I wrote last week about the five NFL teams I expect to improve in 2021. Let's go in the opposite direction and discuss the five teams I expect to decline this season. This is the fifth edition of this column, and over the past four, I've nominated 20 teams to decline. Sixteen of those teams have failed to match their record from the prior year. Three have matched their records, while one managed to improve by a single game. The average team of the 20 has dropped off by 3.4 wins from its record the previous season.
The 2020 version of this column, though, was the least accurate of the bunch. The Packers maintained their 13-3 record from 2019, while the Seahawks became the first team to improve, going from 11-5 to 12-4. On the other hand, the Saints declined by a win from 13-3 to 12-4, while the wheels came off the wagons for the Texans, who dropped from 10-6 to 4-12.
This season, I'm nominating five teams to take at least a small step backward in 2021. I expect several of them to still be playoff contenders and even think one of them will win the Super Bowl. Keep in mind that the NFL is moving to a 17th game and each team is getting an extra chance to win during the 2021 season, so to defy the odds, they'll need to win one more game than they did last season. Let's start with a team that felt unbeatable until the final game of the 2020 campaign:
Jump to a team:
Bills | Browns
Chiefs | Packers | Titans
Kansas City Chiefs (14-2)
2020 point differential: plus-111
Pythagorean expectation: 10.5 wins
Record in games decided by seven points or fewer: 8-0
FPI projected strength of schedule: 12th easiest
Before we even start, let's be clear: Barring a serious injury to Patrick Mahomes, the Chiefs are going to be very good this season. FPI projects them as the favorites to win the Super Bowl, and they will be my pick, too. Nobody is suggesting they are going to suddenly drop to 8-9 or forget how to score tons of points. No team in the NFL has a higher floor or a higher ceiling heading into 2021.
With that being said, Kansas City is going to need to win 15 out of 17 games to top its 2020 record. That's a tall order for any team, even one with the sort of track record this one has with Mahomes under center. The Chiefs were actually 14-1 with Mahomes a year ago before losing a meaningless game in Week 17 with Chad Henne as their starter. Mahomes has gone 38-8 as an NFL starter, which rates out to about 14 wins per 17 games.
So, why the pessimism? To start, they weren't as good as their 2020 record. DVOA actually ranked them as the NFL's sixth-best team, in part because they played the eighth-easiest slate of opponents. FPI ranked them as the best team through the end of the regular season, but the Chiefs didn't dominate like they had in previous years. They outscored their opponents by just under a touchdown per game, a figure that rises to 8.5 points per game if we exclude the Henne loss. That's down from 9.7 points per game over Mahomes' first two seasons as the starter in 2018 and 2019.
To get to 14-2 last season, they needed to go 8-0 in games decided by seven points or fewer. There's no track record of any team being able to sustain anything like that in close games for an extended period of time. That list includes the 2018-19 Chiefs and Mahomes, who was 9-7 in games decided by seven points or fewer before 2020. And while that list includes a couple of games in which late scores by the opposing team made the final score, Kansas City was in real danger more often than not:
In Week 2, the Chiefs faced a Chargers team forced to unexpectedly make a change at quarterback after Tyrod Taylor was injured by the team doctor. Rookie Justin Herbert & Co. led by eight points heading into the fourth quarter, only for Kansas City to score and hit a 2-pointer to tie. The Chargers then drove inside the 5-yard line but were stopped and kicked a field goal. The Chiefs kicked their own field goal to tie at the end of regulation. The Chargers then won the overtime coin toss, inexplicably punting on fourth-and-1 on their first drive. A KC drive stalled in no-man's land, but Harrison Butker hit a 58-yard field goal to win it.
Seven weeks later, the Panthers got to within two points at 33-31 with 1:53 to go and got the ball back. They also got into no-man's land, at which point they gained no yards on three plays and Joey Slye's 67-yard field goal was well wide right.
Aided by defensive penalties in Week 11, the Raiders went up 31-28 on the Chiefs with 1:43 to go. Needing one stop to sweep their longtime rivals, Las Vegas promptly allowed a 75-yard touchdown drive on seven plays.
