Tennessee Titans are the Super Bowl fancies hiding in plain sight

The Tennessee Titans don’t have a superstar quarterback. But they have a phenomenal advantage that the Super Bowl favourites don’t.

Tennessee Titans quarterback Ryan Tannehill has his most valued passing targets back

The Tennessee Titans don’t have Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes or Josh Allen. But when the NFL playoffs begin this weekend, they have a phenomenal advantage that Super Bowl favourites such as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Kansas City Chiefs or Buffalo Bills don’t: the Titans get the weekend off.

The league added a seventh playoff team from each conference last year, and that changed the format in a way that provides a monumental reward to only two teams. The winner of each conference gets both home-field advantage and the lone first-round bye, meaning its path to the Super Bowl has one fewer chance to lose.

The Green Bay Packers and Aaron Rodgers, the regular-season NFC champions, got one of those byes. The Titans, the AFC’s No.1 seed, received the other.

The difference in perception between the Packers and Titans, the only two teams just two wins away from reaching the Super Bowl, is enormous. Green Bay is the strong Super Bowl favourite. Tennessee’s odds are longer than four teams: the Packers, Chiefs, Bills, and Buccaneers.

Yet there’s reason to believe that Titans are being overlooked at the precise moment they’re prepared to play better than they have all season. The Tennessee team that everyone seems to discount is positioned to be at its best after a year dampened by injury after injury.

The Titans are enough of an anomaly that they may have value. Tennessee has 8.5-to-1 odds to win the Super Bowl, which implies a 10.5 per cent probability, at DraftKings. That’s not far off from where popular statistical models place them. FiveThirtyEight’s forecast says the Titans have a 12 per cent chance. A simulation from Football Outsiders — which said the Titans’ play this year rated worse than any No.1 or No.2 seed in their metrics’ history, dating back to the 1980s — has Tennessee winning it all just 7.9 per cent of the time.

The point is clear: Other teams, even ones that have to play and risk getting eliminated on the opening weekend of the playoffs, are projected to have a better shot at hoisting the Lombardi Trophy.

Yet there are two ways of looking at the Titans. One is that, even though they went 12-5, data-driven forecasts and the public seem to agree they’re not nearly as good as a typical favourite such as the Packers.

The other interpretation of their play is more favourable: the Titans still managed to win the coveted No.1 seed despite a historic number of injuries that are finally sorting themselves out, and any numbers that assess their performance don’t take that into full account.

Indeed, the Titans are getting healthy, quarterback Ryan Tannehill has his most valued passing targets back and there’s always the chance that Derrick Henry, back from injured reserve, simply runs over opponents.

“This will be a good week,” coach Mike Vrabel said after his team’s win last weekend.

The Titans haven’t always looked or played quite like a team that won 12 games, with both numbers and the eye test throwing caution about their success. They hardly looked like a contender when they lost to the New York Jets.

But their roster was also gutted by injuries for much of the year, and even though the team’s most important player remained healthy, it was impossible to miss the effect of those injuries on his performance. Tannehill finished the season 19th in yards per pass attempt. He threw 14 interceptions. He was sacked more than any quarterback other than Cincinnati’s Joe Burrow.

Yet when the right pieces are in place alongside him, there’s evidence Tannehill is elite. That’s because his statistical slide came after he emerged in 2019 and 2020 as one of the league’s breakout players. Over those two seasons, he led the NFL in yards per pass attempt. His expected points added per play were higher than any other quarterback in the league — Mahomes, Brady and Rodgers included — during that span, according to rbsdm.com.

Some players just regress. But his regression had an explanation. It actually had a record number of them: the Titans set a record for the most players used in a non-strike NFL season. And they set that mark back in November, when there was still more than a month left in the season.

The laundry list of injuries that contributed to the Titans using 91 players happened to include Tannehill’s most important assets. Star receivers A.J. Brown and Julio Jones were both out when Tennessee was shocked by the Jets. Henry, the steamrolling running back who led the NFL in rushing yards in each of the prior two seasons, went on injured reserve with a foot injury. At times, it looked like Tannehill was forced to play 1-on-11.

Now, the banged up Titans are getting healthy — or, at least, healthier — at the best possible time. Brown returned after a lengthy absence in Week 16 and responded with a 145-yard game. Brown and Jones both caught touchdown passes last weekend, two of Tannehill’s four passing scores. They activated Henry off injured reserve, with the hopes that he will be ready to play in two weeks after the team’s bye.

Tannehill is essentially a different player when he has his best passing targets available. They’re 11-2 in games when Brown plays, and 1-3 when he doesn’t. Tannehill averaged 231 passing yards per game with Brown — and 184 without him. He threw just two touchdowns in those four games that Brown was out. His 7.5 yards per pass attempt in the games with Brown plummeted to 5.5 in his absence. It was the difference between being a fantastic quarterback and a crummy one.

“We have to go out and play our best football in the coming weeks,” Tannehill said after last weekend’s game. “That’s what great teams do.”

There’s also proof that when the Titans are humming, they can beat the best teams in the NFL — or the ones that are expected to have a better chance at the Super Bowl than them. That’s because they have a collection of wins that rivals anyone else’s. They beat the Bills. They thumped the Chiefs 27-3. They also added nice victories against playoff bound teams in the Rams and 49ers. For now, Tennessee can celebrate the ultimate reward of the NFL’s regular season. The playoffs start this weekend. The Titans don’t have to play. They have already advanced to the next round.

Wall Street Journal