Back in early May, not too long after the Titans drafted Kendall Wright, I wrote a post on how the Titans might target their receivers in 2012. As a reminder, here's what my projection looked like:

The Tennessee Titans will get back into the flow of things after enjoying their bye week and we'll resume our regular weekly question and answer exchange with a blogger from the other side.  This week, we'll be joined by Shane Clemons, who runs the fine Jacksonville Jaguars blog, The Jaggernaut.  If you have any questions for Shane, leave them in the comments and I will pass them along to him.

The Tennessee Titans finally get to enjoy their bye week and I wanted to take a look at where the Titans stand relative to the rest of the league.  First, we'll take a look at the standings and playoff possibilities, followed by some team stats.  None of this looks too pretty, but you probably already knew that, seeing as how the Titans haven't looked too good for most of the year.

Last week's win over the Dolphins keeps the Titans' slim playoff chances alive, at least mathematically.  Here's the picture in the AFC as we head into Sunday's games.

Continue Reading

With Jake Locker returning from his shoulder injury before the bye, I thought it would be interesting to break down his game in some detail. Unless he got hurt, I knew going in I would be writing about him this week. Responding to a hypothetical Q&A before this week's game, and I went into this briefly on Twitter, I didn't expect Locker's return to really make that much of a difference in the Titans' offensive fate. He and Matt Hasselbeck are different quarterbacks, with very different strengths, but by Football Outsiders numbers had performed at virtually the same level (they're now 22nd and 24th by DVOA, at -8.9% and -9.7%).

Notwithstanding the stil-existing similarity in his overall efficiency to Hasselbeck's, Locker validated my pre-decision to write about him by having a relatively interesting day, throwing for two touchdown passes and receiving some praise from fans happy to see the win but completing only 43% of his passes. By conventional numbers, I thought that optimism was a bit over the top; FO's Quick Reads was more measured, ranking him 22nd among 33 quarterbacks this week in passing value but 12th in overall value thanks to good rushing performance. Of course, DYAR is a results-based meaure, while for this post I'm interested in going into the process that led to those results.

That said, on to my take of how Locker performed on Sunday.

As promised, it's the follow-up to yesterday's post looking at snap counts by position through the bye week. I covered the offense, which means it's time for the other side of the ball today. There aren't many positions quite as static as there were on the offense, plus even at those there's been some changeover as the year as gone one.

Defensive End

I've been posting the snap count reports weekly after each game, and now that we're at the bye week, I thought it would be useful to take a broader look at the trends for each position. I've tried to incorporate these into my analysis of each game but think it would be useful to put what we've seen so far in a convenient place. Let's do this position by position. I'll cover the offense in this post and have a post on the defense up tomorrow.

Quarterback