The Tennessee Titans didn’t go too high or too low with their addition of pass-rusher Vic Beasley, which is typical for the team making a free-agent signing.
Tennessee will ink Beasley to a one-year, $9.5 million deal that could go as high as $12 million with incentives.
After the move, the Titans still have $19 million in cap space, so avoiding the higher-priced pass-rushers like Jadeveon Clowney and Dante Fowler Jr. gives general manager Jon Robinson more wiggle room in free agency.
The former No. 8 overall pick was a star in his second season, totaling a league-high 15.5 sacks. From there, Beasley’s production dropped-off, leading to him combining for 10 sacks in the two years that followed.
That kind of fall from grace has opened the door to questions about Beasley’s effort and ability to stay consistent, and those concerns have lingered even though he had a somewhat resurgent 2019 campaign with eight sacks.
In fact, those concerns might have lingered enough that the Atlanta Falcons, a team in desperate need of a pass-rusher, allowed him to walk in free agency without so much as making an offer. Before that, the team tried to trade him during the season, but was unsuccessful in its attempt to do so.
Now, we could chalk that up to the Falcons being cash-strapped this offseason, but if a team wants a player bad enough, they can always move money around to make it work.
Despite the questions surrounding Beasley, there is tremendous upside with him based on his past numbers and he could create quite the formidable duo when paired with Harold Landry. And, perhaps having Landry to take some attention off of him will help Beasley thrive.
The Titans haven’t made a long, expensive commitment to the 27-year-old, and if he can fall somewhere between his 2016 and 2019 versions as far as sack totals go, his contract is a steal.
But we’ll have to see that to believe it first thanks to his history of inconsistency.
Even if he finishes with five sacks like he totaled in both 2017 and 2018, that would still present an upgrade over Cameron Wake’s 2.5 sacks from last season.
The only problem with that scenario is that the Titans needed a big upgrade at the position if they’re going to compete with the likes of Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs, and that kind of incremental upgrade doesn’t qualify as such.
A big concern with Beasley, as ESPN noted, is that he has struggled to set the edge against the run in the past. In a Mike Vrabel defense, that’s something he has to improve.
At times with the Falcons, he was not able to hold outside containment, which is something the Titans ask their outside linebackers to do in run defense. In some circles, Beasley was labeled as a sack-chaser, and he’ll need to be more than just that for Titans coach Mike Vrabel.
On the flip side of that wart, Beasley is the kind of athletic freak that can be effective when dropping into pass coverage, which is something Landry did a lot of (and perhaps too much of) last season.
All in all, this is a middle-of-the-road move that comes with a lot of “ifs”. As a result, it gets a middle-of-the-road grade, but there is definitely hope that this signing could turn into a home run.
Grade: C
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