The Tennessee Titans’ offense relies on its star running back more than any team in the NFL. And now that star running back is hurt.
Derrick Henry, reigning offensive player of the year, suffered a foot injury in Week 8 that could potentially end his season before he could get to its halfway mark. If he can’t play, Tennessee will lose a star responsible for handling 239 of the team’s 549 snaps — 43.5 percent — so far this fall. Henry leads the team with 1,012 yards from scrimmage; the next closest Titan is A.J. Brown, with 512.
The news caps off a dreadful two-week span for the league’s leading rusher. Henry had been mostly contained after a red hot five-week stretch showcased the kind of surge the tailback typically reserves for the latter half of the season.
He averaged 145 rushing yards and two touchdowns in Weeks 2-6 as Tennessee overcame an 0-1 start to stake its claim atop the AFC South. The past two weeks, however, those averages dropped to 77 yards and zero touchdowns. He went from averaging 4.8 yards per carry to just 2.7.
The silver lining is that the Titans won each of those games and, at 6-2, holds a three-game lead over the rest of the division. These weren’t wins over chump teams, either; Tennessee exploited the struggles of the Kansas City Chiefs and Indianapolis Colts despite below average performances from Henry.
What will the Titans’ offense look like now?
Tennessee handed the ball off more than any other club through the first half of the season (32.5 carries per game). Among running backs, Henry had 219 carries. RB2 Jeremy McNichols had … seven. That’s 0.88 per game. RB3 Darrynton Evans has only one game and two carries on his 2021 resume.
Both those players will see their roles expand, though neither will be able to match Henry’s overall impact. McNichols will provide a useful receiving presence from the backfield as his 21 catches are three more than Henry had through eight weeks. He’s not a bad change-of-pace back either, having averaged 4.5 yards per carry as a Titan. We’ll get to see just how much of that was thanks to Tractorcito wearing down defensive lines early in the game.
Evans, a 2020 third-round pick out of Appalachian State, has yet to live up to his draft status. He averaged six yards per carry as a Mountaineer, but injuries have limited him to just six games over a season-plus in the pros.
The compact back has an explosive first step, and while he won’t truck people like Henry he flits through narrow holes to create big gains. With 4.41-second 40 speed, he’s capable of leaving defensive backs in his wake.
The problem is that neither McNichols nor Evans are going to create their own lanes. Evans’ NCAA highlight reel is dotted with big runs through well-crafted blocking lanes. Henry didn’t need those; he simply spotted weaknesses in the soil and blasted through to bedrock.
His absence will put more pressure on a passing game that’s often efficient, but never quite overwhelming. Ryan Tannehill beat the Colts Sunday by spamming passes to AJ Brown, who hauled in 10 of 11 targets for 155 yards and a touchdown. That’s effective against the league’s 22nd-ranked passing defense and held up against the collection of discarded Sears mannequins the Chiefs call a defense. It won’t translate against top five units like the Chargers and Bills in the AFC. It already failed in Week 1 against the Cardinals, who beat Tennessee 38-13.
That means Tannehill will have to throw more and to a more diverse group of targets. That’s feasible if Julio Jones is healthy, but he’s missed three games this season after skipping seven games last fall due to injury. He hasn’t been the world beater we’ve come to expect when on the field, either. Though his 11.1 yards per target would be the second-best mark of his career, his 3.4 receptions per game is by far the lowest.
The Titans badly need him to punch up a limited depth chart that’s forced Chester Rogers, Nick Westbrook-Ikhine, and Marcus Johnson into the starting lineup at wideout. Josh Reynolds (10 catches in 2021) has been a bust since signing this offseason. Anthony Firkser has not been able to break out after being promoted to top tight end in Jonnu Smith’s absence, though the Firkser-MyCole Pruitt-Geoff Swaim platoon is … fine.
This heaps expectations on Tannehill’s shoulders. He revived his career by emerging as one of the league’s most efficient quarterbacks in Tennessee, but did so with Henry stacking boxes and luring safeties to the line of scrimmage. Now he has to prove he can keep clicking with a run game that’s been dialed down from “awesome” to “yeesh.”
Tannehill has spent the past two seasons slowly regressing from his breakthrough 2019. His passer rating plus — an efficiency tool that measures his effectiveness relative to other NFL quarterbacks much like baseball uses ERA+ — has slipped from a league-best 133 in 2019 to 119 last season to 96 through eight games this fall. 100 is league average. In that same span, his on-target throw rate has slipped from 81 percent to 77 and, now, 67 percent.
Tannehill needs to get back on track, and he needs to do so with two star wideouts and not much else.
The Titans’ overall playoff odds haven’t been affected by the Henry news thanks to the dumpster fire of a division around them, however their Super Bowl futures could get a little worse depending on how bad the injury is and whether Henry can return to the field come January.
In the short term, Henry’s injury has already moved the Los Angeles Rams from a -260 moneyline favorite to -340 in advance of their Week 9 showdown with Tennessee. We’ll have a better idea of how resilient — or how hopeless — the Titans are then a week from now.