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Titans 2012 Third Downs - Drive Killing


Jamalisms

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Any idea how this stacks up against the rest of the league?

What's interesting is that despite all these problems (which seem glaring to me), we still rank in the top 15 in third down conversion rate.

No idea. My first idea was a length/conversion/frequency comparison between the Titans and NFL after Tom linked me to a full NFL play by play for all teams... but I started finding garble in that document because they used CBS (or ESPN?) histories instead of NFL.com. There is a Bears game on CBS that has all sorts of duplicate and/or missing plays, for instance... and that ended up in the document which throws the whole thing off.

I got tired of cleaning that up and had already done the Titans one myself, so I decided to do this article on a more detailed level to look at pass v run on the downs that led up to third downs. I'll probably circle back eventually.

ESPN has some good split stats by down and distance. I looked at those earlier in the year and Locker was pretty good on the longer third downs as compared to shorter ones. Hass was even better on almost every split... it could be the Titans had a lot of long downs but somehow converted a decent enough share of them to get the rate up a bit.

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According to official NFL statistics the Titans offense faced two-hundred and seventeen third downs over the course of the 2012 season. Of these, they converted eighty-three times (38%). Not included

@TampaTitan:

YPA per failed set of downs will always be low for the passing game, since an incompletion equals 0 yards. On third down the coaches trusted the passing game much more than the running game: 195 p

No idea. My first idea was a length/conversion/frequency comparison between the Titans and NFL after Tom linked me to a full NFL play by play for all teams... but I started finding garble in that document because they used CBS (or ESPN?) histories instead of NFL.com. There is a Bears game on CBS that has all sorts of duplicate and/or missing plays, for instance... and that ended up in the document which throws the whole thing off.

I got tired of cleaning that up and had already done the Titans one myself, so I decided to do this article on a more detailed level to look at pass v run on the downs that led up to third downs. I'll probably circle back eventually.

ESPN has some good split stats by down and distance. I looked at those earlier in the year and Locker was pretty good on the longer third downs as compared to shorter ones. Hass was even better on almost every split... it could be the Titans had a lot of long downs but somehow converted a decent enough share of them to get the rate up a bit.

 

What was nines doing in that document?

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Talk about missing the forest for the trees. After the way CJ started this year you're arguing we should have passed LESS?

I'm not sure why this would need explained, but this has zero to do with play calling and everything to do with actual results.  It is a backward-looking descriptive look at things, not a forward looking projection.  If there were a statement made it would be along the lines of "we should have passed BETTER."

 

We should have run better as well and I'd respectfully suggest that you reset your filter to factory settings to consider the data for what it is while keeping in mind the inter-relatedness of pass/run success noted in the article.

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The running game was either putting the team in drive killing situations or was irrelevant. Either way you read those numbers CJ's not living up to his playmaker billing.

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Or Wes Welker. Or Danny Amendola. In the long run of course it's about drafting and Locker, but even just for 2013 someone could have grown a pair.

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The fact this team signed Greene to big money for a back up RB and the fact they offered Welker 7 mill a year tells you the front office understands they have problems on 3rd down.

 

Greene and Welker's strengths are converting 3rd downs

 

The problem is those signings do nothing to help how bad CJ is on 1st down. CJ was the worst RB in the league on 1st down in 2011 and has to be among the worst in 2012.

 

The better a team does on 1st down the easier the 3rd down conversions are.

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What we need is a passing game that can consistently convert 3rd and long.

 

This is actually what McNair did from 01-03. George was as bad and probably worse than what CJ is now but McNair would consistently keep drives  alive and it helped people overlook how badly George was playing.

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The fact this team signed Greene to big money for a back up RB and the fact they offered Welker 7 mill a year tells you the front office understands they have problems on 3rd down.

 

Greene and Welker's strengths are converting 3rd downs

 

The problem is those signings do nothing to help how bad CJ is on 1st down. CJ was the worst RB in the league on 1st down in 2011 and has to be among the worst in 2012.

 

The better a team does on 1st down the easier the 3rd down conversions are.

 

But the biggest signing and cap commitment , Levitre, should help, yes?

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@TampaTitan:

  • Adrian Peterson ran for 1,005 yards on just 29 carries in 2012.
  • Adrian Peterson ran for just over half of his yards on just over 9% of his carries.
  • Adrian Peterson ran for 466 yards on his best seven carries.
  • Adrian Peterson ran for 466 yards on his worst 260 carries.
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That post is way too long for me to handle but one of the odd things about Palmer was he would never run it on 3rd down. 

 

Whenever the other team got into between 3rd and 2 - 3rd and 4 a run on us was easy money. But we never did it to the other guys. In that range there should be some concern for the run but anyone who would have scouted us would have never respected it. I can;t remember if Loggains ever ran it there in that situation. 

 

We seemed to go backwards on 3rd down as the season went on and it seemed to me it was mostly about 3 things:

 

A) Locker not being as good as Hass on 3rd down

 

B) Terrible play calling by Loggains even worse than Palmer

 

c) Losing Cook

 

It also didn't help that CJ's running style put us in worse down and distance situations than we should have been. 

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That post is way too long for me to handle

Then to sum it up, if you look at failed 3rd down conversions: On those sets of downs the Titans passed more often than they ran on the first down... and averaged less per pass than per run... and came up with no gain or a loss on a higher percent of attempts when passing. They also passed more often than they ran on second down... and averaged less per pass than per run... and came up with no gain or a loss on a higher percent of attempts when passing.

If one is trying to determine what contributed most to failed third down conversions, it was failures passing on first and second down... not rushing.

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