Titans Playbook: 2024's Explosive Plays
Taking stock of what went right for the Titans offense in 2024 on plays that generated 20 or more yards.
Hell. Yes. I’ve been working on this shit off and on all summer and I’ve finally finished it - my own personal researchical (a real word I just made up) study on the big plays that the Titans hit in 2024. I’ve really been doing a lot of pimping sunshine this summer. We’ve looked at some cool plays from the Titans playbook. We’ve reviewed some film from this rookie class. If you only read my work for the last couple of months, you’d probably be running to your bookie to bet on this team winning the Super Bowl.
But, who wants to be negative this time of year? I could remind y’all that we’ve said “it can’t possibly get worse” about the offensive line each of the last two summers. I could point out the depth in the cornerback room and twist the knife by asking, “what if L’Jarius Sneed just ain’t right?” I’m not going to do either of those two things. Now is the time for optimism. July is the one time of the year that our football team can’t hurt us and we have the optimism that comes along with a new season. So, I’m going to lean into that. It’s vibes season, after all.
The general idea here was to look back at the 2024 Titans offense and figure out what worked when things went right. I wanted to look for common threads among the plays that generated 20 or more yards and try to find some signs of optimism with this system. I know, I know….nuance and context…not every play that is good in football goes for 20 yards. But, come on…I had to put some sort of regulator on myself or I’d never get this piece done.
Now, we’ll obviously face a little survivor bias here…which Wikipedia defines as “the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data.” I recently read the example about World War II fighter pilots that came back from battle with bullet holes all over the plane’s wings and tail and all that. The initial response was to reinforce the wings and tail, thinking they had sustained the most damage. However, that was not taking into account the planes that didn’t make it back. The planes that didn’t make it back failed to do so because they had their engines shot out. This highlights the dangers of ignoring or excluding data.
In the context of this piece, we’re not going to see any bad plays and I damn sure hope we’re not shooting any airplanes out of the sky. Those plays are excluded from this study. My hope is not to convince you all that the Titans offense was good in 2024…but that there were times when things clicked, and there are things we can learn about this unit moving forward.
This isn’t a research paper, so I don’t believe I have to put an abstract together to establish the parameters of this study. Nonetheless, I’ll share that I just went on Amazon and bought a blank playbook. From there, I just started drawing plays. My initial intent was to document the entire offense (and sell it to Brian Callahan’s rivals at a steeply marked-up price), but I quickly learned that ain’t nobody got time for that. I really got into the weeds on this thing - sometimes, if a play looked like a concept I wasn’t familiar with, I’d spend time on Google or YouTube researching it. I’ve worked well into the wee hours of the morning to get this done. I vastly underrated how long it would take to document each play and watch it enough to understand how and why it worked. Also, I did not count plays that were nullified by penalties in this exercise. There were a handful of those, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that someone on this staff bare ass spanked Isaiah Prince in the locker room after the Minnesota game.
Central Themes
These were my main takeaways…central themes, if you will…that I kept coming back to, and we’ll start here:
In a shocking turn of events, it turns out that protection really fucking matters. A solid offensive line solves a lot of problems.
This offense needs an injection of speed at WR/TE
This system really stresses space, stretches defenses out, and puts defenders in conflict.
And yes, quarterback play was less than ideal.
The Titans had 50 plays of 20 or more yards in 2024, good for an average of 2.9 plays of 20+ yards per game. That’s the sample size we’re working with here. Of those 50, I counted just five times that the protection was not good enough for the ball to come out in a timely manner (yet it still did when, for example, Will Levis just heaved a ball down field off his back foot and it was miraculously caught). That means that 45 of the 50 times, the protection was good enough. One of those five times was a play during which the Bengals d-line hit the Titans like a tidal wave and forced a quick check down to Tyjae Spears, who just so happened to go for 43 yards with 42 seconds left in the game. That screams, “GARBAGE TIME!” Two of the remaining four instances came in the Minnesota game, when the Vikings defense was content to just crowd the line of scrimmage and send pressure from everywhere. Point is, it proved to be a rare occurrence that a big play was made without adequate protection.
