The Tennessee Titans’ offensive line had its fair share of issues in pass protection last season, en route to allowing the second-most sacks in the NFL — but thankfully things stabilized more and more as the year progressed.
One area of pass protection where the Titans’ O-line did thrive was when it was asked to block for plays that take more time to develop.
According to Timo Riske of Pro Football Focus, Tennessee’s unit is the second-best in the NFL going into 2020 in pass protection for “longer developing plays” after a successful 2019 campaign in that metric.
Here’s what PFF bases its ranking on.
Individual performance on plays that are supposed to take longer than other plays. We identify these plays by using the time-to-throw survival analysis I wrote about a few weeks ago. We measure performance on these plays with individual pass-blocking grades, which we can also use to directly account for roster changes.
Collective offensive line performance on plays that take a long time, no matter whether it is intended or the result of a broken play. We set the threshold at 3 seconds, as only 28% of pass plays observe a quarterback holding on to the ball longer. We will measure performance with survival curves and look at 2019 performance, which we will adjust for roster changes.
Riske notes that Ryan Tannehill held on to the ball for longer than any quarterback last season, so it’s a good thing the Titans’ O-line is able to hold up for an extended amount of time.
Had they been able to keep Jack Conklin, the Titans would have surely been in the No. 1 spot. But losing a solid right tackle and having to replace him with a rookie — who we didn’t consider as pro-ready as some of the offensive tackles selected in the first round of the 2020 NFL Draft — is enough for the Raiders to leapfrog them in these rankings. The Titans offense relied on this strength a lot last year, with Ryan Tannehill holding the ball longer than any other starting quarterback.
Because of the extra time he was afforded, Tannehill was able to make things happen down the field in 2019, as evidenced by his leading the NFL in yards per attempt and yards per completion. That no doubt helped elevate the team’s offense to new heights.
Most importantly, Tannehill was able to take advantage of the play-action — which can take longer to develop than most passing plays — with Derrick Henry facing a league-leading 188 eight-man boxes. Play-action will continue to be a vital part of the Titans’ offense this coming season.
For all the flack that the Titans’ offensive line received last season, it did more than enough to allow Tannehill to thrive, and things should only get better in 2020 now that the group upfront has played more games together.