Programming Note: Positional analysis series starts soon, by which I mean maybe as early as tomorrow if I bother to make the time to write the first post.
After Dick LeBeau had his mutual parting of the ways with the Pittsburgh Steelers at the end of the season and didn’t decide to retire, the Titans were immediately rumored as one of the favorites to obtain his services. His destination was up in the air for a while, but Jim Wyatt reported last night he will be joining the Titans.
The Titans continue to employ Ray Horton, their defensive coordinator. The obvious question is, what will LeBeau’s role be? Wyatt indicated his title will be assistant head coach/defense, which is vague enough to cover anything from consulting to being in charge of everything. Wyatt’s story says LeBeau will be in charge of the defense. Offensive coordinator Jason Michael already doesn’t make the calls-that’s Ken Whisenhunt’s job. If Wyatt’s reporting is correct, that would make Horton the Titans possibly the first NFL team with two coordinators, neither of whom is actually functioning in the coordinator’s normal role.
Fine, so the Titans are hiring LeBeau to be their new Not Defensive Coordinator. What does this mean? I don’t expect LeBeau’s arrival to have that much impact, for a couple reasons. First, LeBeau’s track record isn’t impeccable. He was a failure as head coach of the Cincinnati Bengals in the early 2000’s, going 12-33. Don’t care about old news? How about this: per Football Outsiders numbers, a significantly better judge of team quality than total yardage rankings in my book (I write for FO perma-disclaimer), the Steelers had a worse defense in 2014 than the Titans did. LeBeau is rightly a legendary coach, but his record says his presence is not an automatic fix for whatever ails a team.
Second, the best thing new coaches can do is to stop doing stupid things and to get the attention of players who may have tuned out the previous coach. On the latter point, Ray Horton just finished his first year as coordinator. We’ll see how much change we see in Tennessee defensive personnel, but the likely answer is not too much. He’s had success in the league as a player and as a coordinator. I don’t think his message has gotten stale and players were tuning him out. He and particularly Whisenhunt went out of their way to talk about how the players continued to work, even toward the end of a dismal season. You can discount some of that as normal coach puffery, but I don’t think the Titans’ problems came from a lack of effort.
On the former point, the local comparison to bringing in LeBeau is to bringing in Gregg Williams while retaining Jerry Gray as coordinator after the 2012 season. The Titans improved from 2012 to 2013 on defense, though they were still below average. If Williams’ presence helped, and the improvement wasn’t just a result of adding players like Moise Fokou, Sammie Hill, and Bernard Pollard, plus a passel of young talent improving, then it was likely because the 2012 Titans were too easy to play defense against and doing stupid things. (If you need a reminder*, see Week 16, Green Bay, and watch them complete pass after pass in front of the off coverage. *-Getting a reminder not recommended.) Just getting rid of that free money, as I called it in my play notes, did a lot.
The 2014 Titans were no doubt a bad defense, but I didn’t see them have the same problems with free money. Rather, their issues stemmed from a couple basic problems LeBeau’s arrival does not change. First, they were in the first season of a major scheme transition. I was very pessimistic about the 2014 Titans defense, expecting some regression from 2013, for precisely those reasons. Horton hadn’t done well in his first season in Arizona or Cleveland, and taking over a below-average defense, I expected a defense pretty much like the one we got. LeBeau’s defensive history in Pittsburgh was that players were rarely asked to play much, if at all, their first season or two in the league. That intentional strategy was designed precisely to avoid transition costs like the 2014 Titans had no choice but to undergo. Second, the Titans lack talent on the defensive side of the ball. I’ve harped on this point plenty, but only one of their past seven first-round picks has been used on defense, and the offense has gotten plenty of the free-agency dollars as well. This is basically the opposite of my view, which is that talent is more important on defense than it is on offense. The result of this malign neglect is the Titans have one defensive player who presents a matchup threat on his own, Jurrell Casey. Other players must be schemed into place to have an impact or just hidden to avoid being liabilities. LeBeau’s arrival doesn’t change this issue, either, and his 2014 Steelers defense says he might have the same issues.
This post probably makes it sound like I’m critical of the hire. I’m not, and that’s not how I intend to come across. Rather, I just think it won’t have that much of an impact. Unless they act like the 2011 Texans and come up with an impressive influx of new talent, the 2015 Tennessee Titans will most likely be below average on defense. That is the most likely outcome for defenses that are not historically untalented. It’s the same thing we saw from 2012 to 2013. It’s the same thing I would have predicted had LeBeau retired or joined Arizona instead.
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