Tennessee Titans breakdown: 3 best roles for Jadeveon Clowney

1. Strong-side EDGE

Whether you are talking about nickel package, dime package, running downs, passing downs, 4th downs, whatever Jadeveon Clowney is a dominant EDGE on the strong side and specifically the strong side.

Defenses have different keys to identify strengths, but one of the most common is the tight end. If you move your EDGE from side to side, then this means that you have one EDGE dealing with the tight end and another dealing with an offensive tackle by themselves.

Ideally, the Titans would adopt this and would start allowing Landry to play against tackles by themselves and that would leave Jadeveon Clowney to manhandle tight ends like he has done his entire career.

Against tight ends, Clowney frequently wins instantly thanks to his wingspan giving him an advantage over leaner tight ends. When he doesn’t have that advantage, he has the violence and quickness to beat them in other ways and this usually forces offenses to double team him on the outside.

At that point, you are talking about 6 players (offensive line and a tight end) blocking 4 players, and that means that you can roll with the two-man advantage in coverage or you can get creative and blitz without getting too risky in coverage.

Convincing an opposing OC that he can’t use his tight end to help block and proving it to him by having an EDGE like Clowney who can completely eliminate the advantage that you get from leaving him in, makes the offense more predictable. Predictability is death to an offense, so you can just call him the Grim Reaper.