When the Titans signed Jadeveon Clowney just before the start of the season, it looked like a major move for a Tennessee team with Super Bowl aspirations. It has turned out to be a mostly irrelevant move.
Jadeveon Clowney made clear for months he wanted to be with a team that can win a Super Bowl, and he’s finally made his choice even if he didn't get the long-term deal in the process. Jadeveon Clowney will be little more than a postscript for the Titans team that sure could have used his help and ended up not getting much of it. SUBSCRIBE NOW $3 for 3 months. Earlier today, NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport reported that Tennessee Titans defensive end Jadeveon Clowney had season-ending knee surgery on Wednesday. © Provided by The Spun Jadeveon Clowney talks to. Today we begin with Eagles. Here's Derrick Gunn's argument on why Jadeveon Clowney is the biggest villain in the history of the Birds. You can vote here. Just mentioning the name Jadeveon Clowney to an Eagles quarterback should send shivers up and down their spines. In this region, Clowney is a disliked man. Tennessee Titans defensive end Jadeveon Clowney quietly underwent surgery to repair his left meniscus on Wednesday and is expected to be fully healthy by March.
Clowney has had a disappointing season, and today he was placed on injured reserve with a knee injury. That means he’ll miss at least three more games.
Clowney has yet to record a sack this season and hasn’t made much of an impact.
The Titans also promoted defensive back Greg Mabin from the practice squad to the 53-man roster and placed defensive back Kareem Orr on IR. Practice squad linebackers Will Compton and Tuzar Skipper have been promoted to the game day roster for Sunday and will revert back to the practice squad next week. Long snapper Matt Overton has also been elevated from the practice squad to replace David Long Jr., who is on COVID-19 reserve.
Tennessee also ruled out safety Kenny Vaccaro with a concussion.
Jadeveon Clowney might be the NFL’s biggest enigma.
In past eras, when edge rushers were judged solely by their sack numbers, that may not have been the case. The 2014 first-overall pick, who’s tallied just 32 sacks in six full seasons, likely would have been written off as a bust by this point in his career. In the age of analytics and Pro Football Focus, though, we have more data points with which to judge a player’s performance, and those peripheral numbers tell us that Clowney is one of the NFL’s most disruptive defenders.
As defensive coaches are fond of saying, “Disruption is production.”
But based on Clowney’s experience in free agency this past offseason, it seems NFL front offices don’t feel the same way. The 27-year-old — who had just three sacks in 2019 but performed well in just about every metric that measures pressure — had to wait until September to land with the Titans after teams balked at his contract demands, which would have paid him like an elite edge rusher.
If you view Clowney through certain lenses, he might appear to be one of those elite players. For instance, in 2019, Clowney ranked seventh in ESPN’s Pass Rush Win Rate metric, which uses the NFL’s in-house tracking data to quantify pressure. So Clowney was getting close to the quarterback; he just couldn’t convert that proximity into sacks. And he’s back at it again in 2020. According to PFF, Clowney has logged 12 pressures, which ranks ninth in the league, but has yet to register a single sack.
So … what gives?
Why hasn’t Clowney been able to turn that disruption into sack production?
“Bad luck” could be an answer. Sack numbers tend to fluctuate year-to-year while pressure numbers are more stable. And Clowney converted only 7% of his pressures into sacks last season. That rate fell well below the league average rate of 15%, per PFF, so there could be some regression toward the mean there. But Clowney has only topped that 15% rate once in his career (2015) and, over the course of his career, he’s converted only 11.1% of his pressures into sacks. Maybe Clowney just isn’t a finisher.
Another possible explanation: Clowney gets double-teamed at a league-high rate, according to ESPN’s numbers…
But that extra attention form blockers hasn’t stopped Clowney from racking up those pass-rush wins. So, the question remains: Where are the freaking sacks?
I asked Seth Walder, the chief curator of ESPN’s pass-rush metrics, if he had any theories on the case of the missing sacks. Like the rest of us, he does not have an answer…
“I don’t know,” Walder told me. “I’m stumped by the disconnect between his win rate and sacks. But my overall thinking is that there’s probably some inherent skill in converting pass-rush wins into traditional production.”
Most tape-eaters would agree with Walder’s thinking there. Finishing off a pass rush is a skill and the numbers suggest that Clowney does not possess it. But in order to confirm that theory — and figure out why he struggles to turn pressure into sacks — I took a look at all of his pressures from the 2019 season. From there, I picked out the plays where Clowney had a significant effect on the quarterback. Here’s a cut-up of those plays…
It shouldn’t take too long to pick up on the pattern: On nearly every win, Clowney uses an inside move to beat his blocker.
And as you can see in this cut-up, nothing has changed in 2020…
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When you really dive into his tape, which NFL teams surely did this offseason, Clowney’s biggest weakness becomes readily apparent: He’s got no bend. In other words, after beating an offensive tackle upfield, he struggles to turn the corner, which makes it much easier for the tackle to recover and block him.
That bend Clowney lacks is a trait every elite edge rusher possesses. Von Miller, for instance, can turn any corner, no matter how sharp of an angle it requires.
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Maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise. While Clowney put on a show in the combine drills that measure explosiveness, he put forth below-average times in the two drills that measure a player’s agility: The 20-yard shuttle and 3-cone drill.
Clowney’s dependency on inside moves also helps to explain that double-team rate I cited earlier. It’s not that Clowney is commanding double teams because of his pass-rush prowess; but rather, he’s running into those double teams because his successful pass rush moves take him inside toward the offensive guard. He might get those initial wins over the tackle, but there’s still traffic to navigate in order to get to the quarterback.
Of course, there are ways to manipulate protections that occupy the guard and open up that space inside that Clowney needs. For instance, playing next to a nose tackle or stunting a defensive tackle from the B-gap back inside to take the guard with him. But that limits what a defense can do schematically and if he requires that help to play at a high level, it’s hard to consider him a truly elite talent.
Kicking Clowney inside to three-technique (on the outside shoulder of an offensive guard), where the angles to the quarterback aren’t so sharp, could help boost his production. And the Titans might be a step ahead of me there. Clowney has already played 12 snaps at defensive tackle after playing 16 snaps inside over the last two seasons combined. When Tennessee coach Mike Vrabel last coached Clowney, during the 2017 season in Houston, he moved him around the front more often and it coincided with a career-high sack total. Maybe we’ll see that again in 2020.
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Clowney is a uniquely explosive athlete, and as long as that’s the case, he’ll always be a player capable of disrupting the quarterback. But turning those disruptions into sacks is going to require some creativity from his coaching staff.