This Is Us: Titans defense edition

I don’t know how many of you that read MCM watch This Is Us on NBC. My wife and I watch it. The show is pretty good overall though some episodes put me to sleep because they are painfully boring and some weeks it feels like they are throwing things in there just to make people cry. But the point of that show is to follow a group of siblings through the good, bad and ugly of life. Here it all is....This Is Us.

We have followed this Titans defense for 12 games now. We have seen them be good. We have seen them be bad. We have seen them be ugly. It seems to me that too many people are overweighting the good, the 2(!) game stretch against Baltimore and the second Cots game, and are not looking at the overall body of work. Wouldn’t we all like to be judged by only our best days?

I talked more about it on my latest Titans in Ten podcast. Listen here.

The Titans defense is really bad, and the real problem here is there isn’t much hope of it getting drastically better. Sure, there is hope that the secondary will be better when Kristian Fulton comes back and if Adoree Jackson ever comes back, but that is only a band-aid on gaping wound.

The pass rush, which has always been the biggest problem, isn’t going to get substantially better. The prayer of catching lightning in a bottle with Vic Beasley is long gone. The hope that Jadeveon Clowney would be back for a playoff push is gone. That leaves you with just the guys that we have seen for the last two weeks. What we have learned about them is that they just aren’t good enough to really effect a good passing game.

Last year we saw Dean Pees take virtually the same group and at least manufacture enough pressure to make quarterbacks mildly uncomfortable at times. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is a heck of a lot more than this group is doing this year. Can Mike Vrabel and Shane Bowen figure out how to do that with this group? I guess it is possible, but the first 12 weeks of the season say otherwise.

It really sucks that the defense has played out this way in a year where the Titans offense is good enough to carry the team to a Super Bowl.