Football Outsiders and the Tennessee Titans

Here are some interesting stats for this year's teams.  We talked about these stats on Wednesday night's radio show, and as I mentioned there, August is the one that originally pointed them out to me.

We will start off giving huge props to the defensive line.  Before camp started I wasn't sure if this unit was really any better than the unit the Titans had last season.  Then I saw the production in camp and preseason, and I started to believe that this could be a productive unit.  Then the season started, and they have done nothing but get better every week.  According to Football Outsiders the defensive line ranks 4th in runs stuffed, runs where the running back is tackled at or behind the line of scrimmage, at 23%.  They also rank 5th in the league with an adjusted sack rate of 8.2%.

The offensive stats are not so good outside of Kenny Britt.  He ranks 3rd in DYAR and 2nd in DVOA.  You can read more about what those stats mean here, but put simply DYAR is total value and DVOA is value per play.

Last year Chris Johnson ranked 1st in DYAR and 7th in DVOA among running backs (see above).  This year he is 35th and 34th respectively.  While CJ is probably never going to have a great success rate, last year in 2,006 yard season he only had a success rate of 45% good for 32nd, the number this year is abysmal at 37% (36th).

The numbers for the offensive line, not surprisingly, are equally as bad.  They are allowing 26% of rushing attempts to be stuffed at or behind the line of scrimmage (the NFL average is 19%).  They also rank 27th in the league in pass protection.  Last year the offensive line was 3rd in the league in pass protection and allowed 22% of runs to get stopped at or behind the line of scrimmage.

There is no doubt that offensive line play will be the focus of the bye week.