Locked On Titans - Daily Podcast On The Tennessee Titans - Locked on Titans: All quiet on the Titans OC front; Breaking down the OL

Episode Date: January 16, 2019

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Welcome in to another edition of Locked on Titans. I'm Jimmy Morris, joined as always by Terry Lambert. Terry, how are you today? Doing alright. What's up, man? Not too much. Still waiting for the Titans to be linked to an office of coordinator, candidate, interview, or anything like that. Still got nothing on that. We're going to talk about that, talk about some guys that have been hired, and then we're going to talk a little bit about play calling and the downs that it's done on and kind of the success rate of that kind of stuff, an interesting article from FiveThirtyEight. And then in the show, it's talking about the Titans offensive line. Before we do that, I remind you that we write for musicmiracles.com.

We'll recover the Titans for SB Nation, so you can find us there. You can also find us on Twitter. I'm at JimMorrisMCM. Terry's at TLambertFB. You can follow the podcast account at LockedOnTitans and you can also get the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Just search LockedOnTitans. If you have a smart speaker, you can say

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Again, try to leave your message around a minute so that we can get them all in. All right, so since we last talked, Gary Kubiak has gone off the market, was hired by the Vikings as some kind of offensive assistant. He's not going to be the offensive coordinator there. It sounds like the hang-up to people hiring Kubiak as an offensive coordinator was that he had some position coaches that he said that he had to bring with him if he was going to be an OC. And we know that it was announced earlier this offseason

that there weren't going to be changes to the coaching staff here. So I'm assuming that that would have been a reason that i mean we don't we don't know if the titans reached out to kubiak or if that was even a thought in their mind but it seems like that was a hang up other places so it makes sense that it would have been here interesting to me that he you know left whatever he was doing in the broncos organization to take a non-offensive coordinator position with the Vikings. But, I mean, I think any time you can get him on your staff, that's an upgrade. So, you know, good for the Vikings as far as that's concerned.

Yeah, I think his son is on staff there too. So that makes sense. Probably less pressure there. We talked about his health a couple days ago on the show. So probably a low-stress situation um where he can just kind of uh be with his son and and help uh you know figure out what's going on offensively in minnesota um you know what's interesting the the second piece of news that i'm sure you were going to get to uh john d filippo has been hired by the Jaguars, reportedly.

The guy that Minnesota fired midseason because he wouldn't run the football. Now the Jaguars are built to run football. So is he going to run the football in Jacksonville? Is Nick Foles going to be signed in Jacksonville? I think those are some obvious dots to connect. And, look, Nick Foles going to be signed in Jacksonville? I think those are some obvious dots to connect. And look, Nick Foles might work there, but I don't want to be the guy taking that gamble. I know the Jaguars have to do something at the quarterback position, but I don't know. It just seems like you get these quarterbacks out of their structure, out of their organizations where they succeed.

If they do hit the open market, it really just doesn't seem to work out. So I remember making the comment about a month ago, it seems like Nick Foles is going to be the Jaguars' next big money mistake. I think that feeling got amplified today. Yeah, and like you said, it's just a little bit scary if you're going to give. I mean, he's going to get $20 million a year, I would imagine, Foles is. And, I mean, you've seen no production outside of that Eagles system. And I don't know, man.

I mean, you've seen this story before so many times with backup quarterbacks that play well in a small sample in the system, like you're saying, that they're comfortable with, and they go somewhere else and it just doesn't work out. So, I mean, if the Jaguars get him, I hope that's what happens. There's so many people that want the Titans to sign Nick Foles. I see that all the time on Twitter or you hear it on the radio, whatever. The stupid thing about that is, again, Nick Foles is going to get a bunch of money

wherever he ends up going. And so the Titans are already paying Marcus Mariota $20 million, $23 million, whatever it is, next year. You're not going to spend $40-something million on your quarterbacks. And Nick Foles is going to get $20 million a year. So that, to me, is not in their own possibilities. If you want to bring in a backup to compete with him, we've had that conversation, obviously, back when we talked about quarterbacks.

