Countdown to Kickoff: 31 Days
The countdown to kickoff continues.
The Tennessee Titans will open the 2020 regular season Sept. 14 at Denver. That is 31 days away. So, today we look at one way the number 31 figures into the team’s recent history.
Part of what it took for Ryan Tannehill to win the NFL’s Comeback Player of the Year award for 2019 was the ability to get back up after a sack.
The Tennessee Titans quarterback set numerous career-highs and led the league in a couple notable passing categories despite the fact that he was sacked 31 times last season.
That number did not represent a career high. Not even close, in fact, because for the first six weeks he was the backup to Marcus Mariota and only dropped back a limited number of times.
However, in terms of the frequency that opposing pass rushers got to Tannehill, he rarely has had it worse. His sack percentage of 9.8 was the highest among all NFL quarterbacks who started at least 10 games in 2019. Second on that list was Carolina’s Kyle Allen at 8.6 percent followed by Seattle’s Russell Wilson at 8.5 percent.
That figure meant that Tannehill ended up on the ground nearly one out of every 10 times he dropped back and expected to throw, and it marked two years in a row that he led the league in that regard.
Actually, he tied for first in 2018 with Mariota. Both went down an astonishing 11.3 percent of the time that season (more than once every 10 drop-backs). In Mariota’s case, that represented the worst any Titans quarterback (1999-present) ever has had it – at least those that started at least 10 games. By comparison, Steve McNair’s worst during his time with Tennessee was 7.9. Jake Locker’s was 7.4 and Vince Young’s was 6.5.
Yet things could have been worse. And they were for Mariota, who threw just one pass in the final 11 weeks. He had a whopping 13.5 sack percentage in 2019 before Tannehill took his spot – and a significant number of hits.
