Titans Offseason Primer: Tannehill’s Expiration Date Arrives
(Photo by George Walker IV via thetennessean)
Author’s note: Please enjoy my written rant about the Tennessee Titans, which I wrote during the week before the Conference Championships in an attempt to grieve my own lost hope.
If there’s one thing we know about the Tennessee Titans, they’re a resilient bunch with an underdog mentality, a real chip on their shoulder. Throw in any sort of BS cliché you can think of. None of them solve the case of the Titans’ drastic flop to end their season.
If you thought this team in its current iteration could win a Super Bowl, I hate to burst your bubble. They couldn’t. Even if the offense had shown up, and the Titans won their divisional game, there’s almost no shot in my mind that they’d be able to put up enough points to beat the Chiefs or Bills, then beat the Rams on top of that (I’m not counting the 49ers in this exercise because Jimmy G is always beatable).
The Bills had, statistically, the best defense in football this year. None of that mattered when there were 13 seconds left with the ball in Mahomes’s hands with the game on the line. It’s simply a fallacy to believe the Titans were on these teams’ levels.
I get it. I’m the idiot. I picked the Titans to win the Super Bowl. I picked Ryan Tannehill to win the Super Bowl. In hindsight, the team was built to win a ring, aside from two extremely crucial cogs in the machine: Ryan Tannehill and Todd Downing. And those pieces failed miserably in the most pressure-packed, season-defining moments of the loss.
Tannehill put up numbers over the 2019 and 2020 seasons, both basic and analytic, which rival some passers that many would consider elite. His EPA production was top-5 and he looked to be in full control of an offense that would hum with him under center.
But every time he lined up in the playoffs, I got this awful feeling, a feeling which I tried to block out for the entire regular season, a feeling that reared its ugly head on both the first and last offensive plays of the game. Imagine being a Bengals fan. Your offensive line is getting the shit kicked out of them like an underpaid extra in a James Bond movie. Even so, Burrow hangs in there and delivers in the final moments. He delivers strike after strike, under pressure, and he comes out successful.
I’m not doubting Tannehill's toughness, resilience, or ability to take hits and bounce back up. He’s shown to be more than durable and resilient in his time with the team. He started every game on a #1 seed in the AFC with a record-setting injury report. Yet, somehow, when things get tough and tight in the playoffs, Tannehill can’t carry your team in the same vein as Burrow, Mahomes, Allen, or even Stafford. Tannehill needs the team to elevate his play, whereas the “franchise QBs” elevate their team’s play.
Hindsight is always 20/20, no pun intended in this case.
In hindsight, if Tom Brady had come to Nashville in 2020, they probably would have reached at least another AFC Championship, if not a Super Bowl in one of the last two years. Instead, GM Jon Robinson and Head Coach Mike Vrabel opted for continuity, bringing back Tannehill on a deal that looked expensive but was relatively team-friendly given the potential outs and timeline of guarantees. Tannehill is on the hook for $36.8M in 2022 whether he is on the roster or not, thanks to Robinson’s back-loaded guarantees which essentially gave the Titans a two-year option on a four-year deal, during which Tannehill is 2-3 in the playoffs, 0-2 at home. Brady won a Super Bowl in Tampa Bay in 2020, after securing a Wild Card berth in the NFC.
In hindsight, Robinson could’ve gotten out of Tannehill’s contract last offseason, possibly with a similar package to the one the Rams gave Detroit in exchange for Matthew Stafford (Jared Goff + 2022 1st + 2023 1st + 2021 3rd). The Titans stuck with their guy.
Robinson has made clear through his actions that he believes continuity is a key component to winning championships. For the most part, common sense and history would back up that theory. It’s part of the reason that Tannehill thrived in his second season with the Titans. Former OC, now-Falcons HC, Arthur Smith ran one of the NFL’s most efficient offenses in 2020 and put together a great run in 2019 to take the Titans to the AFC Championship after being promoted from a tight ends coach to replace now-Packers HC Matt LeFluer. However, Robinson isn’t doing his job if he doesn’t at least take swings at getting another guy in the building.
Of course, all of this is moot if Todd Downing is still calling plays. The giant orangutan on the back of the Titans all year in 2021 was the incomprehensible idiocy that Todd Downing put on display at certain points. Derrick Henry wasn’t running nearly as efficiently with Downing calling plays. Tannehill’s numbers began to look increasingly pedestrian, of course, exaggerated by injuries to the offense’s most important weapons throughout the season.
The short-yardage game, almost exclusively consisting of Derrick Henry running up the middle and Tannehill occasionally keeping it to pick up the 1st down, always lacked creativity. Both of those plays failed miserably on back-to-back plays to end the Titans’ penultimate drive in the Divisional round. The screen game was a disaster all season, and teams were able to stuff almost all of them. On 1st & Goal in the 2nd half of the Divisional round, after gashing the Bengals with consecutive run calls, Todd Downing decided that a screen to CHESTER FREAKING RODGERS was the best play in his bag. That play turned into an interception, where yet again, the Titans defense would have to bail Downing and Tannehill out.
