Mike Vrabel once intimated he’d cut off a very sensitive piece of his own anatomy to win a Super Bowl as head coach. In Week 13, the Philadelphia Eagles told the world in no uncertain terms that the veteran linebacker and Tennessee mainstay’s body will remain intact at least one more winter.
Vrabel’s Tennessee Titans are having a very Vrabel Tennessee Titans season. They’re winning big games, losing winnable ones, and generally punching above their weight class en route to a winning record and what will almost certainly be a third straight AFC South title. But they’re flawed in the way their predecessors have been before them.
Namely, that the Titans don’t have the chops to consistently keep opponents’ passing games down. And when that dam bursts, they lack the artillery to keep up in a shootout.
The Eagles understood what they were getting into Sunday. They not only saw a defense lopsided to stop the run instead of the pass, but they also had A.J. Brown prepared to wreak havoc against his former team in his first game against Tennessee since his draft night trade. That’s why, 26 plays into head coach Nick Sirianni’s gameplan, Philadelphia had only handed the ball off three times.
This was absolutely the correct decision. Despite a 35-10 final score and Tennessee trailing by double-digits for the final 31 minutes, the Eagles only ran the ball 35.8 percent of the time. Exclude Jalen Hurts’ keepers from the mix and that number drops to 28 percent. Philly found a weakness and prodded and poked at it until it brought the Titans down.
Why couldn’t Tennessee respond? There are several factors. The Titans’ best receiver the past three years was on the opposite sideline. The player they drafted to replace Brown, Treylon Burks, made a phenomenal catch in the end zone for an early touchdown, then left the game with a head injury, leading to this dystopian Tweet from the official team account.
Holding on through the hit 💪 @TreylonBurks
📺: Watch #TENvsPHI on @NFLonFOX pic.twitter.com/YDGMgUYx93
— Tennessee Titans (@Titans) December 4, 2022
With Burks out, Ryan Tannehill was forced to counterpunch with a receiving corps of Nick Westbrook-Ikhine, rookie tight end Chigoziem Okonkwo and the ghost of Robert Woods. This went about as poorly as you’d expect. Tannehill had only 141 passing yards before ceding garbage time snaps to Malik Willis. The team’s final seven drives covered 45 net yards.
So here stand the 7-5 Titans, with a suspect passing defense and an unreliable passing offense. This isn’t wholly unfamiliar under Vrabel. In the last five years they’ve occasionally had efficient aerial attacks and occasionally been able to turn their secondary into a no-fly zone. But they’ve never been able to do both in the same season, and 2022 so far is an amalgamation of that:
The end result is a team that’s not quite good enough to ground the best passing offenses in the game and not punchy enough to keep up in a shootout. On Sunday, the Eagles put this theory to the test and turned Week 13 into a track meet. Tennessee, predictably, couldn’t keep up and eventually got lapped.
That’s why a team that will almost certainly host a playoff game this January fails to stand out as a real AFC title threat. This version of the Titans looks a lot like last year’s version. While that group won 12 games and earned the conference’s top seed, it was a one-and-done experience after Cincinnati left Nashville with a win en route to Super Bowl 56.
Tennessee’s preferred modus operandi is to slow games down and grind you into dust with its run game. No team in the league had run fewer plays than the Titans’ 625 through Week 12 and 325 of those (52 percent) were runs. The average NFL team in 2022, by comparison, runs it only 42.9 percent of the time.
That old school approach works when you’ve got the lead or even when you’re in a close game. If your opponent has already blasted off the launch pad, however, it’s much less useful. Sunday’s game showed there’s no reliable plan B in Vrabel’s arsenal, which is a fun throwback to 2021 unless you’re a Tennessee fan.
The Titans have to hope Burks can recover from Sunday’s injury and resume the trajectory he’d taken the past few weeks when he emerged as Tannehill’s viable WR1. They need to get something out of Woods in what threatens to be his least productive season as a pro. They need Okonkwo to continue roasting linebackers with his athleticism and continue to prove he can handle his business on Sundays.
That’s a lot of ifs, but the good news is Tennessee’s spot in the playoffs is all but reserved; even after Sunday’s loss FiveThirtyEight pegs their division title odds at 97 percent. There’s time to line up the pieces on Vrabel’s chessboard, even if those turn out to be mostly pawns and a couple wayward rooks. Either the Titans’ passing defense needs to rise up and drag opponents into the much or their passing offense needs to find a way to push itself into gear.
Otherwise, Tennessee’s staring down the same, familiar postseason ending that stops disappointingly shy of a Super Bowl bid.