And then when we had the Mariota episode as well, you're going to be looking at somebody like a Teddy Bridgewater or a Tyrod Taylor, somebody like that that we've seen that's been established. They're going to pay a little bit more money than you would typically pay a backup quarterback to bring one of those guys in. But just when you're thinking about targets for the Titans to sign as a backup quarterback, even if you want them to bring in somebody to push Moriota, that's fine. I don't have a problem with you saying that or feeling that way.

But it's not going to be Nick Foles because he's going to get all that money. It's going to be a guy like a Tyron Taylor or just somebody like that that's going to come in here on a shorter-term deal, less money, Ryan Fitzpatrick. One of those type of guys, not somebody like Foles who there's going to be a huge market for. types got type of guys not somebody like foals who there's going to be a huge market for yeah and i think if you're having this conversation this time next year uh then a guy like nick foals who's going to command big money i think that would be more of an option if again marcus mariotta doesn't show it and we're still answering uh are trying to answer some of these questions i think you could entertain them but certainly not this time around. It's going to be interesting to see if the Titans are

in the game for Tyrod Taylor or a high-level backup like that. I certainly think they need to be. If we know one thing about Mariota, it's going to be that he's going to miss some games. That's fine. That's who he is.

He's had the worst luck of anybody. But you've got to account for that. I think it's certainly a trend at this point. So I think John Robinson needs to invest, probably overpay a little bit to get that quarterback two situation locked up. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they can't go into another season like they have the last couple of years where they just don't have a have a guy back there that they

can count on for a certain stretch of the season because we just we've seen that they're going to need that guy and we talked plenty about that that's there's no reason to rehash all that here um again you know some people are panicking i think because the titans haven't you know hired off as a court area and haven't been linked to anybody, whatever. I really don't think there's any reason to panic about that. There's a few options. They could be talking to guys internally, which I still am leaning towards. That's how they're going to do it.

But they also could be waiting for a guy that's in the playoffs. We know Robinson's familiarity with the Patriots, so you could be waiting for a guy that's in the playoffs. I mean, we know Robinson's familiarity with the Patriots, so you could be waiting on somebody from that staff. The Chiefs quarterback coach is another name that's gotten a lot of run. So, I mean, there's a few guys that could be still playing or could be still coaching on teams that are still playing, so they could be waiting to talk to those guys. So that may be why we haven't seen any activity there.

And if they just weren't interested in kubiak or neef or whatever there's no reason to bring those guys in you can wait until there's you know a handful of these guys that are still in the playoffs you can talk to those guys at that point there's really no rush here if you weren't wanting you know somebody that's already been hired so to speak yeah and yeah i just get the feeling i could be dead wrong and I just get the feeling, and I could be dead wrong, but I just get the feeling if they were going to hire internally, I think it would have been done by now because there's only a handful of candidates there

that we've talked about, Arthur Smith, someone like that. So I just think it would have been done by now. I just get the feeling they're looking outside. They've kept it quiet. They've kept it incredibly quiet. So I Think it makes sense that you know, maybe it is someone that's still in the playoffs that you can't quite announce yet If it is someone still in the playoffs, they've done an incredible job of keeping it quiet And you know, like I like I mentioned on the last show we did, it might be someone from the college ranks. Maybe they're still vetting out someone like that.

It's strange because it seems like with every other search around the league, you're always getting some reports of some interest or some interviews, but not the case with the Titans. Yeah, absolutely. Again, we'll kind of keep track of all that, and we could get some movement next week, depending on, you know, obviously which staff this guy's on, and

who wins this weekend. Alright, coming up, we're going to talk a little bit about like I said, an article that was written about Run Run Pass, our favorite thing from the Mike Malarkey, Terry Hrabisky era, and just kind of some of the math on why that's not a good idea.

Alright, so the article we're talking about is from 538, and it was written by Josh Hermsmeyer. You may be familiar. He's the guy that does the air yards model. If you play DFS, that's a guy that a lot of people have been talking about this year, talking about guys that have seen a bunch of air yards, meaning long targets down the field, but haven't had much success. So he does the buy low air yards model.

But anyway, it was mainly focusing on the Seahawks because we know the Seahawks this year went back to the ground and pound, establish the run, however you want to put that, type offense. It worked out well enough for them. They made the playoffs, lost in the first round. They actually had relative success with it. The thing that stood out to me in this article was the Seahawks were first in the league in frequency of using run-run pass, but the Titans were second.

The Titans used it 24% of the time, and they were successful 41.3% of the time. So they were actually more successful or, you know, having a higher success rate on those plays, a little bit higher than the Seahawks at 41.2% of the time. But, you know, that was, like I said, that was the thing that we killed, you know, Robiski and Malarkey for was, you know, run, run, pass. That's what they did every single time. We were all excited about this new offense, this new, you know, this new system that they were going to bring in.

And it turns out, you know, we have the team that did it the second most times in the league. Obviously, there were extenuating factors there with Marietta's health and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, I don't know. I just wasn't – we didn't hear as much about that this year. I guess we were complaining about other things. But it was just kind of interesting to me that the Titans were second on the list. Yeah, a couple thoughts for me. Like you said, the injury to Marcus Mariota, when he did play,

there were three or four games where he was so limited that you didn't really trust him throwing the ball. You were trying to protect him. You had Blaine Gabbert start a couple of games. So that number, those facts alone skew that number. And then, you know, we had our complaints about LeFleur, but for me, the complaints were he's not giving it to Derrick Henry enough. He's not giving it to Deion Lewis enough early in the year.

So it was arick Henry enough. He's not giving it to Deion Lewis enough early in the year. So it was a little bit different. Look, I don't mind being a ground and pound team because I think the NFL is going smaller. They're working to get speed on the field defensively. They're trying to match up with these Tyreek Hills of the world. If you bring out Derrick Henry and you have a dominant offensive line, that's a way to zig when the NFL is zagging. So I have no problem with that. The only problem is I just feel like this, you know, being a ground-and-pound team, you're a little limited.

I think you have to have a lot go right. And if things go wrong, you get punched in the mouth. I don't think you can recover as well as a team that can throw the ball. You've seen Dallas. You saw them kind of fall apart the other night against the Rams, and then you saw the Seahawks make a quick exit in the playoffs because they chose to stick to the run game instead of letting Russell Wilson throw the ball.

So I don't mind being a ground-and-pound team. It clearly worked, but I think there's obvious limitations there that are going to hinder your upside. Yeah, that's the thing. You have to be able to at least do a little bit of both, and like you said, if that's all you can do, if you have a couple things go wrong in a game, you get behind, you've got no chance of catching up. Just a couple more things from this article that were kind of interesting.

The most successful three-down sequence was pass, run, run. I think that makes sense because if you're in a situation where you can run on third down, it's typically going to be because you're in third and short. So that makes sense there. Pass, run, run, also pretty effective. But again, if you're picking up six or seven yards on first down, even if it's just a short pass, then you have two downs to pick up four yards or whatever it may be. And so having second and four is obviously a lot different than second and eight.

And then passing on third down is actually the most negative play script in all of this. But that's generally because most teams passing on third down – or not most teams, but a lot of times when you're passing on third down, you're in third really long, and that's a tough thing to pick up anyway. So anyway, if you go look for that article, like I said, I think the title of it is You Caught a Run on First Down, You're Already Screwed. That's the name of the article, but it's on 538. Just some interesting stuff in there as far as offensive philosophy.

But like you said, I think there's a point where once the NFL goes too far one way, then you swing the pendulum back the other way. And I think, I guess the moral to the story in all this for me is, I want the Titans to be a team that can take advantage of whatever it is the defense is presenting to them. We talked so much about this when Vrabel was hired and all that, and about what the Patriots do on a week-to-week basis where they change their game plan based on who they're playing.

Like you're saying, if you've got a team coming in here that's light because they're in the AFC West, let's say, and they've made their defense where they're going to stop the Chiefs. They know they need to be light and fast. Well then, yeah, let's line up Derek Henry. Let's run him at them, wear them down, use that. But then if you have a matchup where the run

is not your best play, the biggest benefit to you, then you want to be able to do something different. And I think that's what we want for this team. And again, I think that's the idea that we had of what we were going to see. We just didn't necessarily see it this year. And to your point, look who's left.