The Broncos were within three points of the Chiefs starting the fourth quarter at 19-16 in Week 13, but the only score in the fourth quarter was a Butker field goal.
The Falcons scored a touchdown to go up 14-10 with 4:33 to go in Week 16, only to then give up their lead on a Demarcus Robinson touchdown with 1:55 to go. Matt Ryan drove the Falcons into Chiefs territory, but a would-be touchdown on a free play went off Calvin Ridley's fingertips. Younghoe Koo then missed a 39-yarder that would have sent the game into overtime, one of just two misses all season from the Pro Bowl kicker.
Nothing extraordinary happened in those games, but it's not difficult to imagine a scenario in which something breaks differently in one or two of them and the Chiefs go from 14-2 to 12-4. It might seem like Mahomes always has the answer at the end, but Kansas City lost games just like this to the Colts, Titans and even the Texans in 2019.
The reality is that just about every team that wins 14 or more games in a season needs to be a little lucky. The most Pythagorean wins we've seen from a team since 1989 was 13.8, a mark hit by four teams, most recently the 2007 Patriots. Twenty-one teams between 1989 and 2019 won 14 or more games in a season, and many of them had superstar quarterbacks, including Tom Brady, Peyton Manning and Steve Young. Those 21 teams won an average of 10 games the following season, declining by an average of 4.2 wins in the process.
The 2007 Patriots declined from 16-0 to 11-5 because they lost Brady to a torn ACL in Week 1. Mahomes was healthy during the 2020 regular season, although he did suffer a knee injury for a stretch in 2019 and had to leave KC's divisional-round win over the Browns last season. If the Chiefs were to lose Mahomes for any length of time, their chances of improving on their 14-win mark from a year ago would obviously fall drastically.
Likewise, while their offensive line shed parts before eventually collapsing in the Super Bowl, they were fortunate to have their three key defensive pieces on the field for nearly all of 2020. Tyrann Mathieu and Frank Clark played all 15 games before taking off Week 17, while Chris Jones missed just one game early in the season. On the whole, the Chiefs were the healthiest defense in football by adjusted games lost. They ranked 24th on offense, but Mahomes, Travis Kelce and Tyreek Hill were available for nearly the entire season.
If Kansas City ends up winning 15-plus games, it will be relying on key players to stay healthy, a new-look offensive line to coalesce quickly and improved play from a defense that ranked 22nd in DVOA last season. One of the few places the Chiefs were unlucky in 2020 was in the red zone on defense. They allowed 5.7 points per trip to the red zone, the worst mark in the league. Red zone performance isn't very sticky from year to year, and in 2019, they allowed just 4.4 points per red zone possession, which ranked third. They should fall somewhere in between those two extremes in 2021, which will help keep points off the board. There is also always the chance that Mahomes goes supernova and delivers a season beyond even our loftiest expectations of what a quarterback can do.
The Chiefs appearing on this list shouldn't be taken as a sign that there's something wrong with them or that there's a flaw that will keep them from being the Super Bowl favorites. It's just an acknowledgement that it is tough for any team to win as many games as it just did. No team has a better chance of winning 15 games than Andy Reid's, but the Chiefs are still not likely to do so.
Buffalo Bills (13-3)
2020 point differential: plus-126
Pythagorean expectation: 10.6 wins
Record in games decided by seven points or fewer: 4-1
FPI projected strength of schedule: Seventh easiest
After hitting the Chiefs, let's get to the team they beat in the AFC Championship Game. The Bills have seemingly done little wrong after hiring coach Sean McDermott and general manager Brandon Beane several years ago, with virtually every one of their personnel moves turning to gold. Last season saw their biggest bet pay off in full, as Josh Allen emerged as a bona fide superstar quarterback in his third season. Allen made the single biggest leap in completion percentage in modern league history between 2019 and 2020, giving Buffalo the franchise quarterback it has sought since the heyday of Jim Kelly.