Each of these five plays were made on third down when the Titans were in an obvious pass situation. Each one also has a fluky “that probably shouldn’t have been a big play” vibe going for it, too. But, you want to talk about a common thread? Folks, it’s right there staring us in the face. That’s a correlation if I ever saw one - on big plays, the offensive line holds. It’s no wonder this franchise went out and signed Dan Moore Jr. and Kevin Zeitler while also moving JC Latham back to the right side. If that unit can improve just enough to be middle of the road in the NFL, it should have an exponential impact on the Titans offense.
I can’t tell you how many times I watched a play and thought, “yeah, a faster guy there takes that thing to the house.” There just wasn’t a lot of separation on tape, and it felt like certain players routinely struggled to pull away from defenders with the ball in their hands. This offense needs an injection of speed. Then, we may see some of these 20-yard pitch-and-catches turn into 40 and 60-yard touchdowns.
Play design was slick. Callahan and company know how to put guys in position to get open, and the vision was there. Guys were getting open and either weren’t getting a look because the protection was single-ply or the quarterback couldn’t put the ball on the money. These plays indicated a good feel for what the defense was trying to do and a propensity for exploiting it. Again, this doesn’t go for the plays that weren’t charted…I’m merely pointing out a thread from the 50 that were sampled. But, while many of these plays were run out of formations that looked similar to others, they were different post-snap. It gave the offense a feeling of unpredictability, and it took up a lot of my fucking time to watch, re-watch, and re-watch again to make sure the play I was watching wasn’t already in my notebook from earlier in the season. Alas, this offense has a deep bag.
While Will Levis catches a lot of hell for being a disaster because of the turnovers, Mason Rudolph really wasn’t all that more dynamic. Levis still struggled to feel pressure. I always said he seemed to be operating at about a half-second behind everyone else on the field. But, I also noticed that he didn’t seem comfortable stepping up into the pocket, even when the pocket was clean enough for him to step into. He was content to hit the back step of his drop and just throw it…sometimes to the other team. Rudolph had the offense on schedule a little better, and the ball seemed to come out quicker and more decisively, but he was far from perfect. Given how many games the Titans were actually in in 2024, I couldn’t help but wonder how different things would’ve looked if they just had more consistency from the quarterbacks and the offensive line.
Stat dump
Players with 20+ yard plays:
Calvin Ridley: 18
Tony Pollard: 8
Tyler Boyd, Nick Westbrook-Ikhine, Chig Okonkwo: 4
Tyjae Spears, Josh Whyle: 3
DeAndre Hopkins: 2
Bryce Oliver, Will Levis, Tay Martin, Nick Vannett: 1
Ridley and Pollard were crucial to any success this offense ended up having in 2024. I still don’t really understand what it was that made Ridley take so long to get going. But, he was clearly their best pass catcher, and the only guy I watched on these plays that could routinely separate from anyone in just about any coverage situation. When they got him one on one down field, he was hell for the defense to try and contain. To think…if the Titans offensive staff can do that with him by scheme alone, what’s going to happen if they can actually get more dynamic speedy receivers next to him?
I have a newfound respect for Pollard, man. That dude played his ass off in 2024 and had the production to show it. I know success rate and efficiency metrics don’t necessarily support him as one of the best runners in the league, but I’d take him on my team any day. The run game seemed to taper off later into the season, and while there are many reasons as to why (offensive line, play calling, opponents taking away the run by getting up by 28 points, etc.), it’s something I would be damn sure I was fleshing out if I were the Titans coaching staff.
Last summer, we heard about them wanting a physical run game. I thought they’d be a sneaky good 12 personnel team (one back, two tight ends)…not to say that they’d run it a lot, but that they’d be surprisingly good at running the ball out of it. They had eight big runs on the season - only one of those came out of 12P. In hindsight, I overestimated the blocking ability of this tight end room. We get into the weeds of this stuff and it’s important to remember how symbiotic the relationships are between elements of a football team. It felt like the Titans got away from running the ball too quickly. Or, they didn’t truly commit to it later on in the season. But, multiple factors influence that. If you can’t run block, you’re screwed. If the defense stacks the front because they aren’t afraid of your quarterback, what can you do? If your tight ends can’t drive blocks, well…you see what I’m saying.
