Tennessee Titans copied NFL's best rebuild stories in 1 crucial way, and it should pay off

Let's play a quick game: Guess which of these four stat lines describes the 2023 Tennessee Titans' pass defense.

1. 241.2 passing yards allowed per game (19th in NFL), 7.1 yards allowed per attempt (22nd), 32 passing TDs allowed (26th)
2. 245.8 passing yards allowed per game (30th), 7.5 yards allowed per attempt (31st), 26 passing TDs allowed (23rd)
3. 227.4 passing yards allowed per game (18th), 6.7 yards allowed per attempt (23rd), 20 passing TDs allowed (8th)
4. 238.9 passing yards allowed per game (18th), 7.1 yards allowed per attempt (22nd), 35 passing TDs allowed (30th)

Last year's Titans secondary was no good. It's why Kristian Fulton and Sean Murphy-Bunting are gone, why general manager Ran Carthon spent more than $100 million to add cornerbacks L'Jarius Sneed and Chidobe Awuzie in the spring and why coach Brian Callahan hired secondary expert Dennard Wilson as defensive coordinator.

So it might come as some surprise that the Titans are Team 3 in the exercise above, clearly the best option listed. The other options were 2019 Washington (Team 4), 2020 Cincinnati (Team 1) and 2022 Detroit (Team 2).

Why the comparison? Those Washington, Cincinnati and Detroit squads went 16-32-1 and spent their offseasons fixing their broken secondaries. Washington signed Kendall Fuller and Ronald Darby. Cincinnati added Mike Hilton and Awuzie. Detroit brought in Cameron Sutton and C.J. Gardner-Johnson and drafted Brian Branch. All three teams won their division the following fall, with Detroit making the NFC Championship game and Cincinnati making the Super Bowl.

Chatter about the Titans' offensive transformation has dominated the offseason. But the blueprints the team is following to rebuild its cornerback room are most encouraging for the immediate future.

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Good cornerback play is, both anecdotally and logically, a shortcut to success.

"It’s shutting down one side of the field," former All-Pro Titans cornerback Samari Rolle told The Tennessean. "Or not completely shutting it down, but having it under control. That’s a great confidence booster for everyone. When you don’t really have to worry about one side of the field, there’s so many other things you can do imagination-wise, fundamentally-wise."

NFL corners, L'Jarius Sneed, expectations and the Tennessee Titans

The teams with the top-10 quarterbacks by passer rating in 2023 won an average of 10.5 games. The teams with the top-10 cornerbacks by passer rating against won an average of . . . 10.5 games.

Yes, this is a bit of an outlier. But having a top-10 cornerback by passer rating when targeted has still equaled 9.7 wins per year since 2019. Teams with bottom-10 cornerbacks in the same span have averaged just 7.2 wins per year.

In other words replacing a player like Fulton (the NFL's third-worst CB by passer rating against in 2023) with a player like Sneed (the NFL's fifth-best CB by rating in 2023) is a 2.5-win swing.

Expectations on Sneed will be enormous. He wasn't just one of the NFL's best cover corners last season, he's also the ideal player stylistically for Wilson's aggressive, attacking approach to defensive back play. The Titans made Sneed the sixth-richest cornerback in the NFL, a mantle carrying immense responsibility and attention.

"You don’t bring in somebody for all that money and just stick him on one side," Rolle said. "I think if you’ve already got the reputation, (the expectations) are no big deal. It’s just being who you are. But if you don’t have the reputation or you’ve got different expectations now being thrown at you, it can either humble you or you can excel and accept the challenge. There’s no in-between. It’s either up or down."

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Fluctuation feels inevitable for even the best cornerbacks. Only three corners have finished first-team All-Pro in back-to-back seasons in the past decade. Just 32% of cornerbacks who have finished top-10 in a season between 2014 and 2023 appeared on more than one top-10 list, compared to 51% of quarterbacks and 39% of receivers. Awuzie's passer rating against has fluctuated an average of 37.8 points per year every season since 2019, and Titans slot corner Roger McCreary's rating when targeted shifted by 26.5 points from Year 1 to Year 2.

Sneed's fluctuations, at least, have been linear. He went from allowing 7.8 yards per target with a 102.2 rating against in 2021 to 6.2 yards per target with an 89.2 rating against in 2022 to 5 yards per target with a 55.9 rating against in 2023.

As long as that trend continues, the Titans have the kind of half-the-field-shutter-downer Rolle talks about as crucial for a team's success.

"Just play as well as he did last year and he’ll be fine," Rolle said.

Nick Suss is the Titans beat writer for The Tennessean. Contact Nick atnsuss@gannett.com. Follow Nick on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, @nicksuss.