I don't have any reason to think that McDermott, Beane, Allen and the rest of the roster are suddenly going to stop figuring things out, but 13-3 overstates the Bills' level of performance in 2020. They went 4-1 in one-score games, and while their lone loss was a game they nearly won (the Hail Mary game against Kyler Murray and the Cardinals), they also had a couple of close games that narrowly went their way. In Week 3, they beat the Rams on a touchdown with 15 seconds to go after a pass interference call extended the game on fourth down. In Week 8, they beat the Patriots after recovering a Cam Newton fumble inside the red zone in the final minute while the Pats were down 3.
The Bills didn't play a ton of those close games, but they also didn't blow out teams by huge margins until the final three games of the season, when they stomped the Broncos, Patriots and Dolphins by a combined 88 points. Before that, McDermott's team had gone 10-3 while outscoring teams by an average of just under four points per game, owing in part to a 42-16 loss to the Titans in Week 5. The Bills were the kings of winning games by just over a touchdown, winning six by between eight and 11 points, which tied an NFL record alongside the 2014 Cardinals. They won only those three season-enders by at least 14 points, a mark 10 other teams topped in 2020. Great teams typically blow out the competition.
As always, it's good to look at history and see how teams with this sort of gap pan out. The Bills beat their Pythagorean expectation by 2.4 wins. Thirty-six teams from 1989 through 2019 outperformed their win expectancy by somewhere between two and three wins. The following season, 24 of those 36 teams declined. Six maintained their prior record, while another six improved. The average team in the group declined by 2.7 wins and played slightly worse than what its Pythagorean expectation would have suggested. It's tough to consistently beat broader league history.
Another way to think about this is to measure how Buffalo did versus preseason expectations. According to the data at Pro Football Reference, the Bills topped their preseason over/under by an even four wins. The Dolphins and Packers were the only other teams to top their preseason projection by that sort of total. Going back through 1989 and looking at teams that beat their projection by four or more wins, you'll find 68 teams. Those teams declined by an average of 3.7 wins the following season and came up just under a full win short of their projected over/under.
Could the Bills raise their level of play even further and play something more like a 13-win team from snap to snap? I think so. It's impossible to rule out Allen getting even better after making unprecedented strides across the first three seasons of his pro career. They brought back just about every key contributor from their 2020 roster, as the only player who took at least half of the snaps on offense or defense who didn't return for 2021 is guard Brian Winters. And after ranking 14th in Adjusted Sack Rate last season, they addressed a possible position of weakness in the future by using their top two draft picks on edge rushers Greg Rousseau and Boogie Basham. The Bills might have taken over for the Saints in sporting the league's most impressive roster, and they were even able to bring back offensive coordinator Brian Daboll after expecting to lose him to a head-coaching gig.
At the same time, owing to the money Buffalo has needed to spend to lock up successful draft picks such as Allen, Tre'Davious White and Dion Dawkins, the roster is thin in other places. The offensive line depth is a concern, which is worrisome given the injury history for starters Mitch Morse and Daryl Williams. Beane hasn't made a significant addition to the secondary, leaving Levi Wallace in a competition with 2020 seventh-rounder Dane Jackson for an obvious weak cornerback spot across from White. The deepest tight end room outside of Tampa has been thinned out and will count on Dawson Knox to take major strides in Year 3 (barring a late trade for Zach Ertz). The receiving corps as a whole is shaky beyond Stefon Diggs and counting on Gabriel Davis to take a step forward while hoping Emmanuel Sanders is still a starting-caliber wideout at 34.
There's also Cole Beasley and the thorny issue of this team's attitude toward vaccinations. While Beane suggested that about 80% of his team's players are vaccinated against COVID-19, that would rank as one of the lowest in the league, given that all but four teams have reportedly topped a vaccination rate of 89% or more.
