This Could Be A Tough One…
This Sunday the Titans have their first home game of the year against the ever so unkind, Ravens. I’m not gonna lie, this could be a painful one. The Ravens destroyed the Steelers with gusto. The Steelers suffered seven turnovers which led to a lopsided score of 35-7 in favor of the Ravens. Titans will have their work cut out for them going against one of the meanest defenses in the league. Once you add in the fact that this is also a heated rivalry, things get even more interesting. I take a look at what will be the key factors in deciding who is the victor in this game after the jump.
The Ravens made have destroyed the Steelers, but if you think about it, it wasn’t as impressive as the numbers made it look. The Ravens were playing against one of the most hot/cold quarterbacks in the league in Ben Roethlisberger. He was responsible for 5 of the 7 turnovers that day, tossing up 3 interceptions and 2 fumbles. Roethlisberger has been known to try and extend the play too long at times and is, what I consider, one of the more overrated quarterbacks in the NFL. With that in mind, I think that it’s amazing the Ravens only scored 35 points. I’d give that to the fact that the Steelers have one of the more impressive defensive units in the NFL.
Last week we saw a somewhat sloppy looking Titans team. They can’t be looking like that again if they want to come away with the win on Sunday.
The defense can’t start flat footed like they did against the Jaguars. The d-line has to show up in a big way. They can’t allow Ray Rice to run over them like the Steelers did. They can’t let Flacco get comfortable in the pocket. The more time he has, the more likely it is that one of his receivers breaks free from coverage. I expect Gray will be using some blitz packages to try and address that.
The offense was miserable for the first half of the game last week and hopefully that’s something that has been addressed over this past week in practice. The o-line will need to do a much better job of blocking than they did last week. This game will be hinging on how well they play. Chris Johnson couldn’t find space to run last week and Hasselbeck was under more pressure than he’d seen all preseason. The line really has to pull it together for this team to be competitive.
It could be a really great game tomorrow… Or it could be really terrible.
Let’s hope for the best.