Of the 50 20+-yard plays, 42 were pass plays and eight were runs. Feeding the Derrick Henry truthers out there if I may, the Titans never had more than one explosive run in a game, and averaged 26.9 yards per 20+ yard run. The longest run of the season was 41 yards by Pollard in the Miami game. This is the one area of my work in which I would actually discredit what the data shows, though…simply because when you think of big plays in the NFL, they’re more often than not pass plays to begin with. There just aren’t a lot of explosive runs in the game today. So, it shouldn’t send up any major red flags. I just wanted to rile up the Henry fans and make sure you guys were still paying attention.
Bottom line - they need dependable playmakers outside of Ridley and Pollard. 52% of their big plays came from one of those two players in 2024. The remaining 48% was split up largely between guys who are no longer on this team and guys who probably won’t be on this team by the time the season starts. I like Oliver, Okonkwo, and Spears to pop back up on this list in 2025. But, whether it’s Chimere Dike, Elic Ayomanor, Van Jefferson, Tyler Lockett, or Gunnar Helm, they just need somebody else to step up and give this offense a true triple threat. A quadruple threat would be nice, but that may be wishful thinking.
As far as personnel usage goes, 11 personnel (one back, one tight end) dominated this list of 50 plays. 36 of these plays were run out of 11P. 11 were run out of 12P. And, there was a play run out of Jumbo (which…is Jumbo technically 11P since there’s only one back and one tight end? Help me out), one out of 13P, and one out of 22P. That’s a whopping 72% towards 11P - I’d be curious as to how reflective that was of the offense as a whole. This felt like a team that ran the shit out of 11P.
Go routes, digs, and posts dominated the list of routes run that led to these big plays. Again…it’s about context. These are big plays to begin with. Typically, you’re going to see deep routes that generate big plays on the list. This shouldn’t really be surprising. The average depth of target on these big passing plays was 21.1 yards. The shortest target was about six yards behind the line of scrimmage on a play that went for 29 yards to Spears out of the flat. The longest target was about 46 yards to Tay Martin on that touchdown in the Texans game. Where were you for the Tay Martin touchdown game?
When it comes to the protection schemes, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that 39 of the 50 plays were run in pass protection. With such a high volume of 11P passes, that’s not exactly breaking news. But, there were a few smoke-and-mirrors plays where the Titans ran the ball out of 11P pass pro looks. Very sneaky. Hand up, charting blocking schemes can be difficult (shall we revisit the “inside zone vs. duo” debate?). I jotted down three pass plays during which it looked like the Titans ran a zone look. That’s an interesting observation…if that principle can be applied to the offense as a whole, then there’s an element of predictability on tape. “Zone blocking = pass play” if you’re playing the Titans! I don’t know - I could just be fucking wrong, too. To no one’s surprise, the big run plays happened off of gap blocking schemes. Whether it was some sneaky pin-and-pull action, straight power, or most common, some variation of counter, somebody was pulling and somebody was pounding.
17 of these plays happened on first down. 16 happened on second down. 17 happened on third down. You want to talk about balance, man…can’t get much closer than that. So, what does that speak to? I’d say that from a play calling standpoint, there isn’t much difference from one down to another - there is a sort of balance. There’s just as likely to be a big play on first down as there is third down. Now, we can talk about rhythm, sustaining drives, success in actually executing, and all that. But, from a predictability standpoint, this is a lot different from the run-run-pass caveman football Titans fans have grown accustomed to seeing in some form for the last 25 years.
In all, these passes amassed 32.4 yards per play. So, that was a bit surprising to see. The average depth of target being 21.1, that means there was, on average, 11.3 yards after catch on these big plays. When you factor in the run plays, the average yards per big play comes down to 31.46. Again, I’d be curious to see how these metrics stack up with more prolific offenses in the NFL. 31.46 feels like a pretty good number. It just seems like this Titans offense needed more plays like this.
The Titans were 2-4 in games during which they had four 20+ yard plays. The Titans were 1-10 in games during which they had three or fewer 20+ yard plays. That one win was that grimy win over Miami. The Titans had just one 20+ yard play in each of the Buffalo and Los Angeles games. It ain’t much, I know. This is a three-win football team we’re talking about here. But, from an analytical standpoint, it is factual to say that there was a correlation between “more big plays” and “more wins.”
10 of the 50 20+ yard plays were touchdowns. I would be curious to know what this particular stat looks like for other teams, ones with more productive and prolific offenses. One out of five plays seems low when you consider the fact that these are sampled from big plays to begin with. Five of the 20+ yard plays happened when the games were out of control and the Titans trailed greatly. In other words, there are five plays in that group we probably could’ve even discarded from the study because they really had no impact on the game.