The Bills have the league's most conspicuous objector to the vaccination policy in Beasley, who was one of several players forced to miss practice for five days after being in close contact with a member of the training staff who tested positive. It's entirely possible that, as is the case for many teams, Buffalo's vaccination rate falls as players on the roster bubble are released before the season begins. Every team is susceptible to an outbreak, but the Bills are at a higher risk of having players miss practices and/or being forced to quarantine than most other teams in the league. I don't think anybody can predict how that will play in locker rooms around the league until we actually see it impact the season.
The most obvious player with the ability to impact the Bills in 2021, of course, is Allen. There's no reason to expect him to take a major step backward and turn into the guy who struggled mightily at times during his first two seasons, but even the great quarterbacks who made accuracy leaps in Allen's league gave back some of their gains the following year. Last season was the first time in Allen's life post-high school in which he was more accurate than an average passer at the college or pro level. I don't think he's about to fall below average, but he needs to be an MVP candidate again for the Bills to maintain their record from a year ago. My guess is that he's somewhere closer to very good, and that the Bills end up in the 11-win range as a result.
Cleveland Browns (11-5)
2020 point differential: minus-11
Pythagorean expectation: 7.7 wins
Record in games decided by seven points or fewer: 7-2
FPI projected strength of schedule: Fourth easiest
It's tough to pick on the Browns. No fan base has been more beleaguered or had to deal with more over the past 30 years; a steady stream of bad quarterbacks would be one thing, but losing the franchise altogether for several years puts them on their own level. The Browns are on the right path and have two of the smartest minds in the game running things in coach Kevin Stefanski and general manager Andrew Berry. I also generally liked what they did this offseason, as the organization addressed weaknesses at linebacker and safety.
I just don't think they're as far along as that 2020 record looks on paper. By just about any measure we have, the Browns squeezed more wins out of their performance than we should have expected. DVOA ranked them 18th last season, finishing just below the 4-12 Falcons. FPI had them finishing the regular season in 17th. Point differential essentially pegged them as just below a .500 team.
Think about it this way. Since 1989, there have been 91 teams that finished with a point differential between minus-25 and minus-1. The Browns were the only team in that group to win at least 11 games. Only four won 10 games, and that includes a pair that dramatically declined the following season (the 2016 Dolphins and 2019 Texans). Flip it the other way: 85 teams during that time have gone 11-5. Just two of those teams have posted a negative point differential: the 2020 Browns and the 2012 Colts, who were actually worse at minus-30.
To put that in context, let's take teams that finished with 10, 11 or 12 wins since 1989 and split them into five groups by their point differential. The 20% of teams that finished with the worst point differentials in their 10- to 12-win season -- the group that includes the Browns -- declined by an average of 2.7 wins the following season. The teams in the top 20% of point differentials also declined, but by an average of only one win per season.
Cleveland was able to outplay its point differential or underlying play-by-play level of performance by pulling out close victories. It was 7-2 in games decided by seven points or fewer, and many of those came against the league's worst teams. The Browns beat the Texans by 3 points in Week 10 and lost to the Jets by 7 (in a game in which they were without almost all of their receivers due to COVID-19 protocols) in Week 16. In Week 12, they needed to stop a 2-pointer to keep the Jags from tying a game late in the fourth quarter and then pulled the same thing off against a much better Steelers team in Week 17. In Week 11, they were up by just 2 points against the Eagles in the fourth quarter before eventually pulling away, and in Week 7 they blew a lead against the Bengals with 1:04 to go, only for Baker Mayfield to drive them downfield for a game-winning touchdown. Teams that post winning seasons by stringing together close victories against bad teams, such as the 2016 Dolphins or 2018 Cowboys, often disappoint the following season.
The biggest upgrade the Browns made after the 2019 season might have been with offensive line coach Bill Callahan, who had done wonders for Dallas and Washington in years past. The same Mayfield who looked lost and ready to bail from the pocket for most of 2019 looked secure and steady for the vast majority of 2020. This offense was dominant in the red zone, averaging 5.6 points per trip inside the 20, the third-best mark in the league. And while Callahan couldn't have made this happen, that offensive line was crucially healthy, as Cleveland's five starters were in the lineup for 73 of 80 games. Wyatt Teller was the only lineman to miss more than one regular-season start.
