Good-Bye to All That

Last day of blog! Last day of blog!

ICYMI, I’m retiring from regular Titans blogging effective March 9, a.k.a today, a.k.a. this will be my last post. I made the announcement a month ago, when I started the offseason positional analyses with the QBs, and now it’s time. Monday, I gave an overview of what I thought the Titans might do in free agency, a post that was partly obviated by the report that evening of the trade for DeMarco Murray, which necessitated the post on that. Tuesday, I gave a too early overview of what I thought the Titans might do in the draft, which post conveniently has not yet been obviated by further free agency signings or, to the best of my knowledge, the NFL conducting a secret start to the draft (kind of a bummer, that, in some ways).

Since this is my last post, I wasn’t sure quite what to address. I eventually decided to hit on the latest news of things that can’t become official until later today at earliest, make some premature statements about the Titans in 2016 and going forward, and finally close on a bit of a personal note. So, those things.

DeMarco Murray’s Compensation
We did get the first report of what Murray will get in Tennessee. Well, sort of-the linked Pro Football Talk post has a total dollar amount ($25.5 million over four years) and guaranteed money ($6 million fully guaranteed in 2016, $3 million fully guaranteed in 2017, $3.25 million injury guaranteed). Reading between the lines, that sounds like a $6 million base salary in 2016, $6.25 million base salary in 2017 (the $3M and $3.25M guarantee split), $6.5 million in 2018, and $6.75 million in 2019, and no cost to cut Murray after 2017. As far as base salaries go, that’s a bit less than I was expecting, but perhaps some of the incentives (full deal reportedly up to $33 million) are pretty reachable.

While I was writing this post, we did get a report out of Philly on the trade compensation-a swap of fourth round picks. The Titans have the second pick in the fourth round, which may be c. 100th overall, while the Eagles have the 15th pick in the fourth round, which may be c. 113th overall. Those pick slots are subject to change based on the final award of compensatory picks, but the difference between the two on the Jimmy Johnson draft value chart is along the lines of a mid-fifth-round pick. For a player who wasn’t happy with his hold team, who was due an amount of guaranteed money that made him uncuttable, that’s a phenomenal deal for the Eagles and more than I would have been willing to give up if I was Jon Robinson.

Free Agency Signing Ben Jones
Reports came out of Houston Tuesday night that the Titans had agreed to terms on a four-year contract with Ben Jones, formerly of the Houston Texans. This move surprised me a little bit. I need to watch more Jones in 2015, but a couple thoughts on the move nonetheless:

1. Jones has started at both guard positions as well as center. At both guard positions, he’s shown he really should be a starting center. I’d bet the Titans signed him to be their starting center, at a salary commensurate with that (and the reported $17.5 million over four years, first reported after I wrote a draft of this section of the post, is right in line with that), and not as competition for Brian Schwenke at C and Jeremiah Poutasi and Quinton Spain at LG.

2. Jones is not as much of a power center as I thought the Titans would be looking for. The Texans took him in the fourth round out of Alabama to play in Gary Kubiak’s zone-blocking scheme. I thought strength was one of his issues at guard. He’s not a people-mover in the run game. Jon Robinson and company know all this, or at least they better, so that they signed Jones means (a) they don’t care and/or (b) they were so desperate for a center they wanted Jones anyway.

3. Jones is a pretty average starting center, who lacks any outstanding traits. I tried to cover the range of possibilities in the positional analysis, but I thought Brian Schwenke was acceptable on the rare occasions he was actually healthy, and the best move for the Titans was to either add a really good center (Alex Mack, by name) or just a veteran who provided a better backup option than they had last season (Ryan Wendell was the name I suggested). Maybe I’m off on Jones, but I’d put him in a similar category as Zane Beadles, whom the Jaguars just released. If you really need a guard (center), he’ll fit the bill, but as soon as you’re settled elsewhere you’re probably looking to move on from him.

On the Titans in 2016 and Beyond
I’m moderately bullish on the Titans’ record in 2016. Based on 2015 DVOA (for the last time, I write for Football Outsiders perma-disclaimer), they have the easiest schedule in the AFC even without getting to play themselves outside of practice. With health and any improvement from Marcus Mariota, some decent draft picks and free agency moves to replace some of the obvious weaknesses, plus avoiding some of the roster insanity of last season (see, e.g.,WR, OLB, CB), the Titans could easily see their record jump from 3-13 to 7-9 or 8-8. That could happen even if the Titans are not actually any good.

One thing to keep in mind as free agency unfolds not only this year but also the next couple years is the Titans have Marcus Mariota on a very cost-controlled contract through 2018. The disappearance of the quarterback middle class means that even if he fails to become much better than he was, he’s still making $10 million or more less than what he would if he wasn’t on a rookie deal. That means Jon Robinson has a lot more breathing room in terms of extra cap space and the ability to pay just average starters (like Jones), mistakes aren’t as costly, and you can pay washed-up veterans in the hopes that they aren’t washed up, as long as your ownership is willing to spend the money to do so (see, e.g., what Ryan Grigson has done in Indianapolis lately). Free agents pretty much always get paid more than you want to pay them, the cap has gone up a lot, and the Titans need players. The real constraints are anything with unavoidable cap repercussions beyond 2018 and the Adams family’s cash budget, which is a subject I never dived into in sufficient detail (and probably couldn’t have, given I don’t know the actual timing of signing bonus payments).

