Shattering Narratives: Titans Offense

A lot of incorrect analysis and opinions out there despite what is on film and in black and white data.

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There’s an episode of How I Met Your Mother called “Spoiler Alert”. The main character Ted brings in a girlfriend that everyone finds annoying. They don’t tell him as to not spoil her for him. The entire show’s storyline is that whenever one or more of the group has these quirks pointed out to them, the sound of glass shattering is heard, representing the shattering of their illusions about one another.

I just want to talk about some of the players on this team, the scheme, and the narratives surrounding both, with the goal in mind to try to shatter some glass and some really bad narratives brewing about this team.

Derrick Henry’s Decline is OL Driven!!

Let me be the first to say, and make it very clear, the offensive line on Sunday committed some of the worst football playing atrocities I have ever seen. The offensive line was horrendous. Sunday’s loss to the Texans is absolutely an OL problem. Derrick Henry’s season is not.

Take Sunday for example, as I said on Monday, Derrick henry rushed 16 times for 9 yards. That sounds like a OL issue, and while for the most part it is, he wasn’t expected to get a lot of yards even if the OL was good. He was only expected, based on AWS tracking data, to get 23 more yards than he got. Meaning, if everything went NFL average on the OL he would’ve been 16 carries for 32 yards. 2.0 YPC!

What is even worse that the Texans, who have a really, really, really good run defense, did this without stacking the box. Only 6.25% of Henry’s runs saw 8+ defenders in the box. I haven’t checked, because it would take forever, but that has to be the lowest he has seen in a very long time. On top of that, henry was the slowest running back to get to the line of scrimmage. It took him 2.98s to get to the line of scrimmage on average. Keep in mind it run block win rate is calculated at 2.5s. Meaning he is getting to the line of scrimmage way too slow.

He doesn’t have the get up and go anymore. Let’s take a look at his stats over the last three years: