Field position and the Titans defense in 2014.

After covering the offense yesterday, I now turn my attention to how field position affected the Titans defense in 2014.

Methodology is the same as for the offense and in past seasons. Touchdowns are worth 7 points. Made field goals are worth 3 points. Missed field goals are worth 2 points. All other drives are worth 0 points. Drives that finish the half where scoring is not the point (e.g., the Steelers taking up the final 6:58 in Week 11) are excluded, as are desperation drives that don’t have a realistic chance of scoring.

I mentioned this in the offensive post, but approximately everyone who might be reading this post is well aware the 2014 season was largely a factory of sadness for the Tennessee Titans on both sides of the ball. Consequently, many of the points in here will therefore be critiques or observations of things the Titans didn’t do well. Given that Ken Whisenhunt and Ray Horton are both returning to run the offense and the defense, respectively, I think field position and what it meant is well worth examining. Keep in mind, though, that most of these sample sizes are small enough that the numbers themselves are not of great importance. Rather, the broad trends and comparative results are what is most likely to be meaningful.

As I always start with, a chart showing 2014 results, and how they compared with 2013:

A good look at a factory of sadness: Titans opponents had better starting field position than they did in 2013, and were more productive in each subdivided area of the field.

One of the things I mentioned in last year’s post was Titans foes didn’t start many possessions in particularly good territory, with only 2 drives starting inside the 30 after 11 such possessions in 2012. Well, the Titans were back to their old ways in 2014, with 7 such possessions. Opponents averaged 5.86 adjusted points per possession on those drives, compared to 3.57 per possessions that started between midfield and the Titans 30.

Another way of looking at the decline in the defense: with 2013’s defense and 2014’s field position, the Titans would have given up 54 fewer adjusted points (372 instead of 426). With 2014’s defense and 2013’s field position, the Titans would have given up 21 fewer adjusted points. The primary driver of the Titans’ defensive decline in 2014 was the defense, not the effect of the position the defense was put in.* (*-Larger issue here, which I’ll try to touch on later.)

Average opposing field position after one of the Titans’ 21 turnovers (fumbles, interceptions, muffed punt/kickoff): the Tennessee 43. Average field position for the Titans after one of the opponents’ 13 turnovers: the opposing 45. That’s including only drives, so turnovers like the Steelers’ pick-6 of Zach Mettenberger and Jason McCourty’s fumble return score are excluded. I was actually kind of surprised by that, given the Titans were not as successful as their opponents. What it says is the Titans turned the ball over too much and/or didn’t take it away enough, plus maybe they got lucky with return yardage relative to their opponents.

Now, the breakdown of the other ways opponents got possession. Kickoffs chart.

Hello, Ryan Succop. Goodbye, Rob Bironas. Hello better field position? The chart seems to indicate so, but surprisingly not really. Titans opponents actually enjoyed indistinguishably better field position after kickoffs in 2014 (the 23.3) than they did in 2013 (the 23.2), and that does not include the Eagles’ kickoff return for a score.

This is an area, though, where I think Football Outsiders numbers really help illuminate where the problems are. Per FO, the Titans finished the season ranked 30th on kickoffs. Using my FO staffer access to the breakdown between kickoffs and kick coverage, I can note that the Titans (viz. Succop) ranked a respectable 14th in weather-adjusted kickoff, coming out slightly better than average by magnitude as well as rank. That was an upgrade over what Bironas (R.I.P.) did in 2013. The Titans’ problem, per FO, was their return unit, which ranked next-to-last, ahead of only Miami. That does include the Eagles’ kickoff return for a score; if you look only at allowed returns that didn’t end in a score (those that have an effect on field position, if you may), the Titans were still bad, ranking 27th. Poor kick coverage was why the Titans did not see any improvement after upgrading their kickoff man. (Pinpointing just why the Titans allowed longer kickoff returns is an exercise beyond the scope of this post; my inclination is the problems were primarily personnel-related, but that’s a complicated subject and while Nate Kaczor has the time to figure it out, I really don’t.)

Next up, field position after punts.

Fewer punts inside the 20, more in the more reasonable range of minus territory. On the whole, average opponent starting field position after punts went from the 24.6 in 2013 to the 26.0 in 2014. That was not as bad as 2012’s performance (the 28.6), but it is a difference. How much of that difference is explained by where the Titans punted from? The 32.9, after it was the 34.9 last year (2012 was dismal, the 30.6). Thus, it seems like the Titans’ difference in field position after punts was largely created by the offense being in worse position when they punted.

FO numbers agree that punting did not seem to be the issue. They went from 0.6 points of punt value in 2013 to 2.7 in 2014. Looking only at punts actually kicked (excluding the muffed and the blocked), the story of the Titans punting unit per FO has been Brett Kern comes out average-ish, and when the Titans have a good punt coverage team like last year, they come out reasonably, but when the punt coverage unit suffers, the punting unit as a whole suffers. That was not the case this year. Though it seemed like Kern had his usual mix of shanks and boomers, he comes out 7th and strongly positive looking only at punts actually kicked, while the coverage team was pretty average. Note as well this analysis doesn’t include the two safeties, both of which I would probably put on the punt team.

Just because I thought it was interesting, here’s field position and defense under each quarterback.

With Locker in the lineup, the Titans defense allowed 2.04 adjusted points per possession. That figure was 2.38 points with Whitehurst and 2.61 points with Mettenberger. Of course, while the Titans defense was the Titans defense, injuries and whatnot meant that defense did not perform at the same level all season long. Using the season-long defense numbers, the Titans would have allowed 2.31 adjusted points per possession with Whitehurst at quarterback, 2.36 points per possession with Locker, and 2.43 with Mettenberger. That’s the same rank ordering you get using average starting field position, which was the 28.6 with Whitehurst, the 29.2 with Locker, and the 31.8 with Mettenberger. I noted in yesterday’s post that the offense had slightly better field position when starting with Locker (0.6 yards) and Whitehurst (1.9 yards) than with Mettenberger, but these numbers say the offensive performance exacerbated the differential.

This brings us back to something I noted earlier, the effect of the starting quarterback on actual defensive performance. This is really hard to separate. It makes a ton of logical sense that a defense that faces a ton of possessions and a large number of plays performs worse the longer it is on the field. Was this true for the Titans in 2014? It in fact was; by FO numbers, the Titans had an average defense (1.0% DVOA, 17th) in the first half and the league’s worst defense in the second half (21.8% DVOA). It isn’t always, though, so outside of our n=1 sample, it’s hard to say the relationship is always so straightforward. Whisenhunt and Horton’s 2012 Cardinals team was even more inept offensively than the 2014 Titans, but that defense was equally good in both halves despite facing a ridiculous number of drives. Thus, what bedeviled the 2014 Titans was likely something else, perhaps in-game injuries and age wearing a toll on players, or something more complicated than I’m picking up, or perhaps just an example of splits happen.

Short version of the last two posts: special teams were not a big reason for the success or lack thereof for the 2014 Tennessee Titans. Rather, the offense was not very good and the defense was not very good, and both contributed to the others’ badness.