It will be tough for the Browns to sustain those elements of their performance. Offensive line health is incredibly important but is extremely difficult to predict or project with any sort of reliability. Red zone performance is inconsistent from year to year. Mayfield was a mess when he didn't trust his line in 2019. It feels like Stefanski and the new regime fixed his problems, but that's the same thing many people thought after Freddie Kitchens took over for Hue Jackson and helped lead Mayfield through a hot second half in 2018.
Is Mayfield another quarterback who succeeds only when he's well-protected and works with heavy doses of play-action, or is he a guy who can transcend scheme and make plays when things aren't set up for him to succeed? Basically, is he Kirk Cousins or Josh Allen? The Rams just sent two first-round picks and ate nearly $25 million in dead money because they had the former in Jared Goff and wanted someone who they think can be the latter in Matthew Stafford. Mayfield is the most exciting, promising quarterback the Browns have had in decades, but we still don't know whether he's that sort of difference-maker.
There are two reasonable arguments I can see for the Browns dramatically improving their level of play versus what we saw a year ago. One is Mayfield, who will be entering his second season in the Kubiak/Shanahan scheme Stefanski employs. We've seen other quarterbacks make major strides in their second seasons as part of this offense, with both Matt Ryan and Aaron Rodgers leveling up and winning league MVP. There's a scenario in which Mayfield makes a similar sort of leap in Year 2 and the Browns never look back.
The other possibility is that they were more impacted by COVID-19 earlier in the season than teams that didn't change their coaching staff during the 2020 offseason. The other four teams with new head coaches went a combined 24-40, including Washington, which went 7-9 and still won the NFC East. Stefanski & Co. had to conduct minicamps and install their new schemes over virtual meetings before training camp began, and it might have impacted their team's performance; the Browns were 5-3 with a point differential of minus-31 before their bye and 6-2 with a point differential of plus-20 afterward.
At the same time, fans point to endpoints like that every year, and when your underlying performance doesn't match up to your level of play, it almost always shows the following year. The Cowboys didn't suddenly learn how to win close games after they traded for Amari Cooper, even if they rolled off a bunch of narrow victories in the second half of 2018. Adam Gase didn't figure something special out about those Dolphins in 2016. The Browns have a better case than those arguments, but it's not enough to make up a 3.3-win differential between their Pythagorean expectation and win-loss record. It wouldn't shock me if they improved their level of play and still finished with a less impressive win-loss record.
Green Bay Packers (13-3)
2020 point differential: plus-140
Pythagorean expectation: 11.1 wins
Record in games decided by seven points or fewer: 3-2
FPI projected strength of schedule: Third toughest
What can I say? I'm a glutton for punishment. The Packers are on this list for the second consecutive season, although the story is different than it was a year ago. This seems like a good time to take a look back at what we saw as the problems with their 2019 formula heading into 2020 and examine what happened. Here's why they were going to regress (and what actually happened):
They didn't blow out their competition. The 2019 Packers went 13-3 but outscored their competition by just under 4 points per game. That's remarkably low for a team with as many wins as they had in 2019. The 2020 team didn't repeat that formula but instead raised its level of play significantly; Green Bay went 13-3 while outscoring its opponents by more than 9 points per game.
They needed to rely on winning the close ones. The 2019 Packers went 6-1 in games decided by seven points or fewer, which was way out of line with Aaron Rodgers' career. Their close-game performance regressed to the mean in 2020, as they went 3-2 in one-score games. It wasn't enough to slow them down, though.
They weren't likely to be as healthy, especially on defense. The 2019 Packers lost Oren Burks in the preseason and then saw their 11 expected starters miss a total of just four games. The 2020 team had more players miss meaningful time -- Kevin King and Christian Kirksey were each out for five games, while Kenny Clark missed three -- but actually finished with fewer defensive adjusted games lost than the 2019 team.
