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.

I ran some of these numbers after Chris Palmer was fired, but with the season concluded, it's time to take a final look at how field position affected the Titans' offensive performance in 2012.

I may have said this before on this site, once or twice, in some detail, but the Titans weren't very good on offense in 2012. As the numbers will show, they struggled to move the ball when they had bad field position. They struggled to move the ball when they had pretty good field position. They did ok when they had great field position, but they didn't have great field position very often. Instead, they had bad field position more often. The Titans recently fired Alan Lowry, but it doesn't look like special teams was really the problem for the Titans in 2012.

After the jump, numbers and charts and more analysis.

The flip side to my recent pick of Derrick Morgan the biggest surprise for the Titans in 2012 is picking the biggest disappointment. While Morgan wasn't the only player I considered for that honor, after a 6-10 season following up 2011's 7-9 mark, the disappointment field is sadly a competitive one.

The problem with picking a disappointment (and also a surprise) is that it is relative to expectations; one man's disappointment may be another's reasonable performance. Take, for instance, Karl Klug. He had a very productive rookie year with 7.0 sacks, and many Titans fans were looking for that many or more again in 2012. He slipped to only 3.5 this year, and many people might rate him a disappointment. As I wrote before the season, though, he was lucky with how many sacks he got relative to how much total pressure he had, and 3-4 sacks would be a more reasonable expectation for his 2012 production. That's right in line with the 3.5 sacks he ended up with as a fourth defensive tackle who tended to play situationally. That doesn't make him a disappointment in my book.

My pick for the biggest disappointment for the Titans in 2012 is quarterback Jake Locker. I wrote before the season that "whether Hasselbeck or Locker is the starting quarterback will not dramatically change how good the Titans will be in 2012." As far as my predictions go, this isn't the worst one I've made, but it certainly wasn't the best one either. Through much of the season, it was relatively close to true, but the Titans ended up a better offense with Matt Hasselbeck under center than they were with Jake Locker thanks to a string of six consecutive below-average offensive performances to end the season .

Among all the firings of coaches and general managers around the league last week, there were three I thought were noteworthy regarding their success against the Titans.  Those three are former Chargers general manager A.J. Smith and coach Norv Turner and former Bears coach Lovie Smith.

As we painfully recall, the Chargers and Bears each humiliated the Titans in 2012, by scores of 38-10 and 51-20, but the three men who are the focus of this article have enjoyed success against the Titans far beyond this past season.  We'll look at their careers versus the Titans, after the jump.