NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Bereft of a star pass rusher, the Titans are emphasizing what they can do as a collective.
Last season’s 32 sacks tied for 29th in the NFL. The team moved on from pricey Harold Landry who led the team with nine, but had 22.5 in the two seasons before that, when he still wasn't among the NFL's best. The effort to replace him didn’t produce a proven QB-hunter.
Incoming are second-round pick Femi Oladejo, who only converted into an edge rusher in his final season at UCLA; Dre’Mont Jones, who’s topped out at 6.5 sacks in a season twice; And streaky Arden Key, who's got 12.5 sacks in two seasons with the Titans. The depth starts with Jihad Ward (19 sacks in nine years) and moves on to Jaylen Harrell and Ali Gaye (quiet camps until Gaye's big Saturday), Titus Leo and Desmond Evans, who’s got impressive size.
The Titans count on Jeffery Simmons to have a highly productive season from the interior (he had 8.5 sacks in 2021) and T’Vondre Sweat to become more of a pass rusher.
It’s a bigger and more rugged group, but the Titans talk as if it was their intent rather than a more of a forced direction. Had a speedy, bendy edge been accessible to them, they surely would have jumped. Free agency didn’t offer one, and
they chose Cam Ward with the first pick in the draft, so Abdul Carter wasn’t an option. They were compelled to trade down in the second round to get back into the third round, missing out on the explosive Donovan Ezeiruaku out of BC (Dallas), who had 16.5 sacks last year.
Among the rushers who went after Oladejo at no. 52 who qualified as more burner/bendy: Mike Green (Baltimore) had off-field issues and Princely Umanmielen (Carolina) lasted until 77th in the third round and might be too much finesse and not enough power.
Last year amid talk of Simmons dealing with double teams, we heard about how the guy with a one-on-one had to win in the pass rush and be the one to cause the problem for the quarterback. That seems a much simpler formula than an expectation that four or five rushers will all simultaneously gain ground to collapse the pocket with a breakthrough for a sack.
"When you four-man rush, some of the things that we didn't do a good enough job of is just balancing the rush, giving quarterbacks lanes that they didn't need to have,” Brian Callahan said. “One of the things that you see too is when you're a bigger, heavier front, the idea of trying to crush the pocket and take the tackles and push them back and try to push the front so everything sort of condenses on a quarterback.
“They don't really like that from my experiences and quarterbacks don't respond well to a solid push from the interior. You can deal with edge rushers. You can help on the edge. It's hard to help (inside). Someone's going to get a one-on-one inside, and so that's kind of the key is who gets the one-on-ones and how do we win and then how do rush it together where everything's a little more coordinated from that perspective. Again, I don't know that it's going to guarantee more sacks or not, but I think we have a better feel for what we want to do with the players we have.”
I take major objection to the idea that “you can deal with edge rushers.”
The Titans don’t have quality edge rushers, so now they are dismissing their impact? Well how about the other side? How about how the Titans dealt with edge rushers like Danielle Hunter of the Texans or Will McDonald of the Jets who recorded three sacks against them in 2024, or these guys who each had two in a game: Darrell Taylor of the Bears, Bud Dupree and Tuli Tuipulotu of the Chargers, Andrew Van Ginkel and Patrick Jones of the Vikings and Will Anderson of the Texans?
You can deal with edge rushers.
Which is why the Titans spent their first-round pick on a tackle in 2024 and broke the bank for free agent Dan Moore, who gave up 12 sacks last year and go into this season with all eyes on whther the offensive line can protect Ward.
And, way to set low expectations for your edge rushers. When Jones and Oladejo and Key aren’t getting sacks, we can just refer back to that. While they are being dealt with it should come in conjunction with big numbers for Simmons and Sweat, double-digit sacks for Simmons, right?
I pushed back with the idea that a Myles Garrett is a big problem, an edge rusher any team would kill to have an who is not typically dealt with.
“Yeah, there's some of them that you can't fully deal with,” Callahan said. “They're game-wrecking style rushers. There's only a couple of those. …Well, absolutely, I'd love one. You'd love to have a Myles Garrett or a TJ Watt or those guys. Those guys are incredibly impactful players, but there's a lot of different ways and a lot different styles of player in the league that rush the passer. So we like where we're at. Certainly, if you had a No. 1 overall pick pass rusher, that's great too. But you can help on the edges a little more than you can help necessarily inside. You can chip, you can put backs on them. There’s always ways to try to neutralize a great player.
Quarterbacks feel a bit better about pressure from the edges and really tend to dislike it up the middle, Callahan said. The Titans want to try to "collapse the whole thing in front of them."
Anyone likes the idea of disrupting the quarterback up the middle, getting him off his spot. ANd Callahan isn’t going to say they are dissatisfied with their personnel on the edge.
He’s said they missed 20 sacks last year. Tighten up and they can add from that. But we have no idea what the average team misses in a season, or how many sacks the Titans missed on the same play where only one was available. (Zach Lyons said on the practice sideline he was going to work on this, so maybe we will have some cool data to refer to soon.)
The best potential out of what the Titans have now is that these bigger, more rugged guys help the Titans get back to stopping the run. That forces more clear passing downs, creating more rush chances. The back end of the defense could be a strength and if an opponent is in something worse than last year’s third-and-6.59 yards to go, the sack opportunities rise.
It’s hard to be anti-coordination or anti-plan. I hope it helps them be more effective and maximize what they have. But 
the pass rush is where this team is most lacking and is going to have to be the most creative to get results.
And in a league where there are plenty of impactful rushers, I think it’s a bit disingenuous for the organization to suggest not having strength on the edge isn’t so bad because edges can be defused, when we’ve been watching opposing edges thrive.
“We have to effect the quarterback,” Dennard Wilson said. “So we can’t have rush lanes when they drop back. Them working together is, we don’t allow the quarterback to split the hash, we understand where teams are sliding, who has the one-on-one matchup, who had to split it, and the D-ends not really throwing fastballs high and wide to create step-up lanes.
“So we’re restricting the pocket, we’re trying to make the quarterback throw out of a phone booth with the blitzes and the looks. We can force guys to slide to certain individuals to get the favorable matchup we want. It’s just been a group thing, all of them rushing as one and believing in it and I think it’s going to do well for us this year.”