Ravens’ shocking divisional-round loss was all about Titans’ great coaching

Yes, the Ravens did not play well in their shocking divisional round loss. But this was all about the Titans’ coaching and strategy.

In every postseason, there’s one team that comes up out of nowhere and surprises its opponents on the way to some unexpected final results. That team doesn’t always win the Super Bowl, but the ability to flex your best personnel and coaching at the same time is never more important than in the postseason.

For the 2019 postseason, it is definitely time to crown the Tennessee Titans as that Team to Be Watched. After their 20-13 wild-card win over the Patriots, head coach Mike Vrabel’s team was rewarded with a trip to Baltimore in the divisional frame to face the 14-2 Ravens, the best team in the regular season, as the AFC’s sixth-seed to Baltimore’s first overall. The general consensus was that if the Titans could hang around and make the game competitive, it would be a fine end to a season that started with a 2-4 record and all kinds of questions about the team’s future.

Instead, a 28-12 win for a team that has now beaten up the big kids two weeks in a row.

Vrabel wasn’t buying the negativity — he simply stayed on course. It took a lot of guts to replace quarterback Marcus Mariota with Ryan Tannehill, but that worked like a charm. It took a lot of guts to slow-roll Bill Belichick in the wild-card round with Belichick’s own clock-draining methods, but Vrabel — who played linebacker and tight end for Belichick from 2001 through 2008 — did it anyway. He understood that the Patriots did not have the offense to counter his moves. Vrabel is a fearless coach, and when you understand strategy and momentum, fearlessness can get you a long way.

“It feels great,” Vrabel said following the win. “It feels great to execute a game plan that the coaches worked very hard at. All the credit goes to the coaches, and mainly, the players — they’re the ones who have to execute it. We were locked in all week, and then we had to come to a hostile, difficult environment. We were able to get off to the fast start we talked about.”

It also takes a lot of guts to lead with your running back in a pass-first era, but Vrabel has no issue with that, either. The Titans became the first team since the 1972 and 1973 Dolphins, and the 1974 Steelers, to win multiple games in the same postseason with their quarterbacks throwing for less than 100 yards in each of those games. Tannehill threw for 71 yards against the Patriots, and 88 against the Ravens. The game was so different back then, it’s not an overstatement to say that what the Titans have done this postseason is straight from outer space. Running back Derrick Henry bulled through Baltimore’s defense for 195 rushing yards on 30 carries, and the Titans made no secret of their intentions — just as they made no secret of their intentions when Henry beat the Patriots up for 182 yards on 34 carries the week before.

“It’s not just me; it’s a team effort,” Henry said after the game. “We are all playing collectively as an offense, and we’re just locked in. We believe in each other, we communicate, and it’s working out there.”

It certainly is. First-year offensive coordinator Arthur Smith, who replaced Matt LaFleur when LaFleur took the head coaching job in Green Bay, called an audacious and highly successful game against one of the league’s best defenses through the second half of the season. Tannehill became the first quarterback with two passing touchdowns and a rushing touchdown in the playoffs since Cam Newton in the 2015 NFC Championship game.

This 45-yard touchdown pass to receiver Kalif Raymond in the second quarter was an outstanding deep throw from a quarterback who clearly has the full confidence of his coaching staff.

Smith also dialed up a third-quarter touchdown pass from running back Derrick Henry to receiver Corey Davis that made the score 21-6 after the extra point.

Meanwhile, defensive coordinator Dean Pees — who served in that same role with the Ravens from 2012 through 2017 — tied Lamar Jackson in knots when Jackson’s own receivers weren’t letting him down. Everybody talks about containing Jackson’s explosive rushing ability to hit the edge and turn on the jets with gap discipline and mush-rushes in which one doesn’t over-commit to Jackson before he passes you by, but Pees and his coaching staff actually got it done. They stacked defensive linemen and linebackers at the tackle points, and let their second- and third-level defenders run to Jackson from angles that allowed efficient pursuit.

Jackson did run 20 times for 143 yards, but he also attempted 59 passes, which was never in the ideal game plan. Baltimore had 29 first downs to Tennessee’s 15, and gained 530 yards to Tennessee’s 300, but as they say… scoreboard, baby.

The Ravens hadn’t failed to convert a fourth-and-1 attempt all season — they blew two in this game alone. Baltimore had a plus-10 turnover ratio in the regular season; in this game, they lost the ball on two Jackson picks and a Jackson fumble. They were 0-for-4 on fourth down, and 1-for-4 in the red zone. The numbers that mattered went in the Titans’ favor from the start, while the Ravens gorged up on carb yards all the way to an unexpected  divisional exit.

“I think, just watch,” Henry concluded, when asked what people don’t know about the team that has shocked the football world two weeks in a row. “We aren’t going to do too much talking; we’re just going to work, and believe in each other. That’s our mentality. Focus on finishing.”

If they can do it again next week, the Titans will make their first Super Bowl since the end of the 1999 season. No matter who they face in the penultimate round — either the Chiefs or the Texans — it would be unwise to bet too hard against them.

Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”