Five of the plays happened while the game was tied. One of the plays resulted in a touchdown that tied the game. The Titans held or extended a lead after 16 of the plays. Only three such plays occurred after Week 12. Isn’t it interesting how the data in such a limited sample size of plays…ones that are supposed to be highly impactful, mind you…can be a microcosm of the team’s entire season? We’ve said for months that this team hung on just long enough in games, but the bottom fell out eventually. We’ve said for months that it felt like this team really endured a gut punch midseason and trailed off down the stretch. Even in just these 50 plays I’ve documented, those themes show up.
Finding the meaning
What can we say about this offense as a whole after digging into these 50 plays? This is the part where I take those central themes that I picked up on while watching the film, and I take the data, and I try to make something of it. I’m going to do so in bullet points because that helps me stay organized and at this point in the article, I don’t feel like trying to make things flow and look pretty. I just want to get out of here and go smoke my pipe with a bourbon neat. Anyway…
I actually think this is a more QB-friendly system than we think. At least, it’s easy to see the vision when you notice pass catchers getting open routinely. If the protection gives the quarterback time to make the throw, man, there are plenty to make. It’s for this reason that I think this system is perfect for a guy like Ward who is capable of reading space and triggering his process automatically.
Play action worked. I wrote about a couple of plays last week, but it bears repeating. It works in the NFL, and it worked to generate a few big plays for this team. I’d like to see more of it in 2025.
The Titans ran a lot of Mesh concepts with outlets to the side (flat/wheel routes) and at least one route going deep. It kind of isolates the mesh and man, if they can win those matchups, it’s easy to see this being the bread and butter of this offense. I’m salivating at the vision of Chimere Dike getting a pick off the mesh action and turning the ball up field and going yard.
If you look at the stats, the Titans don’t really use motion. But, it showed up several times in this study when defenses had to shift coverages a little bit. Like play action, maybe that’s something we could see a little more of from this offense
I think there are two things about the 2024 Titans offense that outline reasons for optimism. It’s the “smoke and mirrors” quality of the formations…the window dressing, if you will. This offense shows a butt ton of similar looks and then run different concepts out of them. Theoretically, that should make it hard to defend alone (gotta get that personnel up, though). And, it really seems like a deep playbook. Maybe I’m just untrained in this task, but charting these plays was a motherfucker because they all looked different post-snap. I was begging to watch a play, chart it, and then see the same play five more times and not have to chart five different plays. That wasn’t the case. Thanks, Brian Callahan. But, I do believe that these two hallmarks of this scheme bode well for 2025 because it gives the offense a base level of difficulty to prepare for.
Callahan and company know how to attack deep - whether it was flooding deep thirds with receivers against Cover 3, isolating Ridley on those corners and letting him do his thing to get open, or threatening to push the coverage back only to hit a defense with a set of curl/comeback routes, this staff seemed to know when and where exactly to press those buttons. If I’m right on that, just imagine what it could mean in an offense with better protection and more time to get those balls down the field.
Philosophically, Callahan wasn't afraid to call shots, but the game logs are littered with "incomplete deep" tags. For every play of 20+ yards, it felt like there were 10 "incomplete deep" plays. This study really helped me pin down the reasons I’ve said “the bones are good” on this thing since the season ended. There are reasons for optimism because of the scheme alone.
A couple more observations I made while re-watching all of the 2024 tape, and I’ll get out of here and give you guys your Fridays back. One, the Titans missed a golden opportunity to start the season at 3-1 because of dumb mistakes. Given how competitive the team was in the first half of the season, I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if that team got off to a better start. Two, that Week 13 game against Washington felt like a back breaker at the time, but watching it again, I think it genuinely fucked this team up. Finally, I’ll just say….damn, Cam Ward can't get here quick enough.
Aside from this being just a fun deep dive into the nuts and bolts of the Titans offense, this exercise hammered home that the offensive scheme itself is no issue for this team, in my opinion. Better protection, higher-floor quarterback play, and a little speed in the passing game could unlock this whole thing. Is that so much to ask for?
If you’re still here, hell yeah - let’s get a beer some time and talk about sicko things, you sicko. Allow me to reward you with a video of some of the coolest plays I encountered while conducting this study: