As first reported by ESPN's Adam Schefter, the Titans have met with former Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams about becoming an assistant head coach. Williams is currently under suspension by the NFL for his role in the Saints' Bountygate scandal, but has received permission to talk to teams about a new job. Jim Wyatt indicates that if Williams is brought on, Jerry Gray is expected to remain the defensive coordinator. Gray and Williams have worked together in the past, including in Williams' past stint as defensive coordinator with the Titans, in Buffalo, and in Washington.

Williams' hire is likely to be a controversial one for several reasons. First, his role in the Bountygate scandal, when under questioning by NFL officials he went ahead and named names of players who had a role. Regardless of your feelings about that, NFL players may understandably feel constrained in their dealings with him. Williams will have to deal with the issue forthrightly to establish a bond with his players. Fortunately (or not), the Titans do not seem to have a strong leadership core in place that Williams will have to work with and through in selling his message to the team in whatever position he ends in.

Second, Jeff Fisher reportedly attempted to hire Williams for another stint in Tennessee after Jim Schwartz left to become head coach of the Lions. One of Williams' conditions of hiring it seems, though, was that the team hire his son Blake as an assistant. This apparently run afoul of Bud Adams' anti-nepotism rule, and when the Saints would indeed hire Blake Williams along with Gregg, father and son went there. Fisher did hire Blake as his linebackers coach in St. Louis, but he was fired after the 2012 season for his arrogance and failure to get along with players. As I noted recently, the Titans seem to have a full complement of coaches, and there doesn't seem to be a job for Blake, at least right now.

Third and most importantly, Williams has in recent years coordinator mostly not very good defenses.

After yesterday's post on how many snaps each offensive player played, it's time to turn my attention to the other side of the ball and look at the defense.

As I did with the offense, I took an interim look at the bye week at how much each defensive player played in the first ten games of the 2012 season. We got a bit of an idea of some trends at that point. The Titans did not make a change at coordinator during the season, so I won't be able to engage in the same exercise I did yesterday and see how changes in leadership changed things. Then again, with Jerry Gray returning for another season, there's a chance the trends we saw in 2012 might actually continue into 2013.

As I did when I covered the offense and in the bye week report, I will go position by position.

During the bye week, I took a look at the per-game and cumulative snaps played by each player on offense. My estimation would have been that the basic trends we saw in player participation were, with the exception of changes caused by injuries, the same trends we would have seen after the bye week. Then, the Titans went and fired offensive coordinator Chris Palmer.

One of the big questions for 2013 is just what will Dowell Loggains' offense look like? There are a number of different dimensions to this question, and when I finish breaking down the Jaguars game, I'll mention one thing. At the same time, one of the things I can answer now is what players played less or more. I touched on some of these in my weekly snap report writeups, but I think it's worth taking an overview.

I'll have a separate post on the defense, but this post will cover the offense. As I did last time, I will go position by position.

Selecting Kendall Wright in the first round of last April's NFL draft gave the Tennessee Titans a problem. It was probably a good problem to have, but it was still a problem. Between the acquisition of Wright and Kenny Britt's return from injury, the Titans were adding two potential very big pieces to the passing game at the same time they were returning almost every player who'd been thrown the ball in 2011. How would the Titans distribute playing time and targets in 2012, when they weren't suddenly going to throw the ball a lot more?

The rest of the time until the 2012 season began would see the competition for targets lessen a little bit, but only a little bit. Added to the pre-draft departure of Donnie Avery to the Colts were Daniel Graham's release and Marc Mariani going on injured reserve. Still, those were fundamentally irrelevant, as they represented all of 31 of the Titans' 606 total targets in 2011. 

I took a stab at answering the problem not long after the Titans drafted Wright, making predictions for how things might go. Over the bye week, I took an interim look, noting some of my projections looked pretty good and others were rather off. Now that the season is over, it's time to take a final look at how the Titans targeted their receivers in 2012 compared to how I thought during the offseason they might.

Before the season, I noted that the Titans were an interesting combination of pretty old on offense and pretty young on defense in 2011. I then tried to project how old the Titans would be in 2012, assessing them in the end as likely older than average on offense while being one of the youngest defenses in the league. Now that we have AV information for the 2012 season, we can evaluate just how old or young the Titans were and see if my predictions were close to accurate.

As I noted in that prior post, I'm not completely in love with AV as a metric, but it does allow us to evaluate which Titans contributed the most to the team in 2012. This is not a pure age-weighting, as most NFL teams appear younger than they really are thanks to older players generally being more important than younger players, who tend to be your cheap backups. I also didn't run full AV age metrics for the entire league, so I can't compare the Titans to every other NFL team in 2012. We have that data for 2011, though, and things should not have changed radically.

As I predicted, the Titans come out as somewhat older than average on offense. They had the league's fourth-oldest offense in 2011 at 27.8, but that came down to 27.46 in 2012. League average is close to 27.0, so the Titans were still old. As I keep noting, an old offensive line is a big reason the Titans are old on offense, and signing Steve Hutchinson did nothing to make them younger. The youth came in Jake Locker replacing Matt Hasselbeck at quarterback. Excluding the quarterback position entirely, the Titans offense comes out at basically league-average. The "skill position" players, beyond Hasselbeck, are all pretty young. Even the old man of the group, Nate Washington, does not turn 30 until just before the start of the 2013 season.

As the news has come out piecemeal, I intentionally haven't written anything on the changes the Titans have made on their coaching staff. With today's press release from the team announcing the changes, I think it's safe to assume the Titans are done making changes. Given the scope of the turnover involved, I think it's worth going through the various position.

Offensive Coordinator
Was: Dowell Loggains (interim)
Is: Dowell Loggains
There wasn't a lot of surprise involved in this move. The only suspense died earlier this week, when Tom Moore announced he wouldn't be with the Titans in 2013 and at least strongly implied Loggains would be the offensive coordinator. The offense was terrible the final five games of 2012 when Loggains served in an interim role, and more than terrible, it didn't seem to have an animating principle. Yes, the offensive line was shaken up, but I'm not sure what the Titans were even trying to do. Loggains will have an offseason to make the offense more in his preferred image, whatever that image actually is.

Quarterbacks
Was: Dowell Loggains
Is: Dave Ragone
Ragone, a Chris Palmer guy, manages to stay on in the new scheme, albeit with a shift over from wide receivers coach to his playing position. He was a bit of an odd fit as a receivers coach, and the quotes about Tom Moore teaching receivers a better way to do things in his first week as a consultant wasn't the most encouraging sign. His involvement in the passing game and experience at the position should make him a decent hire, though of course we won't know until we see the results. Bonus: he's just a tad over four years younger than Matt Hasselbeck.

After yesterday's look at how field position affected the Titans' offensive performance in 2012, it is now time to look at how it affected the defense.

My methodology is the same I've used in the past. Touchdowns are worth 7 points. Made field goals are worth 3 points. Missed field goals are worth 2 points. All other drives are worth 0 points. End of half/game drives where scoring is not the point are excluded from my calculations, as are desperation drives that don't have a realistic chance at scoring.

I'll start with a look at the final numbers for 2012 compared to 2011.