No team in the National Football League had a higher punt rate on fourth downs than the Tennessee Titans during the 2022 campaign.
According to football analyst Warren Sharp, the Titans punted on 70 percent of their fourth downs, which was tops in the league by five percent over the next-closest team, the New Orleans Saints.
As usual, context matters, so let’s not be so quick to jump on head coach Mike Vrabel for not being aggressive enough.
The Titans had a horrid offense in 2022, and it didn’t help that the putrid play-calling of offensive coordinator Todd Downing often led to third-and-long situations the passing attack wasn’t able to get out of.
As a result, the Titans didn’t have a ton of manageable fourth-down situations, either, thus forcing them to punt far more often than not.
Earlier this offseason, we covered the fact that Vrabel was actually one of the more aggressive head coaches on fourth downs based on the “Aggressiveness Index” via Football Outsiders’ Aaron Schatz, ranking ninth in the NFL there.
The “Aggressiveness Index” takes into account specific situations to better calculate how aggressive a head coach truly was on fourth downs. Here’s more information on that:
Aggressiveness Index excludes obvious catch-up situations: third quarter, trailing by 15 or more points; fourth quarter, trailing by nine or more points; and in the last five minutes of the game, trailing by any amount. It also excludes the last 10 seconds of the first half, and it adjusts for when a play doesn’t actually record as fourth-and-short because of one of those bogus delay of game penalties that moves the punter back five yards. Only the regular season is included.
Thankfully, the Titans had a great punter to turn to, as 2022 UDFA and rookie Ryan Stonehouse led the NFL in gross yards per punt, even breaking the all-time record that stood for a whopping 82 years.
I personally think Vrabel would like to be more aggressive on fourth downs, but he’s got to have the right players and the right situations to do so. That certainly was not the case last season.
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