Why Titans Need to Get Younger on Offense

A Football Outsiders stat reveals that few teams in the last 16 years got so many snaps from older players such as Ryan Tannehill, Rodger Saffold and Ben Jones.
Christopher Hanewinckel/USA Today Sports
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Age is just a number. The same is true of snap counts.

But the latter can add up in a way that makes a team look older than the actual age of its players.

In that way, the Tennessee Titans had a historically old offense in 2021. According to Football Outsiders’ snap-weighted age (SWA) metric, the Titans had the second-oldest offense in the NFL last season at 28.4 years. The only older unit (offense or defense) was the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ offense, which had a figure skewed by ageless quarterback Tom Brady.

Football Outsiders has calculated the number annually since 2006, and Tennessee’s figure ranks 32nd all-time.

SWA comes from the age of each player weighted by the number of snaps they played in a particular season. Five of Tennessee’s top six in offensive snaps played in 2021 were 30 or older, center Ben Jones (1,159 snaps), right tackle David Quessenbery (1,083 snaps), quarterback Ryan Tannehill (1,068 snaps), left guard Rodger Saffold (852 snaps) and left tackle Taylor Lewan (845 snaps). The exception was right guard Nate Davis (850 snaps).

From Football Outsiders:

Ryan Tannehill is no Brady, but he was still 33 years old last season, and four of the linemen were thirtysomethings as well. That should change for 2022; it looks like David Quessenberry will not be re-signed, and Rodger Saffold went to Buffalo. A youth movement was definitely needed along that line, as all that age and experience still led them to being just 16th in adjusted line yards and 26th in adjusted sack rate in 2021.

Based on SWA, only the San Francisco 49ers had an older offensive line.

Jones (32 years old) and Lewan (30) will be back to help protect Tannehill this season. However, Aaron Brewer and Dillon Radunz – both 24 year-olds – are candidates to be starters and to accumulate a lot of snaps this season.

On the flip side, the Titans’ defensive line was the youngest in the game with an SWA of 24.2, nearly a full point lower than second-place Dallas (25.1).

That saved them from a rare SWA accomplishment.

From Football Outsiders:

No one was older than average at every position, but the Titans sure made a run for it. They were particularly old at quarterback, tight end, offensive line and on special teams, but they were saved from running the table by the youngest defensive line in football; their top four interior line players (Jeffery Simmons, Teair Tart, Naquan Jones and Larrell Murchison) were all 24 or younger.


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David Boclair
DAVID BOCLAIR

David Boclair has covered the Tennessee Titans for multiple news outlets since 1998. He is award-winning journalist who has covered a wide range of topics in Middle Tennessee as well as Dallas-Fort Worth, where he worked for three different newspapers from 1987-96. As a student journalist at Southern Methodist University he covered the NCAA's decision to impose the so-called death penalty on the school's football program.