Titans Exploiting the Numbers

Appears "smashmouth" is working:

As long as Tennessee isn't out-manned in the trenches, like some spread teams at the college level struggle with, they should be able to continue running their offense—which has fronted a 30-17 lead against Miami and a 28-13 lead against Cleveland— against anyone in the NFL. With their running game, which may only be second to Dallas', it seems unlikely that a front seven can keep up with this squad for 60 minutes at the line of scrimmage.

 

I am certainly no coach, and there are people on this board better than me, but reading that makes me believe a lot of us aren't qualified to be yelling "Fire anyone"....lol. It's amazing the stress we put on a defense with our offense if things are going right.

 

Out-Manned or out numbered, the offense from Under Center favors the run heavily. We saw the browns stack up against us and force us to use Mariota in ways we arnt yet most comfortable with. UC drops and throws.

We only had 2 straight drop backs against Miami all game vs 2 drop backs in the first two drives against a browns defense that was more suited to stop us.

These plays have Mariota holding the ball longer than we like to see. A nessecary evil given we have to keep the defense honest whenever we go UC. We need to become a bit more creative with these looks tho.

Getting Henry more involved from the gun seems like an essential evolution as well. Murray is at home in classic power scheme from UC, he's less effective in the zone runs or runs from gun in general though. He tends to skate to the C gap too often for no reason other than he doesn't have the feel for those runs.

 

You would think that running out of the gun would be like the old "sprint draw" and you get a good look at where the holes are, but you are correct, he missed a nice cut to the right yesterday and went left. He would have clipped off a nice run.

Henry would be great that way. He has good vision and cutback ability, but he has to do it in space.

 

I've got no problem with this 'smashmouth' approach, as long as it doesn't seem to interfere with Mariota's growth. Lately, it looks like it hasn't.

 

Thanks Jeff good read.

 

Pretty sizable difference from week 1 to now. The RPOs we are excited about have only been alive the last two weeks

 

Play calling has been noticeably better, and we have even gotten better play from our WRs, which I is was pretty down on.

I know it is 'taboo' to give Robowski and Mularkey any credit, but they've put together some good games the past two weeks.