike Mularkey had a solid record, better than I thought he might, but he and others knew before season’s end that he’d likely be fired. But here, while there were apparently rumblings, there was no sense even among NFL insiders that Robinson might be fired soon. We don’t know how things changed from Robinson getting an extension through the 2027 draft in February (of 2022!) to now. This could have been anything from billion dollar lemonade stand reaction to A.J. Brown dominating his old team, with Eagles fans cheerfully serenading the owner’s box, to a cold-eyed evaluation of where recent Titans teams could have gone and where the current and future teams may be going.

Why now?

Another question to which we do not know the answer, and we have not gotten a good answer. There are a couple possibilities, any or all of which may have played a role.

One: AAS lost confidence in Robinson’s ability to lead the future of the team, and it was best to fire him as soon as that decision was made. The contrast here is with the Colts not firing Frank Reich despite Jim Irsay’s apparent loss of confidence in his ability to evaluate quarterbacks after l’affaire Carson Wentz tanked their season at the end of 2021. When you’ve lost confidence in somebody’s ability to make decisions, it’s time to move on from them, even if the timing is unusual.

Two: Any potential playoff run would have made the timing more difficult for a potential new GM. The normal time to fire a general manager is after a team’s season is over. Barring a collapse, the Titans will make the playoffs. They’ll probably be the #4 seed and an underdog in the wild card round, but could upset their opponent the same way the Bengals upset them last year. They could even win again in the divisional round. A Robinson who only gets fired after the Titans stop playing could theoretically keep his job into late January, giving the team not much time for a GM search before the postseason all-star game circuit begins. If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly.

Three: If this was a power play by Mike Vrabel using Ohio State as leverage, Vrabel needed to act now because that leverage might not be there at season’s end. The Buckeyes are in the playoff, and if they somehow upset Georgia (unlikely but not impossible), they’d be favored in the championship game. Ryan Day’s theoretically potentially hot seat becomes a lot colder if he wins the national title, and Vrabel’s only leverage becomes quitting.

Four: See above about A.J. Brown going off after the trade. Rich people don’t like getting humiliated more than anyone else does, and they normally have the ability to do something about it.

The challenge of the 2019 playoff success

Robinson began his career with a tremendous boon-the #1 overall pick in a draft with a couple quarterbacks and no immediate need at quarterback (as much as I can, except where specified, I’ll try to write about most past decisions using the information known at the time, so Marcus Mariota as a promising prospect, rather than how he is viewed). He was able to ransom that pick for a significant haul-an extra first-round pick, two extra second-round picks, and an extra third-round pick, split between the 2016 and 2017 drafts. The best contract values in the NFL are players on rookie contracts, so Robinson had some extra margin of error for the first 3 to 5 years of his time as GM (Mariota became more expensive with the fifth-year option in 2019, while the four-year period for the later picks ran through 2020).

Robinson’s job became much more difficult after the 2019 postseason run, for which impending free agents quarterback Ryan Tannehill and running back Derrick Henry received much of the credit. After a trip to the AFC Championship Game, Robinson had a decision to make-keep both, one, or neither. Except for that whole trip to the AFC Championship Game for the first time in 17 years bit, which meant he may not have had much negotiating room at all. Keeping Henry was mandatory after the postseason success and what he meant to the identity of the team. Tannehill had stepped in for Mariota to lead one of the best offenses in the NFL in the regular season, so moving on from him would have been extremely difficult (Tom Brady was the only alternative).

But those two extensions in particular made life hard for Jon Robinson. The Titans’ compensation for their starting quarterback went from $6M Average Per Year (APY) to Marcus Mariota to $20.9M to Mariota in his fifth-year option season of 2019 to Tannehill’s $29.5 million APY on his extension. Derrick Henry’s contract went from $1.3M on his rookie deal to $12.5M APY on his extension.

Structure details aside (Tannehill counts for $38.6 million on this year’s cap and has $18.8 million remaining in bonus proration because his cap hit was less than his APY in 2020 and 2021), Robinson had $20 million less to spend on every player on the roster other than starting QB and starting RB at the same time a wave of players was ending their period of cheap cost control. Yes, the salary cap went up. But only by $10 million, so half of that, and much of that was eaten up by proportionate draft pick increases and minimum salary increases (and those extra picks in 2017 hitting the most expensive part of their deals). Keeping Henry and Tannehill (or any other expensive QB) meant the Titans would not be able to afford to keep the 2019 team around, unless they could significantly outspend the salary cap for the short term and were willing to feel the pain in future years to do so. Unless Henry and Tannehill could keep the team running by themselves, Robinson had to do an even better job than he had done to keep the team as successful as they had been.

The 2020 offseason

In a way, it’s quite fitting that Robinson was fired on the same day that ESPN released its annual survey of team analytics staffers. (I promise I’m not turning this into another “the Titans hate analytics” rant.) One of the things that stood out the most to me in there is the responses to “When your team makes a decision you disagree with, which area is that most likely to occur in?” The most common answer by far was positional value. It’s hard to win in the NFL-you can outspend (many of) your opponents in the short run, but not forever. You only get so many draft picks. If you’re going to be great, you need to find value somewhere. Until QB salaries exploded the last couple years (and maybe even still?), an elite QB seems like one of those ways. But you need to find some way, and one of the ways to do so seems like finding positions you value and those you can get by at. If I were interviewing potential NFL GMs, the most important question I’d ask them is “What’s your theory of value?” Much like asking a head coach about which assistants he’d hire, I’d want to hear not just a single answer but a comprehensive idea for the ways your team could be better than the baseline expectation of average.

I don’t know what Jon Robinson’s answer to that question would be. I’m not sure which specific positions he valued more or less than the league-over seven seasons, he spent market money and first three round picks at almost every position on the roster. The closest thing he had to an answer seemed to be “his ability to pick players.” I personally hate this answer in general, because almost nobody is actually good at drafting over the long term (pro player personnel may be different, especially if it’s tightly integrated with coaching). But to the extent that was Robinson’s theory of value, 2020 was a very bad offseason for him.

