Film Friday: Arden Key is Pass Rush Personified
If the Titans wanted to double down on disruption opposite Harold Landry, they may have damn well found their man.
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I ran a super official Twitter poll earlier this week to see who you guys might be interested in seeing me do some homework on this week. The reason? Well, I started this piece on the Titans linebackers and how they work within this defense and realized it’s probably going to be a novel. I knew pretty early on that it wasn’t going to be done in time for this week’s Film Friday, so I figured I’d take it to the Twitter streets to see what you guys wanted - Arden Key won the poll, but the joke’s on y’all because I’m writing about Sean Murphy-Bunting and Roger McCreary this summer, too.
The book on Key leading into the 2018 NFL Draft was that he had all the talent in the world - length, change-of-direction speed, a pure pass rush toolkit - but he had some major character concerns that many teams considered to be red flags. He probably was legitimately a first round talent that slipped into the third round, where the Raiders snatched him up.
Key tread water there for three seasons before the 49ers took a flyer on him in 2021. He blossomed there, recording 6.5 sacks, a mark that is still a career high for Key in a single season. It looked like he was finally living up to the potential that his talent gave him. He drove up his price that season, and the result was the 49ers being outbid by the Jaguars in 2022, who were subsequently outbid by the Titans in 2023. I wouldn’t call this your average NFL five-year trajectory, but here we are.
Key was one of the gems of this year’s free agent class for the Titans. He was a highly sought after player, with rumors of up to 12 different teams competing for his services. It’s like the league looked at Key and said “oh shit - the light bulb’s finally come on for this guy.” Ultimately, he decided on the Titans, who signed him to a three-year, $21M deal with a chance to start after the team let Bud Dupree bounce.
There’s plenty to love about the signing even though we’re just a couple months into it. Key seems to have brought a lot of energy to the defense. He seems like a pretty quotable guy. He’s mentioned a chip on his shoulder because his last team didn’t want to pay him and give him the opportunity the Titans did. He’s been more of rotational guy his entire career, so he doesn’t have the same mileage the average five-year vet would have. And, of course, the bottom line is that Key is a talented player who is coming into his own as a pass rusher, which the Titans so desperately need opposite Harold Landry.
There are a couple of things that cause pause for me too, though. For one, if you’re counting him as 1:1 replacement for Dupree, there’s a chasm between what Key has done in this league and what Dupree has done in this league from a production standpoint. Since entering the league in 2018, Key has a total of 14 sacks. Over that same time frame, Dupree has 32. Likewise, since 2018, Dupree has played 3,306 snaps to Key’s 2,106. That level of production just isn’t there for Key.
Now, there’s a wealth of nuance in there as to why those numbers are so different, and I do believe these two are different players. Dupree was more of a force multiplier who could generate pressure while allowing the other guy to clean up and get the sack whereas Key is the rangy guy doing the sacking. But, that difference does illustrate the general point that there is less known about what Key can actually do with a more voluminous workload than Dupree. You don’t know what he is as a starter with the same level of certainty. It’s still a roll of the dice, comparatively speaking. Not to mention, why the hell were the 49ers and Jaguars so reluctant to give this man this type of money and opportunity? Where’s the intel? What did they know?!?!
Key is such an interesting addition to this team because you don’t typically see guys who are five years into their NFL run with so much potential left in the tank. Usually, you know what a guy is at this point, but with Key, it still feels like there’s a ceiling he hasn’t hit yet. If you’re going to get him for his prime, now is the time to buy in. So, why was he so highly coveted? Let’s dig into the film on a couple of games to find out.