It’s not that the Titans were without offensive success, but there seemed to be no purpose in play calls. The Titans elected to go play-action on the first play of the game, using the theory that everyone in the building thought the ball would go to Derrick Henry. In a vacuum, that theory seems relatively sound. To Titans fans, it became far too indicative of Downing’s 4D Chess mentality, a thought process that is far over-complicated to the point it lacks purpose or identity. With Henry in the lineup, the game plan was often too simple: run the ball as much as possible because no one can stop Henry, then let Tannehill get it to AJ Brown, a budding superstar, once or twice on some crossing routes. With Henry out of the lineup, Downing over-complicated things for the first few weeks instead of trusting a run game that had success with and without Henry due to the underrated run blocking of the O-Line.
For most fans of an NFL team, disappointment with your team is as much a part of life as being hungry or tired. It’s the feeling that if your team just did one or two things differently, you could have made it all the way. As was said often in Ted Lasso, “It’s the hope that kills you.” The entire 2021 season, it was the hope that would be my demise, because in order to be let down, you have to have hoped in the first place, and hopes were certainly high in Nashville before last Saturday.
This marks two years in a row that Ryan Tannehill crumbled on his last pass of the season in the Divisional Round. That’s two Titans seasons in a row abruptly ending because Tannehill isn’t one of the 10 guys that can take over a game when everyone in the building knows you’re throwing the ball. When Tannehill is up and can manage a game, he can succeed. When he needs to play outside of his means and his comfort zone, this team fails, as do most teams with good-but-not-great quarterback play.
I’m not going to pretend that I could manage a NFL roster, especially with the injury hand the Titans were dealt this past season. However, if Jon Robsinson isn’t at least kicking the tires to put together a package for a Wilson, Rodgers, or any other QB that might become available (excluding Deshaun Watson, for obvious reasons), he’s not doing his job. Robinson must shake the cycle of mediocrity, of complacency. This team has seen its limits with Tannehill; we’ve seen all we need to see, and it’s not going to miraculously get better in 2022. Downing is certainly to blame for a lack of creativity to open things up for Tannehill, but the offense often seemed to succeed in spite of Tannehill rather than because of him.
If you watched Allen, Mahomes, and Burrow play over the last two weekends, you can’t help but develop a greater sense of urgency to find that kind of QB for your own squad. The 49ers already played their hand, trading up to grab Trey Lance. Yet, their team succeeded in spite of Jimmy Garoppolo, and he let them down in the fourth quarter once again. It not only validated their inevitable decision to move on from Jimmy G, but the idea that they had to go get a replacement sooner rather than later. The Titans are in a similar boat, albeit with even less success in the playoffs. Even if Tannehill is the starter in 2022, the Titans have to be planning for the future at the QB position and looking for every opportunity to grab a guy who can elevate the play of their team in the most important moments.
So, if I was Robsinson, which quarterback would I go after this offseason? Aside from Rodgers and Wilson, who are, respectively, the most notable wild cards and influential catalysts of the upcoming offseason, I think there are some intriguing options on the table.
I cannot believe I am putting this in writing in the year 2022, but Derek Carr should be on a shortlist of plug-and-play QBs who can take the Titans to the next level. He’s more turnover-prone than Tannehill, but if you watched the way he brought The Raiders, which lost both their Head Coach/offensive mastermind as well as their star receiver for the year, a team that lost its best player from Thanksgiving until Week 18, a team which everyone thought was dead in the water by midseason, to the playoffs, you can’t help but be impressed with his play.
We could go through the X’s and O’s and find out who would truly work better in the system, how the system changes based on each of the QBs’ strengths, and much more. There’s something to be said, however, about breaking the mold, doing something drastic within reason to break the coveted continuity and ignite a spark that the Titans lack with Tannehill. Carr isn’t a world-beater at QB, but his contract expires after next season, so it’s possible he could be a high-value rental in an effort to dig the Titans out of the Ryan Tannehill-sized hole in their roster. Las Vegas just hired a new GM and Head Coach, so they may be apt to press the reset button and build the roster from scratch, in their mold. I think Robinson could find a manageable and workable deal to send Tannehill off as a bridge QB for Josh McDaniels’s offense with some draft capital for Carr, in an effort to upgrade the QB position.
Aside from that, the offseason playbook looks like this:
Extend AJ Brown and Jeffrey Simmons, who look to be the building blocks for the long term future in Tennessee
Resign Harold Landry
Fire Todd Downing and bring in an OC who understands how to call an offense from this century.
Re-tool the offensive line through veteran additions, not just through the draft. We’ve seen how that pans out (Anyone remember Isaiah Wilson?).
Find an above-replacement-level starter to replace the glaring weakness in the Titans’ defense: Jackrabbit Jenkins.
Note: Last year’s first-rounder, Caleb Farley, should slot in here, but it’d be helpful to have a quality starter to share the load while Farley gets fully healthy and back to speed.
Keep Defensive Analyst Jim Schwartz on staff, even if that means elevating him to co-DC alongside Shane Bowen.
Find reliable QB depth to challenge Tannehill if you can’t find a player to replace him fully.
I believe that the Titans could find themselves in a similar position next year, hopefully with a fully healthy and conditioned Derrick Henry ready to snatch back the rushing crown. Without a major shake-up, though, the Titans will most likely find themselves in a similar position next year: on the couch watching better quarterbacks lead less-complete rosters to championships.