Harold Landry is off to a great start with the Titans.
Sometimes I think that Tennessee Titans fans look around the league and see stars from other teams and don’t realize how rare it is for those players to come along.
Every year one or two of the 32 NFL teams gets a rookie that comes in and plays at a high level, and then that player is used as the standard for all rookies at that position.
For example, everyone wants a rookie EDGE to get drafted by the Tennessee Titans and become the next Jevon Kearse. The problem with that is Kearse was one of the best rookie EDGEs of all time and you only get one of those seasons every few years in the NFL.
I wanted to use this time to remind everyone that while Harold Landry isn’t Jevon Kearse, that doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be very impressed with the start of his career.
Let me walk through some of the stats that people don’t really talk about and break down just how good the former NCAA sack leader has been for Tennessee.
Keep in mind, I’m not suggesting that Landry is an all-time talent but there is a young (25 or younger) nucleus of talent on the Titans defense that includes: Landry, Rashaan Evans, Jayon Brown, Jeffery Simmons, and Adoree Jackson.
Each one of those names is getting better and better, and each one of them could take a leap towards stardom in 2020.
Let’s talk about volume and assignments
There is a lot of talk about Harold Landry playing a ton of snaps this past season, and rightfully so. Landry played the 3rd most snaps of any EDGE in the NFL and a huge chunk of that was against the run.
People tend to pigeonhole Landry as a pure upfield pass rusher, but that severely underestimates his ability to set the edge vs the run as well as his ability to anchor vs offensive tackles despite a size disadvantage.
Still, people talk about Landry’s snaps in 2019 and point to his low production numbers, but is that even really true? For his career, Landry has only started 19 games after being a rotational player for most of 2018.
Landry absolutely had a full plate in 2019, but you have to remember that he was asked to take on an entirely new role with the team and was still adjusting to that. Going from a rotational player to a starter takes time to transition and we saw that in 2018 with Rashaan Evans.
Evans went from being a rotational player to a starter during the season and he took a massive leap forward in 2019 after having an offseason to really focus on what he was going to be asked to do as a starter.
Landry had 10 sacks in the season and postseason combined as well as an uncredited sack vs Cleveland- where it was tallied as a FF by the QB behind the line of scrimmage but somehow Landry got no credit for it- but he still isn’t given the respect he has earned even by some in the fan base.
Maybe it is a better idea to look at his production compared to players with similar roles.
Win rate
How can you compare a player like Landry to someone like Cameron Wake last season who just had to play 15-20 snaps per game with his only job being to get to the QB? It doesn’t seem like a fair thing to do, so why not filter out some of those guys by taking “starts” into account?
Running it through PFR, here is a list of the Titans/Oilers of the past who have had 10+ sacks in their first two years. In parentheses I have their total number of starts which indicates if they spent time predominantly as DPRs or players asked to do more:
1. Jevon Kearse: 26 sacks (32 starts)
2. Harold Landry: 13.5 (19)
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3. Jacob Ford: 12.5 (3)
4. Anthony Cook: 12 (15)
5. Carlos Hall: 11 (17)
6. Karl Klug: 10.5 (2)
7. Travis LaBoy: 10 (9)
So even among all the players throughout Titans and Oilers history, only those seven started their careers with more sacks and only Carlos Hall and Jevon Kearse started more than half of those games.
Sacks and TFL per start
That is just in the first two seasons of their careers. To give a better look at the bigger picture here and where Landry’s 2019 season stands, I am going to try to contextualize his impact by showing sacks per start and TFL’s per start.
What I hope this shows is how Landry stacks up to his fellow EDGEs around the NFL that are part of this next wave of talent. But, to limit it to just sacks wouldn’t be fair because again, the more you are asked to do for a team the harder it is to pin your ears back on third downs effectively.
From that 2018 draft class, here are the EDGEs who have had at least 10 sacks in their career and then sorted by the percent of games they have started vs how many they have appeared in:
Bradley Chubb*: Stared 100% of his games, 13 sacks (0.65 sacks per start), 19 TFLs (0.95 TFLs per game)
Harold Landry: Started 61% of his games, 13.5 sacks (0.71 sacks per start), 17 TFLs (0.89 TFLs per game)
Marcus Davenport: Started 50% of his games, 10.5 sacks (0.81 sacks per start), 11 TFLs (0.85 TFLs per start)
Sam Hubbard: Started 48 % of his games,14.5 sacks (0.97 sacks per start), 17 TFLs (1.13 TFLs per start)
*Chubb missed most of 2019 with an injury so his sample size is smaller
What I hope that shows is that even with someone like Bradley Chubb who was a stud as a rookie, more snaps and starts means less production per start as a pass rusher. On the opposite end of the spectrum, it usually gives you more of an opportunity to make TFLs in the run game.
Landry has proven to be one of the most reliable young EDGEs from that draft class and his production as a pass rusher and in the run game is right on target with the top players from his class.
Given more time and more help around him, those numbers should only increase going forward.