The macro-level issue for the Titans is not getting the sort of mediocrity I think they can get to this season, but getting beyond that. Evaluating prospectively how they do that from this distance is a tricky proposition, of course. The best bet is Marcus Mariota developing into an elite quarterback. I highlighted some of the areas I’d like to see him improve in the QB positional analysis, and don’t really have anything to add to that here.

Repeating a long-time mantra of mine, the Titans need more premium players. They don’t have many right now. The best/easiest way to acquire them is in the draft, especially in the early rounds. That will be Jon Robinson’s task. He has the pedigree to be successful, but we’ll see.

Beyond Mariota and premium players, there’s the overall team-building stuff, involving Robinson and Mike Mularkey. Since both men were hired this offseason to their full-time jobs, I gave them and their initial public pronouncements the in-depth treatment not too long ago. What they’ve said since then has been (a) mostly consonant with that, and (b) not that important relative to what will happen soon, which will put the truth or the lie on the things they (particularly Robinson) have said. Mularkey, I’m fairly comfortable we know what we’re likely to get, because he has a long track record of coaching in the upper ranks of the NFL. There’s more I could say, but little of it I’m confident will look good a year from now, so I won’t say it.

A Personal Note
Total Titans, especially the way I wrote here, was always a very personal, idiosyncratic work.

I never tried to cover, on a timely basis or even necessarily otherwise, every important piece of Titans-related news, let alone all the unimportant (in any big picture) stuff that necessarily makes up the day-to-day workings of the reporting on a team.

I mostly wrote the posts that interested me. At their best, this was hopefully a thought-provoking and sometimes even prescient way of looking at something around the team. More often, it was Tom tilting at windmills, or maybe leading you off on some damn fool idealistic crusade.

Posts sometimes appeared pretty regularly, and sometimes appeared at seemingly-random intervals, whenever I had some spare free time and a Titans-related topic I wanted to dive into. Sometimes, this just meant posts didn’t appear at all, even if I may have in some sense wanted them to (see, e.g., last year between the draft and the start of training camp, or mid-week of pretty much any week the last two seasons).

Posts were rarely edited, and even less often well-edited. By and large, I hacked out a bunch of words on a compose window and hit publish. In the early years, when I was good, I remembered to hit spell check before publishing. Lately, I’ve been pasting things into Microsoft Word and letting its spelling and grammar checker clean up the mistakes that are obvious to it. That still leaves plenty of mistakes, like perhaps incoherent sentences and moments when my fingers typed in a word other than the one I meant, plus plenty of stylistic infelicities, like poor word choices, overly long sentences, and unnecessarily convoluted attempts at explanation.

I didn’t start out as anybody anybody had ever heard of. I never covered an NFL team. Or a college team. Or a high school team. I never played in the NFL. Or in college. Or in high school. Or any other sort of organized football. Even flag football. I was just some guy in Illinois, with a computer, an internet connection, and a desire and willingness to watch, learn, write, and argue about the Tennessee Titans.

Thanks to Andrew Strickert for bringing me on board back in 2007. If you’ve enjoyed my work here, give him credit for bringing me on board. I accept full responsibility and blame for me, all my dumb posts that I cringe at when I look back on, and all my bad habits, which weren’t apparent back then. Thanks to Drexel Perry for joining us for part of the ride.

Thanks to all the Q&A partners over the years, particularly mainstays and division rivals Nate Dunlevy (Colts) and Steph Stradley (Texans). You made this more fun.

Thanks to everybody who linked to one of my posts, even if only to tell me I was wrong. Thanks in particular to Paul Kuharsky, for regularly including us in his roundup of Titans reading, and a personal thanks to Evan Silva of Rotoworld for his kind words and plugs for the positional analyses.

Thanks to all of you for reading, for following along, for putting up with all my bad habits, for commenting, for pushing back when you thought I was wrong (which I was, often). I used to joke that my ideal blog was one nobody read. Total Titans was always a labor of love for which I was paid primarily in hedons, though, and it wouldn’t have been as much fun without anybody else actually reading things.

This site will still be up, or at least I expect it to, and somebody else may take it over. I’ll still be around, on Twitter, writing from time to time for Football Outsiders (including the Texans and Colts chapters in Football Outsiders Almanac 2016, the next edition of our annual book), and I hope to start posting at least semi-regularly to my personal blog. I’ll still be a fan of the Titans and follow the team as closely as my time and sanity permit. Heck, I may even still spend five hours re-watching a preseason game, a proposition that will probably be more attractive knowing that I won’t then be spending another two hours writing a post on it. I’ll probably still feel the urge to write about the Titans from time to time. If that urge doesn’t pass after I lie down for a while, that’ll show up at my personal blog. But for me, for here, sorry, we’re closed.