It’s no secret that Tennessee Titans fans and media are used to seeing disrespectful and/or uneducated takes being thrown around about their favorite football team.
Whether it’s a handful of national media members or random accounts on social media, chances are the person talking about them has put minimal effort into actually forming an educated opinion on the team.
Now, there’s no denying that Warren Sharp does fantastic work in his own right, but to call the Titans’ front seven a bottom-10 unit has to be one of the laziest and most disrespectful takes of the entire offseason.
If you personally can’t put them in your top 10 because there’s no telling how Harold Landry will return from his knee injury, then fine. That’s honestly a fair take, even though I would emphatically disagree myself.
However, having them ranked No. 23 overall is about as outlandish as you can get when talking about Tennessee’s defense.
And to be perfectly honest, it only amplifies the amount of skepticism that many have when it comes to believing how much some of these national media members are watching this team.
Here is Sharp’s exact reasoning for having the Titans ranked so low:
Tennessee’s front seven excelled against the run last year, contacting ball carriers at or behind the line of scrimmage at the league’s second-highest rate. The pass rush was less effective, but the return of Harold Landry from a torn ACL will help.
Truthfully, the problem isn’t with anything he said, it’s the fact that he completely undersells just how important those two things are.
The Titans are coming off a season in which they finished with the No. 1 run defense in the league, only allowing 76.9 rushing yards per game.
All of this becomes even more impressive when you remember that Tennessee accomplished that feat despite the major injuries it suffered all across the defensive line.
Landry, Bud Dupree and Denico Autry all spent time on injured reserve, while Jeffery Simmons was essentially playing on one healthy foot throughout the second half of the season.
Yet, the Titans still ended up with one of the stingier run defenses of the last decade.
According to True Media Sports (via Nate Tice of The Athletic), Tennessee finished the year tied for the ninth-highest defensive rushing success rate since 2013, producing a successful run stop on 69.8 percent of its snaps.
it has to be emphasized just how good the Titans run defense was last year.
their defensive rushing success rate (higher = good) was at 69.8%. Tied for the 9th-best rate since 2013 (via @TruMediaSports) and one of the best marks in years. pic.twitter.com/TFuCePxsOP
— Nate Tice (@Nate_Tice) June 23, 2023
As far as the significance of Landry’s return goes, it’s often forgotten that prior to suffering his gut-wrenching season-ending knee injury right before Week 1, Landry was coming off an incredible Pro-Bowl campaign where he set career-highs (including playoffs) in quarterback pressures (52) and sacks (13.5).
His impact along the edge was one of the many reasons why the Titans’ pass-rush had been so dominant whenever the team had its primary pass-rushers all on the field together.
Back in 2021, the Titans’ defense accounted for 52 sacks on the year, 35.5 of which came from the combination of Landry, Simmons and Autry.
Unfortunately, we haven’t seen that trio on the field together since they combined for six sacks in the playoff loss to the Cincinnati Bengals, a game in which the three of them certainly did enough to win.
Since then, the Titans made the obvious choice to replace the clear weak link of the group, Dupree, who was ultimately being severely overpaid to be the fourth-most impactful member of the defensive front on the team.
Tennessee subsequently replaced the oft-injured Dupree with Arden Key, a talented and reliable pass-rusher who has tallied 90 pressures, 25 quarterback hits and 11 sacks since the start of 2021, all while being limited to a rotational role.
More importantly, Key is being compensated much more fairly than Dupree was while also coming off two consecutive seasons having not missed a single game.
Then you have Simmons and Autry, both of whom were individually and collectively dominating before they suffered their own lower body injuries around midseason last year.
#Titans DL @GrindSimmons94 gets emotional after Saturday’s season-ending loss. pic.twitter.com/TdQ6n4KdjD
— Jim Wyatt (@jwyattsports) January 8, 2023
The two of them combined for 66 pressures and 12.5 sacks over their first eight games of the campaign.
Jeffery Simmons swipes the hands aways & gets the strip sack. Have a pass rush plan! #passrush #titans pic.twitter.com/nsq3um2ZtJ
— DLineVids (@dlinevids1) September 15, 2022
Looking ahead to 2023, the two Mississippi State legends are finally healthy again, and you’d have to imagine the two of them will pick up right where they left off.
The team may have lost linebacker David Long — another often injured player — but the Titans replaced him with Azeez Al-Shaair, someone who was underutilized in San Francisco, something new general manager Ran Carthon saw first hand.
Al-Shaair is a high-upside player who was simply stuck behind two talented studs atop the 49ers’ depth chart (Fred Warner, Dre Greenlaw).
Truth be told, this is someone who could be in line to make a lot of money next offseason if his past play carries over into the full-time role he’s going to have in Tennessee.
The former 49er is coming off a season where he produced 44 tackles over 313 defensive snaps. Those numbers might not blow you away, but there’s no denying that Al-Shaair made an impact whenever he was on the field.
“Taking on a full-time starter job is the next step for him, and I love that he gets to continue this development under a former linebacker in Mike Vrabel,” Niners Wire editor Kyle Madson told us back in March. “Al-Shaair thrived under former NFL LB DeMeco Ryans when he was on the 49ers’ coaching staff. A hands-on coach like Vrabel should help him take a step up as a three-down LB. The 49ers’ LB corps. got a little bit worse with Al-Shaair’s exit. This is a really quality signing for Tennessee.”
Madson also labeled Al-Shaair as a “heat-seeking missile dressed up as an NFL linebacker.”
The Florida Atlantic product finished the 2022 season with an impressive pass-rush grade of 83.0 and a run defense grade of 79.7, per Pro Football Focus.
We’ve also seen Al-Shaair step up on several different occasions whenever his team needed him for an extended period, and most notably occurring back in 2021, when the former 49ers linebacker more than held his own after he was forced to start 13 games, recording 102 tackles, nine tackles for loss, two sacks, and one interception.
As long as wearing the green dot on game days doesn’t prove to be too much to handle for Al-Shaair, it’s hard to envision him not thriving in 2023, especially with the talented group around him.
And even if he doesn’t pan out, the Titans still have more than enough to get by (barring injuries, of course), and certainly more than enough to not be worse than 22 other front sevens.
