The Titans’ next biggest playoff challenge is trying to keep pace with the Chiefs

The Titans have made a statement in the 2020 NFL playoffs. They aren’t the same “just good enough” team that has defined their recent past.

After finishing with nine wins in each of the last four seasons, Tennessee has escaped this purgatory by breaking through to the AFC Championship Game for the first time since January 2003. In its wake were the defending Super Bowl champions (New England) and the team with the best record in the NFL (Baltimore).

The source of this surge? A handful of unlikely sources. Ryan Tannehill went from Dolphins castoff to the league’s most efficient quarterback after replacing Marcus Mariota. Derrick Henry showed the value of a high-usage, run-first tailback in an era that has increasingly turned to running back platoons and passing games. Thirteen players stepped up to catch touchdown passes, including two different offensive linemen.

That’s helped make field goals nearly obsolete. In Tannehill’s 12 starts (including the playoffs), the Titans have scored 45 touchdowns and made only four field goals. As those numbers suggest, this team has been one of the most explosive — and fun — franchises in the NFL.

The Titans face another massive challenge when they’ll hit the road once more to face an AFC juggernaut. Tennessee will take on the Chiefs, who turned a 24-0 deficit into a 51-31 win in the Divisional Round. That means Mike Vrabel’s team may need to empty its gas tank to outrace Kansas City — and his 2019 results suggests that could be enough to get the Titans to the Super Bowl.

The biggest concern the Titans will face in Kansas City is the distinct chance that even a string of long, grinding scoring drives could still leave them playing catch-up. That’s thanks to a Chiefs offense that can score a handful of touchdowns in mere minutes of game time (as the Texans found out). If that happens, Tennessee may not be able to rely on its clock-draining running game to mount a comeback attempt.

This team’s playoff identity has rested on Henry’s ability to turn tiny creases into explosive gains. Although he’s run the ball on 64 of his team’s plays this postseason, shrugging off the Tennessee passing game is a knee-jerk reaction. Tannehill may have only thrown for 160 yards in his first two playoff games (ever. Thanks, Dolphins!), but he emerged as one of the league’s most efficient quarterbacks through the back end of the 2019 regular season.

Here’s how Tannehill, 9-3 as a starter with the Titans if you include his playoff wins, ranked among the top passers in the regular season.

Holy crap! And he did this all while throwing to:

Tannehill hasn’t thrown the ball much in the postseason so far. His attempts per game have dropped from 27 in his regular season starts to 14.5 in the playoffs. The Titans’ passing decline has come because they haven’t needed to throw the ball much. Tennessee led for nearly 49 minutes of their Divisional Round win over the Ravens — a span that saw Tannehill drop back to pass only nine times.

For comparison, he’d attempted six dropbacks in the 11+ minutes the game was tied at 0-0. He also commanded an offense that led for more than 36 minutes in New England a week before.

With Henry ripping off solid gains on first and second down, the Titans have faced an average third-down distance of just 5.7 yards — the shortest to-go number of any team remaining in the playoffs. That’s helped sustain demoralizing drives. Even though Tannehill is just 5 of 12 on those money downs, his team has converted 13 fo its 25 third downs and scored four touchdowns in the process. Tennessee is set up to move the chains with or without a big passing performance from its quarterback.

Which brings us to ...

Tannehill’s rise has freed up space for Henry to destroy defenses.

Henry averaged 18.8 carries per game and 3.7 yards per rush in Tennessee’s 2-4 start under Mariota. After Tannehill took over, those numbers rose to 23.1 carries each week and 5.9 yards per touch, playoffs included. A late bye and a rest day in Week 16 gave Henry a little extra time off toward the end of the season, and there were still only four running backs in the NFL who ran for even half as many yards as he did after Week 10.

Henry has been downright historic in a series of win-or-go-home games, too. Here’s what he’s done since Week 17, which punched the Titans playoff ticket:

Those are ridiculous numbers. In his three biggest games of the season, Henry is averaging as many yards per carry (6.1) as Mitchell Trubisky averaged each time he threw a pass in 2019.

Henry has been able to carry the Tennessee offense into the AFC title game with a bang-up Earl Campbell impression, even if there isn’t much room now for tailbacks to average 20+ carries per game without adding value as a receiver. The bulk of the league’s most-utilized runners (seven of the top 11) missed out on the playoffs entirely this year. Even so, Henry’s been the exception to that rule, and the Titans are reaping the benefits.

The biggest reason the Titans may not have stepped inside the Super Bowl circle of trust is Tannehill, who has spent 2019 trying to wash seven years of mediocrity from his soul. There are some reasons to think he may not yet have put his former self firmly in his rear view.

While he recorded a steady 3:1 touchdown-to-interception ratio in his first two games of 2020, let’s not forget that one of those scores was effectively the greatest catch of the decade to date:

There’s also the issue of Tannehill’s protection, which has been a major problem. He was sacked on more than nine percent of his dropbacks as Tennessee gave up the worst sack rate in the NFL. That’s going to have Chiefs pass rushers Frank Clark and, if healthy, Chris Jones, salivating (let alone guys like Nick Bosa, Arik Armstead, Dee Ford, or Preston Smith and Za’Darius Smith, who could be waiting in a potential Super Bowl showdown).

Despite that, Tannehill still managed to put nearly 75 percent of his passes on target — the second-best rate in the league. That’s been a boon for his aforementioned cast of receivers. Brown’s been the biggest beneficiary.

In Tannehill’s 10 regular season starts, Brown averaged 3.8 catches for 77.8 yards per game and an absurd 20.5 yards per catch. That production hasn’t held in in the postseason, however; he has just two catches for 13 yards over his first two playoff games. That may need to change if the Titans are going to outgun Kansas City.

But there’s still so much to like about what Tannehill has brought to the Titans’ passing game. His ability to spread the ball out to a host of receivers has erased concerns about Tennessee’s lack of star power behind Henry. And even if Smith’s aforementioned catch was borderline miraculous, that third-down pass was right where it needed to be: in the un-interceptable square foot of space available for the tight end to turn a field goal attempt into a touchdown.

There’s a good chance the Titans can keep this up in Kansas City. Tannehill threw for 9.5 yards per pass and two touchdowns the first time these teams met. Henry ran for 188 yards and scored his team’s other two offensive touchdowns in that 35-32 win. There were a lot of issues that kept the Chiefs from following through as five-point road favorites that day — special teams miscues and Patrick Mahomes’ first game back from his knee injury foremost among them.

Still, the Chiefs haven’t lost since getting upstaged by Tannehill back in November. In the seven games since, they’ve held opponents to just 14.3 points per game and balanced that off with Mahomes’ always-explosive passing game.

Even so, the Titans will take on a defense that ranked sixth in defensive efficiency against the pass and just 29th against the run, which means we could see Henry become the first player in NFL history to record 180+ yards in four straight games. The Chiefs may have to load up the box in an effort to stop him — but if that effort comes at the expense of their secondary, it could be just the platform Tannehill needs to finally prove himself as a playoff passer.

Someone’s hot streak is going to end in Kansas City Sunday, either way.