It started with the draft. Isaiah Wilson is one of the worst late first-round picks of all time. Kristian Fulton was a wash-out as a rookie before a much-improved 2021. Darrynton Evans was another washout. The fourth-round pick went to Miami for Ryan Tannehill. Fifth-round picks don’t matter much, so Larrell Murchison was only slightly below average.

The lack of cap room meant the Titans couldn’t do much in terms of veteran free agency, so they had to hit on the players they brought in. Both the high-price imports ended up being OLBs. Vic Beasley was a total whiff in terms of football character and only played 125 snaps before getting cut. Jadeveon Clowney provided an unsurprising mix of physical play, hurries, lack of sacks, and unavailability, only playing 8 games.

There were no other significant additions, in terms of resources expended, and this is long enough already without rehashing every smaller move. The offense was still very good in 2020 despite the whiff on Wilson, but the defense was a mess that could have used two strong pass rushers and a quality rookie corner.

The 2021 offseason

The last of the extra picks from the Rams trade were off their rookie deals, so Robinson had no surplus value from that to enjoy. Instead, on that same limited budget, he had to keep together the quality offense and rebuild the defense into a unit good enough for the Titans to have another deep playoff run.

Once again, I’ll cover the draft first. As Mike Keith indicated he might, Robinson gambled on a high-end talent with red flags (back injury, limited experience, COVID opt-out) at corner in Caleb Farley. The second round brought small school tackle Dillon Radunz (one game in 2020 as FCS teams didn’t play their regular schedule). Third-rounders were linebacker Monty Rice and corner Elijah Molden. Fourth round, wide receiver Dez Fitzpatrick and outside linebacker Rashad Weaver. Farley played 60 snaps. Radunz, with an open right tackle job after Wilson became the rare player to get into repeated trouble off the field in 2020, 124. Rice, 179. Molden was a quality contributor as the slot defender most of the season, but Fitzpatrick didn’t make the 53-man roster and Weaver played only 12 snaps before he was lost for the season. Molden aside, this was another near-complete washout crop as rookies.

Robinson was able to do more in free agency, and most of his attention was concentrated on the defense. Three new starters were added in Denico Autry, Bud Dupree, and Jackrabbit Jenkins. This class actually worked out fairly well. Autry has been terrific, both last year and this year. Jenkins gave them short-term stability they needed. The money paid to Dupree coming off a torn ACL in December was a major risk, but was a solid player late in the season and filled a void. Acknowledging the risk with Dupree, this class did what you wanted them to do, and helped key a significant defensive turnaround

But the problem became the offense, which didn’t get a starter-level reinforcement in veteran free agency for the second straight offseason. The neglect was most blatant at wide receiver, which eventually necessitated the costly (in terms of both draft picks and cash) for Julio Jones. I wrote a post on that at the time, and won’t re-hash all the details. I will, however, highlight that the 2020 Titans had relied on two receivers, and Corey Davis had left in free agency and not yet been replaced. Julio’s injury issues continued, aggravating Vrabel with his inability to practice even beyond his lack of performance on the field, and this risky transaction did not work out like the Titans hoped.

Persistent problem position groups

It’s too early for me to want to tear about the 2022 draft class, plus they’re actually contributing as rookies unlike almost all of the 2020 and 2021 draft classes, even if maybe only due to lack of other options. Instead, I’ll highlight something that really annoyed me under Ruston Webster that has continued under Jon Robinson: obvious potential disasters waiting to happen at specific position groups, and those position groups costing the team. These are under specific focus this year at wide receiver and offensive line, especially tackle, but it’s been a recurring theme.

2017: The Titans didn’t have the blocking TE Mike Mularkey’s offense required, and put Jonnu Smith in a position he wasn’t capable of filling all season.
2018: Wide receiver was an obvious disaster in waiting, and hamstrung the offense all season. As I wrote in Football Outsiders Almanac 2019 (I write for FO perma-disclaimer), the 2018 Titans didn’t run a modern 3WR-based offense, and couldn’t have even if they wanted to.
2019: Who’s going to play snaps at OLB other than Harold Landry and the 300-500 Cameron Wake can play? The Titans unsurprisingly finished 30th in pressure rate.
2020: Cornerbacks, who needs them? Johnathan Joseph had lost three steps yet started for much of the season. (Between Clowney and Beasley, I thought they’d be okay at OLB. It’s more a retrospective disaster than obvious disaster waiting to happen.)
2021: Tight end, with no two-way players and almost no upside. Wide receiver, again, with a top two with a recent history of injuries and minimal quality depth. Offensive tackle unless Radunz was healthy.
2022: Wide receiver, still and yet again, with those standout top two both gone and the top four was two rookies, a guy coming off a torn ACL, and the guy who got bodied on the INT that ended last year’s playoff game. Offensive tackle, with no good answers.

Robinson’s New England background showed, sometimes to the Titans’ benefit (role-based evaluation has helped them plug and play), and in the case of the Patriots’ longstanding wide receiver evaluation issues, to their detriment. It’s the position that shows up the most in that casual listing for a reason. And, yes, Mike Vrabel was certainly aware of their limitations in terms of pass catchers.

What happens next?

Actual answer: I don’t know. It depends a lot on why the Titans fired Robinson, and what they’re looking for in the next couple years. We won’t get good answers on this until after the season-we’re after the trade deadline, and the Titans don’t have the cap space to make big moves even if they want to.

If this is Vrabel winning a power struggle, then it seems likely that the Titans will look to ride their current core group of players (however they define that group) into the ground. I mentioned in the Julio Jones post that I thought the Titans had 1-3 years left as a potentially elite offense with the Henry-Tannehil pairing as long as they were good enough around them. That window appears closed now, and both players’ contract status is such that the Titans could part with them after this season and start the next era of Titans offense in 2023. But that doesn’t have to happen if they don’t want it to.

The GM search may tell us a lot. It’s natural to construct a list of Vrabel-associated people, and if one of them like a Brian Gaine is hired, that will be a signal of one thing. A hire unconnected to Vrabel would be a different signal. A hire more tightly connected to Vrabel like John Streicher in a significant front office role would be another signal. What that new GM does will be more signs.

Right now, I’ll wait and see and respond to developments as they happen.

