A look at the names atop the unofficial depth chart in the weekly game release for the Titans’ 2014 season opener at Kansas City on Sunday reveals an awful lot of familiar names. Looking at the offense and defense, I count two projected starters who were not on the 2013 Titans. There are a couple more new starters than that, but most of them were backups for the last year, now thrust into the lineup by the departure rightly ranked ahead of them on last year’s depth chart. The other former backup was once a starter, and wasn’t removed from the lineup because he played so well they didn’t want other teams to feel bad. The 2013 Tennessee Titans went 7-9 and were neither particularly lucky nor particularly unlucky to do so. The 2014 Tennessee Titans return most of the same players as that team. Why on earth would you predict the 2014 Titans to have a record much different than the 2013 team?
On the other hand, there’s this:
I didn’t know half these things went on during practice. During seven-on-seven I was lost. I had never been down for seven-on-seven.
That was Mike Munchak’s comment after overseeing his first practice as head coach back in 2011. It flabbergasted me then and continues to astound me now. Munchak was a very fine player and a fine offensive line coach for many years. I keep bringing up that quote, even now, not to denigrate Munchak as a man but to note that men who become head coach of an NFL team typically have certain attributes and points in their background Munchak lacked, to the detriment of his performance as head coach. Whatever else you want to say about him, Ken Whisenhunt does have those attributes and points in his background. As a former offensive coordinator, he has watched a 7-on-7 drill before. He has been a head coach before. He knows things now Munchak did not when he was beginning his first season as head coach or even when he was approaching what would be his final games as head coach of the Titans.
Coaching, even competent coaching, can mean a world of difference to an NFL team. We saw that last year in Kansas City. We saw that in the division with the change in the Texans defense from 2010’s abysmal outfit to 2011’s division champion. I saw that closer at hand with Chicago’s offense last year. Look at what the Eagles did last year in Philadelphia. More relevantly, look at what Whisenhunt (and/or head coach Mike McCoy) were able to do on offense in San Diego last year. If you want a case for the Titans to be better, maybe a lot better than they were in 2013, it starts with coaching.
At least on offense. Whisenhunt brought with him new defensive coordinator Ray Horton and his version of the 3-4. It’s been a long time since the Titans have run a 3-4. They’ve spent years and years acquiring players to fit a 4-3. Horton’s one-gap version of the 3-4 isn’t that dissimilar from what the Titans did last year in some respects, but it’s still a transition. Every new defense is. The counter to the 4-3 to 3-4 transition time argument is that so much of the game is spent in sub package these days. There, the transition may be even more pronounced. Horton’s defensive fronts in obvious passing situations often don’t look like the way the Titans have lined up the majority of the time the past few seasons. He calls blitzes that, if they’ve been in the playbook in somewhat similar form, haven’t been used. His preferred personnel packages probably won’t be the same. It will be new and different.
And because it’s new and different, there will be that transition period. A transition period in which the Titans will allow plays they likely would not have allowed running a more familiar defense, whether in a world where Whisenhunt retained Jerry Gray and Gregg Williams to run the same thing they ran last year or whether in a future Horton defense where players are more used to their roles and playing the offense. The Cardinals did not have a good defense in Horton’s first year as defensive coordinator in Arizona. As I explained in July, I consider the Browns defense in Horton’s first year as coordinator to have been bottom ten, not the top ten you may have read it was.
Because of the costs of transition, I expect the Titans to struggle a fair amount on defense this year, especially early in the season. I’ll have more say about the Chiefs matchup specifically before kickoff on Sunday, but that generally is not a good sign against particularly what looks like a formidable first quarter of the season and might spell disappointment during a soft-looking second quarter. I’d like the Titans’ chances to have a good defense better if I saw another player on the roster capable of making the same leap from occasional impact player to consistent top performer the way Jurrell Casey did last season.
If the Titans are to be as good as they were last season with what I see as likely to be a worse defense, then they must improve elsewhere. Special teams is more like one-eighth of the game, not one-third like you hear, but that’s not an inconsequential amount. The Titans had a below-average special teams unit, with struggles in multiple areas. The presence of Leon Washington and Dexter McCluster should solidify the return game; I don’t think McCluster will be as good as he was last year for the Chiefs, but even simple solidity and a league-average performance would be an upgrade over what happened last year. Ditto kickoff returns. As I mentioned in my 53-man roster analysis, Ryan Succop is likely to be a net upgrade over recent vintage Rob Bironas. Simply transitioning from last year’s mistake-prone special teams squad to an average one could help offset any defensive issues.
The great imponderable for the 2014 Tennessee Titans is just how good the offense will be. There are three or four pretty major imponderables within this question, none of which we’ll really know the answer to until the season plays out. First, just how good is the offensive line? This has the potential to be a pretty dominant unit, one of the three or so best lines in the league. Right now, I’d rate it as average or a little above. There are major questions and serious potential at all five spots on the line. Michael Roos, a longtime top ten or higher left tackle, but the Titans selecting Taylor Lewan told you all you need to know about what they think of Roos’ probable future level of performance. Andy Levitre, certainly a useful player, but struggled in his first season, missed time again this year in training camp. Brian Schwenke and Chance Warmack, the second-year players who showed promise in between making a bunch of rookie mistakes. A first NFL offseason could have brought a lot of technique and body improvement, or they could be the same players they were last year. Michael Oher, a disaster at times last season but a former first-round pick with the talent to be a quality right tackle. This could be a powerful line that leads the way for a sustaining running game made up of a committee of backs I don’t believe will gain yards if they’re not blocked, or it could be like last year’s unit, which creates holes sometimes but not consistently enough they can rely on them to power the team to victory (see Jacksonville’s first win).
You can tell a similar story at wide receiver. Between Justin Hunter, Nate Washington, and Kendall Wright, the Titans could have their best three receiver set since at least 2003 and maybe since the team moved to Nashville. On the other hand, Hunter showed in preseason some of why he had his hands on but failed to bring in eight of the 24 incompletions thrown his way last year, Washington isn’t going to beat defenses on his own, and one completion on a crossing route after a scramble isn’t enough for me to declare the stop sign preventing Jake Locker-to-Wright completions more than 10 yards downfield has been removed.
Ah, yes, Jake Locker, the greatest imponderable of them all. As I believe I’ve indicated on here before, I ended up intentionally avoiding any deep dives into his play because I think whatever happens in 2014 will render those offseason takes largely irrelevant. The questions are multiple. First, can he stay healthy? He’s been the starting quarterback of the Tennessee Titans for two seasons and been available to play in the second half in 16 of those 32 games. Second, how does he play on the field? Whisenhunt’s offense, if he ran what he did in Arizona, will ask Locker to take deeper shots than, say, Chris Palmer’s did. He has the arm, but what about the accuracy? Can those wide receivers make contested catches? Will tight ends be a thing to control the middle of the field and make contested catches? Can the offensive line give Locker time to throw, or will he continue to be a quarterback who is sacked an above-average amount? (Hint: The answer to that last question is very likely yes, no matter the answer to the first question in the sentence.)
There’s enough there that you could look at Locker under Whisenhunt and say “Ben Roethlisberger” and enough there you could say “remember the 2010-12 Arizona Cardinals quarterbacks?” What we saw in the preseason was positive and vanilla, or vanilla but positive, or positive but vanilla, or something; enough not to be too concerned about a fourth-year player heading into a new scheme, but not so much to make you change your mind from what you already believed.
There are more question marks on offense to get too, but I want to mention the biggest one: injuries. Outside of 2012, when a too-old offensive line fell to pieces, the Titans have been of average or above-average health on offense since 2007. There are a couple key points of vulnerability on this edition of the Titans, though. The first is wide receiver, where the Titans did not make any major investments into finding a receiver who could step into one of those 11 personnel sets should one of the top three go down; glass mostly empty fellow that I am, I envision 2011-like levels of misery should that happen.
The second is of course quarterback, where Charlie Whitehurst is the primary backup and Zach Mettenberger the intriguing rookie. Whitehurst has been poor and failed to win the starting job in Seattle that was almost supposed to be handed to him, while you can count on one hand the number of Day 3 picks who’ve been average quarterbacks as a rookies with one hand left over to count anything else you can count on the five fingers of one hand. If/when Locker gets hurt, the Titans will probably struggle to match even Ryan Fitzpatrick’s 3-6 record as a starter (3-4 once they adapted the offense to fit his strengths). If you want a disaster scenario for the 2014 Titans, it starts here, continues through an offensive line that doesn’t improve the way everyone is expecting it to, and runs through a defense that looks lost and confused longer than anyone hopes before concluding with the Titans on the clock to ring in 2015.
The optimistic scenario includes Locker for a full season, an offensive line that comes together quickly, a defense that comes together by the second quarter of the season, six eminently winnable division games plus mostly non-overwhelming foes in the AFC North and NFC East. As we saw with the 2012 Colts, you don’t have to be the best team in the league or even better than average to be 11-5, you just have to outscore your opponents in games. In this scenario, double-digit wins, and I’m not talking just 10, is a possibility.
I’ll believe that only when it happens though. Whatever Munchak’s limitations, I didn’t think the 2013 Titans were nearly as badly coached as, say, the 2012 Chiefs Reid transformed. Give me 7-9 once again, and I see too many points of potential weakness and not enough points of assurable strength I think they’re more likely to go under that mark than above it.
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