Their interception rate would decline. Green Bay's defense intercepted 3.1% of opposing passes in 2019, a remarkable figure in a league in which quarterbacks throw interceptions at historically low rates. This mark fell to 2.0% in 2020. Its turnover margin only dropped from plus-12 to plus-7, though, because it posted a league-low 11 giveaways on offense. Rodgers threw just five interceptions, which shouldn't have been a huge surprise, but this offense also fumbled just 11 times all season. Only the Colts and Jets fumbled less frequently. (This counts as the greatest success of the Adam Gase era in New York.)
They won't sweep the NFC North again. The Packers went 6-0 against the North in 2019. They didn't sweep their division rivals again in 2020, but they came awfully close (5-1).
Their red zone differential won't be as good in 2020. Here's where things went off the rails. In 2019, they outscored opposing teams by an average of 0.76 points per trip to the red zone, which was the third-largest difference in the league. It's tough to pull that off year to year; the two teams ahead of them in 2019 were the Ravens and Vikings, who outscored teams by an average of 0.25 points per red zone trip in 2020. Well, the Packers outscored opposing teams by 0.86 points per red zone trip in 2020, in part because they had what might be the greatest red zone offense in the history of football. They weren't particularly good at stopping teams in the red zone, but they scored touchdowns on 80% of their trips inside the 20, which is the best mark we have going back through at least 2001. They jumped from eighth in the league in offensive DVOA to first; the Chiefs were the only team within 9 percentage of points of Matt LaFleur's offense.
Of course, the other factor that we didn't see coming was an elevated level of play from Rodgers, whose QBR jumped from 58.0 in 2018 and 52.5 in 2019 to a league-best 84.3 in 2020. He had been between league-average and above-average by advanced stats in each of the prior five seasons before stunningly returning to an MVP level of play during his age-37 season. I would argue that the Packers didn't think Rodgers was about to win MVP given what they did with drafting Jordan Love in Round 1 last year, but when a quarterback goes from good to dominant the way Rodgers did between 2019 and 2020, it's going to mean a lot more than any number I can bring up for historical context.
With that being said ... it took Rodgers improving by 31.8 points of QBR and the Packers producing the most dominant red zone offense in decades for them to even maintain their 13-3 record from 2019. Rodgers isn't going to suddenly fall back to his 2018-19 level of play, but what happens if a guy who is turning 38 this December doesn't play at an MVP level? How will the offense be impacted if left tackle David Bakhtiari isn't ready to start the season after tearing his ACL or if star edge rusher Za'Darius Smith misses time with a back issue? There was a stronger case for the Packers to decline heading into 2020 than there is heading into 2021 -- and I'm almost excited to see how they could find a way to elude history again this upcoming season -- but they are likely to take a small step backward and finish around 11 wins.
Tennessee Titans (11-5)
2020 point differential: plus-52
Pythagorean expectation: 9.5 wins
Record in games decided by seven points or fewer: 7-2
FPI projected strength of schedule: Ninth easiest
It was a close race between the Titans and Seahawks for the final spot on this list, with Tennessee narrowly winning out. The Titans finally broke a run of four consecutive 9-7 seasons by going 11-5 last season, but their point differential suggests that they were really playing more like a nine-win team of years past. Amid the good (the blowout victory over the Bills in Week 5) and bad (double-digit losses to the Bengals in Week 8, Colts in Week 12 and Packers in Week 16), they made the playoffs by dominating in close games. They were 7-2 in those contests after going 7-6 in those same one-score games over Mike Vrabel's first two seasons at the helm.
As with the other teams on this list, there were games in which the final score wasn't representative of the performance, like when Stephen Gostkowski couldn't stop missing kicks against the Broncos in Week 1. Two late Gostkowski field goals gave the Titans narrow wins over the Jags (Week 2) and Vikings (Week 3), teams that weren't exactly stiff competition. Vrabel's team had two wild victories over the lowly Texans (Weeks 6 and 17), one of which required an A.J. Brown touchdown with four seconds left to tie and the other one a 52-yard Brown catch with 18 seconds left to set up a Sam Sloman field goal. The Titans won both of their overtime tilts against teams that were probably exhausted from tackling Derrick Henry all day.
Henry has been essential to the Tennessee attack over the past two seasons, running for 875 more yards than anybody else in the league since the start of the 2019 campaign. Those yards have required a heavy workload. He ran the ball 303 times during the 2019 regular season and then hit 378 carries last season, numbers that don't include his 101 rush attempts from the postseason.
There's no magic number for workloads in the NFL -- and Henry is built like the sort of running back who can take a pounding -- but the track record for modern running backs who get this sort of workload in a typical season is bleak. No back has been able to field 350 carries in consecutive seasons since Shaun Alexander in 2005. The best-case scenarios are backs who merely took a step backward without getting injured, such as Chris Johnson in 2010 or Adrian Peterson in 2011. Other backs suffered major declines or serious injuries. Just about everything has to go right for a player to shoulder this sort of workload, and the NFL is not a league where everything goes right year after year.
The Titans might have prepared for this in part by trading for Julio Jones, but their roster has been stretched thin by missing draft picks, especially in the first round. Jack Conklin, Corey Davis and Adoree' Jackson have left after the organization declined their fifth-year options. Isaiah Wilson, Tennessee's first-rounder in 2020, was traded after his first season, playing only four snaps for Tennessee. General manager Jon Robinson has tried to account for those departures by adding veterans such as Jones, Janoris Jenkins and Ty Sambrailo, but the latter two can't be expected to play like first-rounders at this stage of their careers, while Jones missed half of the 2020 season with injuries. Tennessee is an extremely top-heavy team, bearing plenty of similarities to the 2020 Cowboys. You saw what happened to that Dallas team when injuries found it out last September.
Those Cowboys also weren't well-coached, and the Titans have had a brain drain over the past couple of seasons. Former defensive coordinator Dean Pees retired after the 2019 season, and the defense fell from 18th to 29th in DVOA under new coordinator Shane Bowen last season. This year, they lost offensive coordinator Arthur Smith to the Falcons and replaced him with Todd Downing, who looked overmatched in his lone season as an offensive coordinator with the Raiders in 2017. Downing might look better in his second go-round as a coordinator -- and Smith wasn't exactly a high-profile candidate before excelling with the Titans -- but this is a much different staff than the one we saw on a deep playoff run in 2019.
Owing to the departure of Pees and an utterly broken pass rush, the Titans simply weren't good on defense a year ago. Signing Bud Dupree should help that problem, but they were able to get by on defense a year ago only by creating takeaways. Opposing drives ended in turnovers 13.3% of the time, which ranked seventh in the league. When a drive didn't end in a takeaway, the Titans allowed touchdowns 37.5% of the time, which ranked 31st. Great defenses can force takeaways year after year, but it's a lot tougher ask for bad defenses. Tennessee either has to improve significantly on the defensive side of the ball or expect its takeaway rate to drop in 2021.
You might be able to make the same case on the offensive side of the ball, where the Titans turned the ball over just 12 times last season. Ryan Tannehill posted a career-low interception rate of 1.5%, and the offense fell on 10 of its 15 offensive fumbles for one of the highest recovery rates in the league. It would be tough to count on either of those events to occur again.
In all, the 2020 Titans finished with a plus-11 turnover margin, the best mark in the NFL. Just as we talked about how teams with dismal turnover ratios improve their turnover margin and their winning percentage the following season, teams with impressive turnover ratios head in the opposite direction. There were 112 teams that finished with a turnover margin between plus-10 and plus-15 between 1989 and 2019. Those teams saw their ratio decline by an average of 9.9 takeaways the following season and won an average of 1.8 fewer games than they had the prior year.
The 2020 formula for Tennessee revolved around feeding Henry, winning the turnover battle and capturing the close ones. It might be tough to sustain even one portion of that formula this upcoming year.