PFF has a strong suggestion for Tennessee Titans in free agency
By Will Lomas
The Tennessee Titans are in a bizarre spot when you look at what this team is going to be for the rest of 2022 and what they want to be in 2023.
There will be plenty of time to talk about offseason moves when the season is over and judging by the product they have put on the field lately it seems like the end of the season is coming quicker than Mike Vrabel and company would like to believe.
Still, over the next month and leading into the offseason there is this narrative that the next GM is going to have to make some really tough decisions.
While there will be some difficult calls to make in terms of potential cuts or trades, the actual free agents that the Tennessee Titans could lose aren’t really a concern.
To show you what I’m talking about, PFF has an article out now with a graph that shows the WAR of the collective free agent class for each team compared to how many collective snaps those impending free agents have played. They get into more detail later in the article and have graphs for the teams’ offensive free agents specifically, and that is the point of this article today.
A quick look at that article shows you that the majority of the Tennessee Titans’ impending free agents probably won’t even get an offer from the team.
The Tennessee Titans 300 snap club
According to an article from Benjamin Solak, the Tennessee Titans have 25 players that have played more than 300 snaps this season, and 18 of those players are going to be free agents this offseason.
With so many players on I.R. or perpetually injured, most Titans fans might not be able to name all of these impending free agents on the offensive side. So here they are in order of how many snaps they have played:
-Aaron Brewer, iOL (RFA)
-Dennis Daley, “OT”
-Nate Davis, RG
-Nick Westbrook-Ikhine, WR (RFA)
-Geoff Swaim, TE
-Austin Hooper, TE
I think fans will be more than happy to see nearly everyone from that list gone. The obvious exceptions would be Nate Davis and Austin Hooper.
Things get a little more complicated on defense where the Titans need to figure out what to do with David Long Jr. and Teair Tart, but it is pretty cut and dry for the offense.
Given that most of their free agents this offseason are players who were brought in due to injury to form patchwork offenses and defenses from week to week, it won’t hurt the Titans to let the bulk of their free agents walk.
By the end of the season injuries will probably force the Tennessee Titans to play nearly 90 players, but in a world where everyone is healthy the core of this roster is mostly set.
Despite the rhetoric going on right now about how “there are going to be so many decisions for the next GM to make, more than we have seen in a decade” it won’t take a good GM more than a few days to figure out what most of us have known all along.
The problem with the Titans has never been the talent on the roster, it has been the historic number of injuries and the complete lack of understanding of how to use the talent they had once Arthur Smith was gone.