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.