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My offseason coverage of the Tennessee Titans begins in earnest this week, and that means starting with the superlatives from the Titans season that was. I’ll be picking an MVP on both sides of the ball, naming a rookie of the year, and choosing a biggest surprise and biggest disappointment. I begin today with the offensive MVP.
Like virtually everyone else, my selection as the offensive MVP for the 2014 Tennessee Titans is tight end Delanie Walker. Despite missing a game, the veteran led the team in targets (111, including plays negated by penalty), targets percentage (20.7% overall, 21.7% in games where he was active), receptions (63), and receiving yards (890). His yards per reception went from 9.5 his first season in Tennessee to 14.1, confounding my warning/fear that doom could be setting in for the 30-year-old at a position that tends not to age well. Not only that, he was the rare Titan that actually looked comfortable in their first season playing in http://gty.im/459464138 Ken Whisenhunt’s offense. For those reasons, he was an obvious choice.
Given Walker was such an obvious choice, why wouldn’t you pick him? Well, for the second year in a row, I’m picking a Titans pass-catcher, but not the Titans pass-catcher who fares the best by Football Outsiders’ efficiency metrics (perma-disclaimer: I write for FO). Walker came out below average, 29th among the 50 ranked tight ends, with a DVOA of -3.5% and just 21 DYAR, FO’s measure of cumulative value. He ranked behind, among others, Vikings tight ends Rhett Ellison and Chase Ford in both metrics. Heck, Walker didn’t even lead the Titans in DVOA or DYAR. The baseline for receivers isn’t the same, but Kendall Wright ranked just ahead of him in DVOA (barely, at -3.4%) and DYAR (66). For the fourth straight season, Nate Washington actually led the Titans in receiving DYAR (96) and led all Titans receivers in DVOA (5.1%). Like my Kendall Wright selection last year, though, I ultimately decided that Walker’s greater volume, better play, and bigger threat to opposing defenses made him the better choice.
It did not sway my voting at all, but one of the things that struck me in looking up the numbers for this post was the split by quarterback for the pass-catchers. I’ll explore this in more detail in a future post, but most of Washington’s value came with Zach Mettenberger in the lineup. He had 90 DYAR on passes from the rookie, compared just 7 DYAR each from Jake Locker and Charlie Whitehurst. By contrast, Walker was most valuable with Locker (37 DYAR, meaning he got negative DYAR from both Mettenberger, who couldn’t complete 50% of his passes to him, and Whitehurst). Those come from fairly small sample sizes (Washington had between 22 and 26 targets from each of the three quarterbacks), so I wouldn’t swear to their absolute reliability. Still, I thought they were interesting enough to share here.
The Titans’ injury issues helped make Walker an easy choice. Only eight players played as many as half of the Titans’ offensive snaps, and only four players-Walker (769 snaps, 79.6%), Nate Washington (765 snaps, 79.2%), Andy Levitre (965 snaps, 99.9%), and Chance Warmack (964 snaps, 99.8%) played at least 70% of the time. Availability is one of the most important stats unless a player is doing some truly spectacular things. Nobody did for the 2014 Titans, so I had to choose one of those four. A full sixteen games of Warmack at the very best he was this season could have seriously tempted me to show off my contrarian nature and zig to pick him instead of zagging to select Walker like everyone else, but (a) I wasn’t as impressed with even his improved play as some other observers may have been, and (b) I actually watched him play the rest of the season, too, when he would have been a serious contender for the biggest disappointment award. I’m higher on Levitre than most Titans observers, but his limitations were too obvious and destructive at times. That left just Walker and Washington to choose between.
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