On the 2022 Tennessee Titans

The latest of my occasional post about the Tennessee Titans. No separate 53-man roster post; notes on that will end up in here when it matters.

Progress from last year: this post is being written on Saturday night the day before the first game, rather than Sunday morning. Like last year and unlike some past efforts, I will attempt in this post to concentrate and focus on some key areas of concern that will help determine how good the Titans will be on offense and defense, rather than being a comprehensive season preview discussing everything under the sun.

Like last year, we’ll begin with an updated version of The Chart:

Pyth. Wins	Est. Wins	DVOA
8.2	7.7	-4.9%
9.7	7.5	-3.0%
9.9	9.3	8.1%
8.1	8.7	3.5%
9.2	8.4	2.9%
7.4	7.0	-5.7%

For the uninitiated, Pyth. Wins = “Pythagorean Wins”, a projected record based on a team’s point differential. Estimated Wins is a stat by Football Outsiders (I write for FO perma-disclaimer), calculated using DVOA with an emphasis on consistency and performance in key areas with average fumble luck (so it would like the 2021 Titans more than the annoying prolate spheroid actually did, as the Titans defense only recovered 4 of 16 opponent fumbles). DVOA is FO’s core stat, opponent-adjusted and based on play-by-play performance. The table contains the Titans’ performance by those three stats for the 2016-21 seasons (2021 pro-rated to 16 games), sorted randomly (I used Excel’s random number generator to produce the ordering, except the second time because the first time it spat them out in actual chronological order).

I started displaying this chart a couple years ago because it suggests there was a pretty deep continuity from each Titans season to the next of the Jon Robinson era. I can pick out 2017, because I know it’s the weakest of the era, and 2019, similarly the strongest (and the one with the best argument those numbers were underrating it, due to the QB switch), but I’d honestly have to guess at every other year if I hadn’t just double-checked my proration for 2021. So, pretty good track record of generally playing within a narrow band. This suggests the Titans will probably be roughly as good as they’ve been for the past six years, and if you’re predicting otherwise, that should be the focus of your prediction.

That said, on with the show.

The Offense: Why Should You Think It Will Be Good?

The Titans’ 2021 offense in a nutshell: when Julio Jones and particularly A.J. Brown were on the field, it was generally good. When neither them was on the field, the passing offense was quite bad. Jones was released. Brown was traded to the Eagles. How does that not recur? Obviously, the additions of Robert Woods and Treylon Burks, plus Kyle Philips to play the shifty slot role held by Chester Rogers last year.

But let’s take a step back from the names and think about this structure, because we’ve seen this before. Twice, in fact. The overall shape of the receiving corps resembles what the Titans had in 2011 and 2018-a reliable veteran chain-mover (Nate Washington/Rishard Matthews), a potentially explosive young player (Kenny Britt/Corey Davis), a slot guy (Lavelle Hawkins/Taywan Taylor), and some guys you’d probably prefer not to have to rely on as starting receivers (Damian Williams/Tajae Sharpe). In both 2011 and 2018, one of the top two guys on the list went away for most of the season (Britt ACL, Mathews whatever) and it ended up an unmitigated disaster. In 2022, the reliable veteran is (a) new to the team and (b) coming off a torn ACL. The young player is (a) a rookie rather than a guy with at least one year of NFL experience and (b) not even a(n unofficial) starter. The slot guy is also a rookie. The “we hope he’s not a starter” is still a(n official) starter. So, we have a scenario we’ve seen before that’s ended in a predictable disaster a couple times before, and this year’s version comes in looking objectively worse than the previous comparables. Obviously the past is in the past and there’s no guarantee similar blowups to the ones that disintegrated those units will recur, but we saw last season that injuries are a thing that happens. This isn’t the Bears receiving corpse-there’s some legitimate upside here (Woods being ready to play off an ACL +, Burks improved over rookie camp +, everybody loves Philips), but I can’t help but see the other side of that.

At this point it feels incumbent upon me to say something about Ryan Tannehill, so naturally I’ll talk about his Miami interregnum replacement Jay Cutler. At one point during that season, I was watching NFL Network and Steve Mariucci, as memory serves, was leading a discussion about whether this year, his 12th season, would be the year that Jay Cutler finally changed who he was. That’s about how I feel about the Tannehill discourse, except of course that Tannehill is only in his 11th season. Players do do different things from time to time; Josh McCown had a great stretch of games with Chicago as Cutler’s replacement in the 12th season after his debut. Heck, Tannehill has been a guy who’s stood in the pocket and taken a bunch of sacks every year of his career except 2020. But to pretend that there’s a good chance of him being anything other than what he’s been for most of his career, or even just his Tennessee tenure, I find tedious and almost exclusively vibes-based. And what he’s been in Tennessee has been a player who operates most effectively on early down passes with play action, and who not even in his better seasons of 2019 and 2020 has been better than league average in pure pass situations like third and medium/long or in the two-minute drill.

At this point it also feels incumbent upon me to say something about Derrick Henry. Frankly, we saw last season that the Titans were perfectly happy to play the same way even without Henry in the lineup. The Titans fielded a competent offense in the games A.J. Brown played and Henry missed aside from the Houston slopfest loss, and the ugly loss to the Jets was the one full Henry/no AJB game we got. Do I think Henry should get fewer carries than the 27 a game he had last year before getting hurt? Absolutely. Do I think he’ll either get hurt or be largely ineffective after midseason if he does get that kind of workload? Also yes. Did the Titans draft Hassan Haskins, and keep him on the 53 so they’d have an alternative to giving Henry literally every carry again? I hope so. But do I think the answers to those questions are as important as how the WR corps ends up? No, I do not.

And you can’t talk about Henry without talking about the offensive line. Paul Kuharsky likes to note it’s taken the Titans first-, second-, and third-round picks for the Titans to seemingly finally have replaced Jack Conklin, with Nicholas Petit-Frere claiming the starting job Isaiah Wilson and Dillon Radunz could not. Naturally, I can’t help but note that this seems quite fitting, as the Titans spent first-, second-, and third-round picks in the trade up to acquire Conklin. Trivia aside, the Titans as a team are influenced heavily by their offensive line, and we’re waiting to see how Petit-Frere at right tackle and Aaron Brewer’s unusual size at left guard shake out, and how Nate Davis performs after a down year following what felt like a breakthrough 2020 season, and if Taylor Lewan can be healthy enough to play at his former established level.

