Tennessee Titans fans correctly have a lot of contempt for the franchise right now. Everyone can admit this team needed a chance to catch its breath. The Week 10 bye provided an opportunity to reset.
After more than a month of terrible play, the team fired Brian Callahan and started looking toward the future. In the meantime, interim coach Mike McCoy has done his best to keep this team afloat while also dealing with players like Jeffery Simmons and Calvin Ridley missing multiple games.
With a chance to step back and evaluate during the bye week, McCoy and his offensive staff should have come to one definitive conclusion. This team couldn't run a successful screen if their season depended on it, and they need to remove it from the playbook completely.
Titans need to eliminate failed screen plays coming out of Week 10 bye
Sure, the plays out of the wildcat formation are the most recent idoicy on the minds of Titans fans, but the screen game has been the most consistently frustrating part of the team's playbook since Week 1. Penalties and poor execution have routinely doomed nearly every screen the Titans have run this season.
Whether they call them "run solutions" or something else, the quick screens have killed the momentum created by the offense whenever they have been called. Whether the play gets blown up, a lineman goes downfield illegally, or there is offensive pass interference, the play is nearly guaranteed to lose yards and to hurt the offense.
Instead of calling any of those plays ever again, the Titans coaching staff should consider more play-action passes. Most of Cam Ward's successful plays have come from play-action concepts, and both play-action passes and screens serve functionally the same purpose.
If the concern is that the defense is crowding the box or coming up too aggressively to stop the run, screens and play-action passes take advantage of that aggression. If one type of play (screens) is killing you and the other is leading to explosive plays and touchdowns (play-action), then the conclusion should be straightforward.
This coaching staff needs to remember that their sole job is to help Ward (and to a lesser extent, this whole rookie class) develop. With just the small change of eliminating the handful of screen passes per game and replacing them with play-action passes, the Titans could make life easier for Ward and create a more fun and explosive offense.