You've got the Patriots who can do both, clearly. You've got the Saints who can do both. You've got the Rams who can certainly do both. You saw that with C.J. Anderson. And then you've got the Chiefs who are pretty unique, but they can still do both. Even with Damian Williams, you look at what they did with Kareem Hunt earlier in the year. They can beat you in two totally different ways. So I think all four teams can do

that. It's no coincidence why they're still standing, right? You know, it really, I hate to say defense doesn't matter, but it's kind of trending that way. And it's kind of trending that way and it's it's kind of kind of weird to say but You know certainly Kansas City's defense showed up Last weekend, but really they won in spite of their defense So man, it just seems like you need to maximize your offense maximize your offensive line Get guys that can win in space and get a coach that can maximize those players in space. The formula is there. So we'll see if the Titans can make an offensive coordinator higher that can maximize this roster. Yeah, and to that point, the Rams were, I think,

ninth on this list of run-run pass. They did it 16% of the time. And if you watch that Rams-Cowboys game, the Rams just kept running the ball because the Cowboys couldn't stop them. So, you know, you don't want the guy who refuses to run the ball because he thinks he has to get a certain number of plays either way. You want the guy that's willing to take advantage of whatever it is that he's given him. And that's what we've seen from McVay.

If they're going to give him the run game, he's going to turn around and hand it off to his back, Todd Gurley, C.J. Anderson, whoever. And, you know, he's not proud in that way that he thinks he has to be an air attack. Like you were saying, hopefully we can get that guy in here, maximize the talent that's here, and it could be a different conversation. We could actually be talking about a productive Titans offense for the first time. I don't know when the last time we were able to really have that conversation was. All right, so coming up we will talk about the uh titans

offensive line kind of break down that and what we see heading into 2019 all right so you know the titans offensive line we've obviously spent you know millions and millions of years it feels like talking about all the different issues and all that stuff. Here's what we know. We know that Taylor LeJuan is really good. We know that he's good. He's here. We know all that, how that's going to work. We know that Jack Conklin is on the roster in 2018.

Now, does he have a starting spot over Dennis Kelly? Does Dennis Kelly start? Do they move Conklin to guard? I don't know. I mean, again, that's all speculation. They've never said anything about that. But we know we have LeJuan. We have Conklin.

We have Kelly here. We know those three things. I think the rest of it's all up in the air. I don't see any scenario where they cut Josh Klein just because the cap ramifications and all that kind of stuff, it just wouldn't really make sense to do that. So I think Josh Klein probably starts somewhere on your offensive line next year. But then you've got Quentin Spain, who is an unrestricted free agent. I would expect he would want to test the market.

I don't know if the Titans would want to invest that much money in their guards. We'll see how that plays out. And then you've got Ben Jones who's still under contract, but a very favorable cap situation if the Titans decide to move on from him. So there's a lot of question marks here, and we don't know a lot about if these guys are good or not outside of we know lawan's good we know conklin has been good and we know dennis kelly played well last year

it's gonna pain me when when they let quentin spain walk because i think he's a pretty good player and i think some team is gonna find a really good young player in free agency uh i'm not sure what the staff has against him, but he was the first guy to get benched when they were trying to, I forget what game it was, but they were trying to switch things up and jumpstart this offensive line, which is fine.

I just didn't think Spain was the guy that needed to be benched. You read between the lines, you look at last year, I would guess they're going to let Spain walk. You've between the lines, you look at last year, I would guess they're going to let Spang walk. You've got one spot open there. Is that spot

filled by Jack Conklin? Suddenly, he looks like a guy that really couldn't operate out on an island that really struggled to move. To kick him inside, I think he could win there for sure. You know, you go back to his college tape,

and I was pretty upset the night the Titans took him because he really didn't play well his last year at Michigan State. Come to find out he's got a knee injury. Well, he's coming off of another knee injury. So I'm worried there. Will they kick him inside? That's the big question mark for me uh then of course you could put dennis kelly at right tackle but um you know you look at

some of these east west shrine bowl meetings uh titans are meeting with some tackles uh that i saw a couple of of connections already there um so i i think it's a spot that the titans are going to address and they need to address yeah absolutely and the other conversation about Conklin is you know at some point before May they've got to decide if they're going to pick up his fifth year option or not and we were looking at this before we got started from what I can gather since Conklin was a top 10 pick then he gets the average of the of the top 10 salaries at his position.