Which brings us to the one wild card. We saw last year a Todd Downing-coordinated Titans offense looked a lot like what we’d previously seen from the Tannehill/Henry Titans offense in terms of ideas and how they were trying to win. This year saw the arrival of Tim Kelly, another Vrabel-linked Houston import, as passing game coordinator. Davis Mills looked reasonably competent for a rookie third-rounder last season, so that brings some reason for optimism. But from my viewings of Houston, those moments of competence largely came when the Texans pretended they were going to try to run the ball, something they did in 2021 much more frequently notwithstanding a spectacular lack of success (32nd in DVOA, rushing yards AND yards per attempt). So unless the Titans are going to try to play a different way than the way their personnel is set up for and, and with Downing still officially the OC, and given Tannehill’s history across multiple teams and offensive coordinators, my expectations for how much of a difference Kelly is likely to make are relatively muted. I could be too pessimistic here (I’ll get to a related topic soon), and maybe there are smaller details here than the ones I’m generally focused on that lead to larger improvements, but I’m not inclined to move the needle much because of this.

But yes, I’ve cruelly neglected the one position group on offense the Titans have clearly improved from 2021: tight end. The Titans had a couple replacement-level one-way tight ends last year, and tried to do what they could with them. Which wasn’t much at all. Preseason wasn’t much of a guide to actual usage, but I expect we’ll see a lot more 2TE sets of base personnel, Geoff Swaim in a pure mini-tackle role, Chig Okonkwo used situationally, and Austin Hooper is a two-way tight end they lacked and really really really could have used last year. This aspect of the 2022 Titans offense, as long as Hooper is around, is guaranteed to frustrate me a lot less than the 2021 Titans offense did, but tight end is generally not a position to move the needle.

TL;DR: it’s all about the receivers, a group that has clear upside but also massive obvious downsides that could see an offense crippled like the 2021 offense was crippled without A.J Brown and Julio Jones.

The Defense: 2021 a Mirage or The Start of a Turnaround?

I wanted to start the discussion of the 2022 Titans defense by talking about the 2020 Titans defense. Convenient timing on this:

Explosive plays get you beat defensively. EVERY defensive coach would obviously prefer to make you go 10-12 play drives than 3 to 5 play drives to score. This philosophy (emphasizing split safety schemes with late rotations to 1 high) dates back to the 80’s/90’s. Nothing new.

— Louis Riddick (@LRiddickESPN) September 9, 2022

Fun fact about that 2020 defense: though they allowed the highest third-down conversion percentage by any team in recent history, by DVOA they were “only” 29th on third down defense, so not even the worst team in 2020. There were multiple reasons for the disparity, two of which I want to focus on. First, distance matters. The 2020 Titans faced more third-and-shorts and -mediums than the average team, so ceteris paribus an equally good (or bad) defense would have given up a higher conversion rate because the offense’s job was easier. Second, the 2020 Titans defense was actually quite good at preventing long pass plays. They illustrated the ideal of that tweet, except that at some point, you have to make the offense’s job a little bit harder to make those short gains.

What drove me crazy about the 2020 Titans defense was they showed only one idea for how to play defense-deny big gains, allow short passes. This was most apparent in the Steelers game, when an aging Ben Roethsliberger could only play the one way, and the Titans defense just let him. Yes, there were reasons the Titans played that way in 2020, and some more aggressive schemes wouldn’t have worked trotting an aged Johnathan Joseph and some of their other pieces. But from a high-level perspective Mike Vrabel, Shane Bowen, and co. chose a way to play defense and never re-assessed that way even when it obviously (to those of us on the outside) wasn’t working. A significant reason I was pessimistic about the 2021 Titans defense was that failure to change.

It took a couple weeks to suggest that the 2021 Titans defense might be different. No, not just because of how well Kristian Fulton was playing despite my skepticism. And not to pick on him, but after starting Week 1, Elijah Molden largely disappeared from the defense. In contrast to Joseph lasting seven games, replacement starting safety Bradley McDougald was cut after the second game. Notwithstanding his contract, Jayon Brown was not the starter and was supplanted by David Long. Molden re-appeared, didn’t get lit up, and became a regular starting in Week 6. Many different players shuffled in and out of the lineup, as often for seeming specific matchup-related reasons as the injuries (a topic I’ll get to)-DL5/6 was a seemingly intentional revolving door all season, with seven different players playing at least one game but not making it to 100 total defensive snaps. And coverage multiplicity significantly increased-I don’t have the stat handy, but the Titans were the only defense in the league to play a certain number of snaps in Cover-1, -2, -3, and -4, behind significant use of simulated pressures. SIMPRS/creepers was also a Dean Pees thing, so not entirely new to Tennessee, but the 2021 Titans didn’t have just one way to play defense, and were much the better for it.

Amidst all the coverage complexity was one thing the Titans did an awful lot of: brought 4 pass rushers. This was not a Mike Vrabel thing in his one year as Texans defensive coordinator or his first three years in Tennessee-Pees didn’t prefer it, and while 2020 saw more of it (the Titans brought 4 pass rushers at roughly league average rates on both 1st/2nd downs and 3rd/4th downs), it still wasn’t a feature. It definitely was in 2021. The Titans brought other than 4 pass rushers 33% less on 1st/2nd downs and 39% less on 3rd/4th downs (yes, I can’t help but think the presence of senior defensive assistant Jim “the correct number of pass rushers is four” Schwartz might have been a factor here). And while the Titans did bring one of those creepers at a decent rate (11% DB blitz rate, 13th in the league per Football Outsiders Almanac 2022), the pass pressure primarily came from the front four of Denico Autry, Bud Dupree, Harold Landry, and Jeffery Simmons, who had his breakthrough season as a pass rusher (all but Dupree had 34-37 pressures per FOA22, and if you prorate him from 397 regular season snaps to 800, he’s also in that range). The inside linebackers were also non-factors as pass rushers, in contrast to Vrabel/Pees tendencies. That pressure came despite the Titans ranking just 23rd in ESPN’s pass rush win rate, suggesting the pressure and sacks the Titans did get came from a combination of structurally breaking down the protection (coaching!) and strong coverage forcing the opposing QB to hold the ball (also coaching!).

The defensive coaching staff remains intact (yay), but the quartet of pass rushers does not after Landry’s torn ACL likely knocks him out for the entire regular season. There is no like-for-like replacement on the roster. Denico Autry, the new nominal starter at OLB, missed August with an injury, is 32, and probably shouldn’t be a coverage player and is most successful as more of an inside rusher. Rashad Weaver also does not look like the same sort of athlete for those SIMPRS and does not win in the same way as a pass rusher. It’s a different sort of challenge for the coaching staff, and the baseline quality of the pass rush is probably not as high as you (also sometimes me) probably felt like it was in 2021.

Depth outside the pass rushers also does not feel great-preseason and pedigree don’t make you feel better about the Titans backup inside linebackers, and both Zach Cunningham and David Long are about as versatile as last year’s Geoff Swaim/Anthony Firkser tight end combination (i.e., never ask one to do the others’ job). There’s a reason J-Rob was aggressively acquiring backup safeties in training camp, and it wasn’t because he was bored. Aside from 208 Fulton snaps, the cornerback group on the 53-man is completely changed over from what it was, but without a backstop veteran like Jackrabbit Jenkins or even Greg Mabin (I know the Titans are listing him at CB but Ugo Amadi is much more a slot/SAF Molden injury replacement than outside CB). If anything else happens, the Titans are choosing between a bunch of untested young players who’ve never done it (and sometimes this turns out surprisingly well like Fulton last year) or players available on the street (or I suppose yet another trade). Frankly, I’m not comfortable with any of this. I’m sure the Titans internally are more optimistic in some specific areas than I am, but I’d bet they share some of the same questions.

I don’t know how this is going to turn out. There’s enough defensive investment you could say that between four first/second day picks the corners will be fine (assuming the IR’d Molden returns relatively soon), the two starting safeties are good, the two inside linebackers are good at they’re supposed to be good at, and the pass rush will be good enough. The Football Outsiders projections have them in the muddled middle post-Landry. That’s a much better place than they were in 2020, and with the range of offensive outcomes, would be plenty good enough to put the Titans again where they’ve been for the past six seasons. Much like with the offense, I can see a downside scenario where things end up a mess again, but that’s not the likeliest outcome.

TL;DR: coaching staff be good again, don’t let depth get tested too much, be good incorporating new players again.

Concluding-Type Thoughts

A repeated note from past previews: injuries happen. And, with Landry, in fact have already happened. Assuming he misses the entire regular season, the Titans have already lost more starter games from DL and OLB than they did all of 2021. And if you don’t include Teair Tart as a starter (Naquan Jones was already starting to take his playing time), you can add in LB to make it the entire front seven. Not all depth, everywhere, will be tested, but some of it will, and there are entirely too many positions where the Titans depth looks shaky.

Not to repeat what I just said, but the Titans on both offense and defense have obvious points of vulnerability, for some combination of injury and reasonable range of performance. And the chart at the top suggests the Titans were more “2016-20 Titans” good than “typical #1 seed” good in 2021-heck, most of the 5-loss teams in 2021 played in the first weekend of the playoffs. Even if the Titans repeat their record, that will quite likely be their fate. And the healthy version of this year’s Titans doesn’t feel as good as the healthy version of the 2021 Titans. And while the AFC South is in its regular place as the weakest division in football, the Colts have a less laughable quarterback, the Jaguars are employing an actual non-laughable head coach and were free agency again, and the Texans are trying with a slightly-elevated cast of Madden replacement-level players. You can understand why Vegas doesn’t favor the Titans, and other people are down on the team. But this coaching staff has earned the benefit of the doubt enough that you should expect a roughly similar group of players doing roughly the same thing should end up with roughly similar results. One of the other teams, most likely Indianapolis, will get their act together enough to win the AFC South, but put me down for 9-8 and probably but not definitely a return to the playoffs as a wild card.

Tennessee Titans 2022 Draft Preview by Position

The latest of my occasional posts about the Tennessee Titans.

One of the staples of my pre-draft coverage for years has been a draft preview by position, including a breakdown of what the Titans have at each position, what they might be looking for, and a probability the Titans draft a player at that position. See here for an example of what this looked like last year.

As of right now, the day before the draft, the Titans currently hold seven selections in the 2022 NFL draft. Two of those selections are in round 6, outside the first 200 picks in the draft. My regular disclaimer in this post has included that selections that late in the draft are commonly used for doubling up at a need position or grabbing a player at a non-need position. Once you get into the 200s, you’re getting a head start on undrafted free agency. I don’t think it is quite as useful to include those late picks in draft probabilities, because it might be a mistake to assume players drafted that late will be counted on to fill a key role on this year’s team. Because what I’m doing here is trying to figure out what the Titans think they need to draft, I decided to base my draft probabilities on the five picks the Titans hold in the first five rounds, where they’re most likely looking for key contributors to the 2022 roster.

Previous versions of this post have included lists of players linked to the Titans via either a top-30 facility visit or a private workout. Neither of those happened last year, so they were not in last year’s version of this post. This year, I have included a list of reported visitors; the Titans did not publicize the full list of up to 30 (counting) players they had in, so we’re left with some unknowns. The Titans still regard player fit as extremely important, and did the best they could with their strong emphasis on selecting Senior Bowl players in last year’s draft. So we do not have the full list of players they could most strongly be connected with, but I think the list we have is useful enough to be worth including. Private workouts are still useful, but (a) I trust less that we have comprehensive information and (b) they’re weaker individualized signals of interest, so I did not comprehensively include the information we do have there.

I should note that, as much as I can, this post attempts to describe what the Titans might do based on how I think the Titans might think. Jon Robinson and Mike Vrabel will be setting the direction and making the decisions for the team, so I try to think like they will think. What I would do if I were in charge of the Titans is (a) in some cases quite different and (b) completely irrelevant in terms of predicting what the Titans will do.

On with the show.

Quarterback
Need at position: Low
Analysis: Ryan Tannehill is the starter. Logan Woodside is the backup. They tried the late round quarterback thing with Luke Falk and COle McDonald, with no success. If you think Woodside isn’t a reliable backup, well, the Titans have had a bottom quartile backup QB situation every year of Jon Robinson’s tenure except 2019, when he acquired Tannehill with the goal of potentially having him replace Marcus Mariota sooner rather than later. One of the things I was listening to while I was preparing to write this post was Mike Keith on the OTP, in response to the A.J. Brown trade rumors coming from outside Tennessee, emphasize the Titans were in a window where they were trying to win this season, and that move wouldn’t make the Titans a better team in 2022, so chances of it happening weren’t very good. That’s pretty much exactly what I think about the possibility of the Titans drafting a quarterback in the first round. But there’s been enough noise I can’t rule out it happening.
Visitors: Malik Willis (Liberty)
Draft probability: 10%

Running Back
Need at position: Low-moderate
Analysis: Derrick Henry is Derrick Henry. Dontrell Hilliard is back to be the third down back again if need be. But the Titans have been sniffing around backs who might be available on the third day, and they could find a spot for a player like that if they want. Not an early round priority, but a pick on Day Three wouldn’t be a surprise.
Draft probability: 40%
Visitors: James Cook (Georgia)

Wide Receiver
Need at position: High
Analysis: The Titans’ current top three receivers are A.J. Brown, who skipped out of the early offseason workouts because he wants a contract extension, and new acquisition Robert Woods, who’s coming off an ACL tear. Yes, I have two names in that top three. Nick Westbrook-Ikhine is around and will undoubtedly have a role to play, and maybe Dez Fitzpatrick or Mason Kinsey or Racey McMath will emerge to be a useful player on offense. But we’ve seen what happens when you throw the ball to Fitzpatrick or Westbrook-Ikhine in key situations, and the Titans will be looking to avoid that. They could find a Chester Rogers-level vet in veteran free agency, but slot receiver is a need you could fill in the middle rounds of the draft, and they’ve been scouting receivers like Calvin Austin who could be a fit. I don’t see Jahan Dotson in the first, but I expect a slot receiver and they could also draft a Woods future replacement who could play a role immediately if the right player is there.
Visitors: Calvin Austin (Memphis), Treylon Burks (Arkansas), Skyy Moore (Western Michigan)
Draft probability: 90% of one, 30% of a second

Tight End
Need at position: High
Analysis: Austin Hooper gives them two-way capability they didn’t have last year. Geoff Swaim gives them a useful blocker. Both of those guys are older and signed to one-year deals. The draft broke very badly for the Titans last year, with the top tight ends going before they got to a pick where the Titans would draft them. They’re better covered, but the Titans know what Hooper and Swaim are, and they know they need a guy. My favorite for #90, especially with mock drafts indicating there’s likely to be a run between #90 and their next pick at #131. As always, competent blocking ability would be a plus, so I don’t think the Titans will prioritize an oversize slot receiver here.
Visitors: Daniel Bellinger (San Diego St), Trey McBride (Colorado St), Cade Otton (Washington), Jalen Wydermyer (Texas A&M)
Draft probability: 80%

Offensive Tackle
Offensive Guard/Center
Need at position: Moderate? + moderate?
Analysis: I normally treat these positions separately because they’re different things, but I think it makes sense to group them together this year. The Titans probably have four starters on the offensive line between Taylor Lewan, Ben Jones, Nate Davis, and either Jamarco Jones or Dillon Radunz. Jones has played both guard and tackle. Radunz has practiced at both guard and tackle. One of them will be a starter. The other will likely be the gameday swing tackle. Aaron Brewer can be the gameday center backup but is probably too small to be a long-term starter candidate, and Corey Levin’s place in the pecking order is they kept Brewer over him. But there’s a clear void in the gameday lineup at either guard or tackle. We know it’s there. But we don’t know which, and heck, we can’t even be sure if the Titans are sure. They could plausibly take either a guard like Zion Johnson or a tackle like Tyler Smith, and it would be completely congruent with what we think we know. I’d probably lean toward them thinking Radunz is a tackle, and I think that’s the consensus, but for this post, I think the basic “they could really use a starter, and there will be a player or two at #26 who really fits what they could want” is sufficient. With more picks, I’d raise the probability of an immediate Brewer replacement/future Jones replacement like Cole Strange from Chattanooga (private workout), but I think the likeliest scenario here is we see one offensive lineman, at #26.
Visitors: AJ Arcuri (Michigan St, OT), Josh Ezeudu (North Carolina), Kenyon Green (Texas A&M, OG), Trevor Penning (Northern Iowa, OT), Nicholas Petit-Frere (Ohio State, OT), Tyler Smith (Tulsa, OT)
Draft probability: 50% (OT) + 60% (OG/C)

Defensive Line
Need at position: Low?
Analysis: Five different defensive linemen-Denico Autry, Naquan Jones, Larrell Murchison, Jeffery Simmons, and Teair Tart-played at least 200 snaps for the Titans last year (including playoffs). All of them are back. But two of those guys are really good, and the others appear to be role players. Autry is older, so you could theoretically fill, say, Murchison’s rotational role in 2022 and have that player move into a bigger role in 2023. But they’ll be fine if they don’t draft any.
Visitors: Logan Hall (Houston)
Draft probability: 20%

Outside Linebacker
Need at position: Low
Analysis: My initial favorite for the pick at #26, until the Titans re-signed Harold Landry. Landry and Bud Dupree start and play a lot. We just got the Rashad Weaver injury recovery puff piece. Ola Adeniyi showed last year he could play a few snaps while being primarily a special teams player. Edge rushers are great, and you could always use more, but I was having a hard time thinking of this as a priority. The Titans bringing in a couple who seem likely to go at different spots in the draft (Johnson’s likely gone before #26, Malone and Sanders mid-rounders, and Otomewo late) got me to raise my probability here relative to their need.
Visitors: Jermaine Johnson (Florida St), DeAngelo Malone (Western Kentucky), Esezi Otomewo (Minnesota, alt: DL/Autry), Myjai Sanders (Cincinnati)
Draft probability: 30%

Inside Linebacker
Need at position: Low
Analysis: Zach Cunningham and David Long are your starters. Monty Rice is the backup. Dylan Cole and Joe Jones could easily be a special teams-focused LB4. Long’s in the last year of his deal, so there’s a potential long-term need here, but this is another position I see as not a priority.
Visitors: none known
Draft probability: 10%

Cornerback
Need at position: Low
Analysis: Kristian Fulton had a much better second season than I was expecting. Once the Titans adapted to him, Elijah Molden had a good rookie year as a slot corner. Chris Jackson also played some slot and on the outside. We got the offseason Caleb Farley piece. Buster Skrine provides some veteran depth. What the Titans are missing here is this year’s version of Jackrabbit Jenkins, the more established veteran to provide leavening to a core group of younger players. You’re not going to find that player in the draft. Corner is a position where you could always see a player added, just because there are so many of them and you can always use more. But this isn’t a priority.
Visitors: Marcus Jones (Houston, alt: RET)
Draft probability: 20%

Safety
Need at position: Moderate-high
Analysis: Kevin Byard and Amani Hooker are your starters. Free agent signee A.J. Moore is primarily a special teams player who probably fits best as a fourth safety. There are a couple depth safeties out there. But I don’t see a SAF3 on the roster. This could be a veteran addition after the draft, but there’s definitely a role here that a draft pick could fill.
Visitors: Alontae Taylor (Tennessee, alt: CB)
Draft probability: 60%

Some Macro-Level Thoughts
1. A repeated note from past drafts: Jon Robinson values not draft picks, but using the draft capital he has to select players he wants. Until he traded down after the tight ends and wide receivers got picked over by mid-third round last year, he hadn’t traded down in the first five rounds while on the clock. Unless the board at priority positions gets wrecked again, I’m not expect a trade down unless it’s for a huge haul.
2. Another repeated note: Jon Robinson has spent his early draft picks on players with an immediate role on the team. This hasn’t always been a significant role, like spending a second-round pick on Austin Johnson to be a rotational defensive lineman in 2016, but they’ve filled a role. If you don’t see a clear path to potential playing time as a rookie, the Titans aren’t taking the player early.
3. Some draft picks are comments about particular players on the roster, and I’m not sure which ones the Titans want to reduce in their role.
4. Special teams matters. A third safety would be expected to play a significant role as a gunner, one reason teams apparently like Alontae Taylor. Return skills add value to a player like Marcus Jones, so just because he’d be a slot player like Molden is not sufficient reason to completely discount them (and cross-training Molden could be the safety answer).
5. One of my goals for this exercise this year was to stack position priorities. By that measure, it ended up about like this:

OT/OG+C – WR – TE — SAF — RB – OLB – DL/CB – QB/LB

The implication of that stacking was the Titans are really likely to come out of the draft with an offensive lineman who could be either a guard or tackle, a wide receiver, and a tight end, would like to come out of the draft with a safety, and then highlight running back as a priority should they meet the earlier needs unless there’s a player at a different position they value more. I’m fine with that being the quick gloss to Titans draft priorities, and adjusted my draft probabilities to match that implied high-level gloss.
6. My baseline expectation is that the Titans will draft all but one of the positions I think they are likely to draft, while hitting one of the positions I think they are less likely to draft. That tends to be about how it goes.

On the 2021 Tennessee Titans

The latest of my occasional posts about the Tennessee Titans. I’d hoped to have a separate 53-man roster post in addition to this one, but that didn’t happen this year.

Like last year’s version, this post is being finished on Sunday morning in the hours before kickoff, so it won’t be as long as some past efforts. Instead, it will concentrate and focus on a couple major points instead of being more of a comprehensive season preview.

Also like last year’s version, we’ll start with an updated version of The Chart:

#Titans results, 2016-20. “Pyth Wins” = Pythagorean wins, based on point differential. “Est Wins” a @fboutsiders stat based on performance in key areas. Pick which season they went 11-5! pic.twitter.com/v7PLimgUjl

— Tom Gower (@ThomasGower) January 6, 2021

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Last year, I gave the years 2016-19 in order. In that version, the years 2016 through 2020 appear, but not in chronological order. You can probably guess when 2017 might be, since that was one of the lesser versions of current Titans run. But if you can pick out 2020 from its place in that list of five seasons, well done. Frankly, it’s not obvious to me. When a version of this graphic showed up when I was on the Football Outsiders Twitch stream this summer, Mike Tanier (who was probably seeing the chart for the first time) was able to pick out 2019 as the best team. But on the whole, I present the chart not just because it suggests the 2020 Titans were not as strong a team as their 11-5 record might lead you to believe, but to suggest a deep continuity in the last five seasons of the Titans as a whole.

The question now is, should we expect the 2021 Titans to be significantly better or worse than any of the past five Titans teams, and particularly with respect to the 2020 Titans. It would be convenient for that purpose to have the 53-man roster post, but alas. But I’ll do what I can here to summarize. Let’s do a brief positional rundown for a high-level gloss on how much personnel has changed from last year to this one:

• QB: Same personnel, minus some high-level doubts about Ryan Tannehill.
• RB: Same personnel, down to Darrynton Evans already injured. Add in, maybe, high-level doubt about Derrick Henry’s ability to sustain the workload.
• WR: Same WR1. Upgrade at WR2. More replacement-level players in depth positions (to be clear, this is an upgrade IMO).
• TE: Lost Jonnu Smith and didn’t replace him. Not as versatile in 2TE sets.
• OL: Same personnel except at RT. Largely unchanged.
• DL: Lost DaQuan Jones and added Denico Autry. Similar tier players, but subtract run defense and add pass rush. A good orientation change from my perspective, but not a significant overall talent difference.
• OLB: Lost Jadeveon Clowney and added Bud Dupree and Rashad Weaver. Dupree’s a good player, but coming off an ACL and is no longer his team’s third pass rusher.
• LB: Same personnel.
• CB: Significant personnel changeover. Lost Malcolm Butler and Adoree Jackson, added Jackrabbit Jenkins and draft picks. Butler-Jenkins is another Jones-Autry-type swap of different similar tier players. Draft picks are largely we’ll see.
• S: Lost Kenny Vaccaro, will be replaced internally with Amari Hooker. Matthias Farley might be the new dime safety?

Frankly, I’m not seeing a significant personnel-related case for the 2021 Titans to be better from that high-level positional gloss. The cornerback group is more talented, but there’s almost no NFL experience outside of Jenkins and the strong rule of thumb is that young corners, even ones who end up very good, struggle as rookies. If apparent starter Kristian Fulton (a second-year player, granted, but one who barely played as a rookie) is an average starter this season, that counts as a huge win for the Titans.

One thing I learned doing a decade of preview chapters for Football Outsiders Almanac for different teams is that before the season begins, basically 28 of the 32 fanbases hate our projections. Every other fanbase thinks we’re underrating their team’s special snowflake qualities. And at the end of the season, most of those fanbases will be wrong and we’ll never hear from them, but about 4 of those 28 will be right and get to lord it over us (you win, Bills fans, we’re not doubting Josh Allen unless he stinks again).

The locus of claims for the Titans to be significantly better in 2021 seems to be the defense, which is replacing 6 of the 12 players who played at least 400 snaps (including postseason). There’s definitely a case for improvement. The previous paragraph, though, is my cautionary tale, that virtually every team has some case for improvement, and that Tennessee’s should be evaluated in that context. To look at one case in slightly more detail, it’s not just that Denico Autry over DaQuan Jones is a pass rush upgrade, but that the Titans are getting Autry outside of the context of Indianapolis, when he’s not playing next to DeForest Buckner, and that your bullish case for Autry to be just as effective as he was with the Colts also pre-supposes Jeffery Simmons makes a transformative leap as a really strong player to also a terrific pass rusher, so your claim is really about two things an outside observer is going to be skeptical of, not just Autry being the same player.

Another personnel-related point is that you may have objected to the inclusion of Adoree Jackson in the positional list above. That’s about a particular point I think I make in this preview every season: the expected number of injuries is not zero. Injuries may regress toward some mean from year to year and are often a case for a team to be better or worse, if that team was particularly healthy or particularly unhealthy. That’s not an accurate story about the 2020 Titans. By the adjusted games lost numbers at Football Outsiders, the Titans ranked #7 on offense and #10 on defense, so they were healthier than average on both sides of the ball. Tennessee has been a pretty healthy team the past five seasons, with their only below average ranking coming on defense in 2018. But on the whole, you should expect some injuries, and injuries is not a good reason to expect the 2021 Titans to be better than the 2020 Titans.

Beyond personnel changes, one of the other big reasons for changes in team quality is coaching. Mike Vrabel is back, but the Titans lost Arthur Smith at offensive coordinator, replacing him with Todd Downing, and now officially have Shane Bowen as the defensive coordinator after last year’s weird “we don’t have a DC but Bowen is going to call plays and coach a position group but this isn’t a problem at all and you’re bad for thinking it is.”

One of the things our research at FO has shown is teams changing their OC normally decline on offense; there’s at least some transition cost, in terms of new schemes, people communicating with other people, coordinators learning their all the details of their players, etc. Relative to that, I’m bullish on Downing’s ability to maintain the same level-there’s not much personnel changeover on offense, he was on the staff so he’s been in the coaching room, the coaching staff is otherwise unchanged, and I’m confident the people around him will insist the Titans remain a very run-oriented team, so he won’t go as pass-heavy as he did when he was an OC in Oakland. But this moderate bullishness doesn’t preclude there still being some transition costs-he just hasn’t called plays within the rhythm of a game for these players before, so he won’t have the same kind of Fingerspitzengefühl that helped Arthur Smith be so successful.

Shane Bowen, I’m less convinced about. Vrabel is a defensive-oriented head coach, and I see no reason to reject my baseline assumption that head coaches oriented to a particular side of the ball almost never believe in fundamentally changing what they do. Any coaching-related improvements on defense are likely to be marginal, and relate to that communication stuff the Titans institutionally pooh-pooh’d last year. That may help some. As a fan of the team, I’m happy the early signs from the players are that they’re acting like they believe that-it’d be a bit of a red flag if they weren’t. But there’s nothing in Bowen or Vrabel’s track record that suggests we should believe they’re able to implement a quick turnaround. Now, the Football Outsiders projection (infamously?) has the Titans defense dead last in the preseason projections. I’ll emphasize a point I had from the other end of the spectrum with the Houston Texans a couple years ago when I did that chapter in FOA: the projections at FO are based on a million simulations, with the result that even the most extreme projections are more conservative than what happens in a normal season. That 32nd-ranked defensive projection is actually better than last year’s 28th-ranked Titans defense. “FO projects Titans defense to be worst” and “FO projects Titans defense to improve” are both accurate claims. The better way to think about the projection is that it doesn’t see a strong case for the Titans to be good (or not to be bad again). If I had to guess, they’ll be in the bottom ten by DVOA but not the worst. Some of the claims about reason for improvement will be true, but not too many of them, the corners will probably stink, and while the third-down conversion rate will be better (and N.B. the Titans defense was “only” 29th by DVOA on third downs last year), it won’t be enough for them to be good.

Fortunately for Tennessee, they still play in the AFC South. Houston and Jacksonville are likely to be two of the worst teams in the league again, and the bullish case for Indianapolis is they play in the AFC South and Carson Wentz pretty much can’t be as bad as he actually was last year. The Titans are a bit too top heavy for my comfort, but they bring back most of the pieces from one of the league’s best offenses, and they still won the division even with an awful defense last year. Unless they get really unlucky with injuries or one of the three other teams is unexpectedly better than I think they are, they’re winning the division again. But they’re not one of the best teams in the AFC, and eventually they’ll probably have to beat a couple of those to achieve their deep postseason aspirations. I don’t see it. 10-7 and an AFC South title, but falling short of the AFC championship game.