That's what his number would be for that fifth year. Now, it's a little bit unclear as far as if that's offensive tackles or offensive line. It looks like it's offensive line based on numbers that guys like Taylor LeJuan, those guys are supposed to play under. So it looks like it's the whole line, not just tackles. We won't know what that number is for a couple weeks, I don't think. Everything's kind of set

with the owners meeting and that kind of stuff. So they're going to have to make that decision in the next couple weeks. If you're making that decision right now, what do you do? I think it's a spot where you probably wait and see. See how he plays. See how he comes back. I'm just not sold that

knee is right. Maybe he was rushed how he comes back. I'm just not sold that that knee is right Maybe he was rushed back Into the lineup Titans were playing well without him Dennis Kelly was playing well But Conklin came back and the line seemed to get worse And unfortunately the line seemed to get better when he was out of the lineup So it's a spot where I'm gonna wait and see How that knee reacts. Again, you saw him in college when I evaluated him.

He did not look like a first-round pick to me. So you look at what he did in his rookie year, you can't deny that. But we're a long way away from that point. So I've got to see how he responds this year before I give him anything. Yeah, so, I mean, it'll be interesting. We've seen him play really well. Obviously now, you know, again, we were in a battle with Jeff Schwartz that year about how much was help and all that kind of stuff. And it turned out, you know, maybe Jeff Schwartz was right,

that the Titans weren't giving a lot of help, and that's why he's playing so well. And then as far as that goes, like you said, I mean, you're looking at, you know draft, in the Shrine Bowl. It's not typically a place where you're looking at first and second round guys, but kind of some of those middle round guys. And so that's where I would hope they would address this problem. I don't know if they're going to be able to find a big ticket free agent guy. I don't know that they'll really have the money to do that anyway.

But find a guy or two in the middle rounds that you can plug in and play this year, and you don't have to give up being able to draft your edge guy at the beginning. You can address receiver and free agency. Find a couple of guys in the middle of this draft that can come in and play for you, and you can kind of fix that problem. As far as guys that are on the roster, it'll be interesting what they do with kevin pamphil uh you know he was playing pretty well and then he got hurt missed the rest

of the year he's scheduled to become a free agent i wouldn't mind seeing him back like i said he was he was pretty good in the opportunities that he got and a guy that gives him some versatility because he can play guard and tackle and then you know we've seen cory levin at times and he's been okay but i would be looking to draft him and replace him. Yeah, Levin was a guy that I was kind of excited to see, and then he got in the game, and it wasn't good. So I thought he would be in line to take over for Ben Jones. That clearly didn't happen.

So, yeah, I think I like what they did last year. They signed a bunch of guys, you know, I think I like what they did last year. They signed a bunch of guys created competition Cut whoever lost the the battle At the end of training camp, so I like that approach. I think they need to get younger though I think you can draft guys. I think it's been proven that you can find some some starting guards In the third fourth fifth even sixth round So I'd certainly like to see them do that.

And just judging from these early meetings, you know, it seems like that's something that they're going to be interested in doing. Yeah, absolutely. So that'll be a thing to keep an eye on as we lead up to the draft. And we'll talk about more of those guys, you know, potential targets and all that stuff as we get closer to draft day. All right. So I'll do it for today.

Again, if you want to leave us a voicemail, 615-787-8762. Call in there. Leave us a message in about a minute. We're going to do a show with voicemails tomorrow. So we've already got a few, but if we get a few more, we'll try our best to work those in. Again, you can follow us on Twitter. I'm at jmorrismcm.

Terry's at tlambertfb. Thanks so much for listening to Locked on Titans, and we'll talk to you again tomorrow.