The Tennessee Titans have a top-3 NFL secondary after Quandre Diggs signing. Now what?

The Tennessee Titans have spent their offseason trying to get dramatically better in the secondary. This is obviously, indisputably, unambiguously true.

Let’s say it works.

Let’s say the Titans’ choice to hire DB-focused defensive coordinator Dennard Wilson and their moves to add L’Jarius Sneed, Chidobe Awuzie, Jarvis Brownlee Jr., Jamal Adams and now Quandre Diggs into a room that already features Roger McCreary, Amani Hooker and Elijah Molden makes the defensive backfield obviously, unambiguously better in 2024.

What then? Is being better in the defensive backfield a cheat code to being better as a team?

As with anything in the NFL, it’s complicated. Here are the trends to see if the Titans’ energy and resources have been well-spent.

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On paper, the Titans officially project to have a top-three secondary in the NFL after the move Sunday to add Diggs.

This isn’t hyperbole or random peacocking. This is analysis pulled straight from ESPN projections analyst Mike Clay’s forecast for the 2024 season. Based on Clay’s unit-by-unit grading system, only the Miami Dolphins and Jacksonville Jaguars have better combined grades for their cornerback and safety groups. Clay’s grades give the Titans the fifth-best cornerback room and 12th-best safety room in the league. There are only four other teams graded out as being above average at both cornerback and safety.

The Titans haven’t finished a season in the top half of NFL teams in pass yards allowed since 2018. Even in their best years under coach Mike Vrabel, the Titans’ defensive backs were more opportunistic than stifling. This year, that has a real chance to change.

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NFL secondary trends: Are Titans scheduled to see big turnaround?

No one stat is going to encapsulate perfectly how good a team’s secondary is, but for the sake of brevity, let’s look at net passing yards allowed by year. It’s not the most sophisticated metric, but it still rings true that teams that allow the fewest passing yards are generally regarded as having the best defensive backfields.

Teams get better against the pass year-over-year all the time. There have been 92 instances in the past 15 seasons of a team improving their net passing yards against by 400 yards or more. In nine of those cases, teams improved by 1,000 or more yards. That 1,000-yard improvement might be a little drastic; it’d position the Titans with the sixth-best net pass defense of any team since 2008. But a more-modest 400-yard improvement vaults the Titans into the range of the top-10 net pass defenses in the NFL last year, which isn’t something to scoff at.

But as for getting better in pass coverage directly correlating to more wins, the data doesn’t back that up. Of those 92 teams mentioned earlier, their median wins gained year-over-year was zero. The 20 most-improved pass defenses in the sample improved by only a median of 0.5 wins year-over-year.

Tennessee Titans roster 2024: So what should fans expect?

Getting better just about anywhere is a good thing. Take a look at teams like the 2021 Bengals and 2023 Lions who made deep playoff runs after loading up on cornerbacks and safeties in the offseason to fix ailing secondaries, and it’s more than fair to say the Titans approached this offseason a correct way.

In the modern NFL, the five most important commodities are pass throwers, pass catchers, pass blockers, pass rushers and pass defenders. Nearly every move the Titans made this offseason can be viewed through the lens of one of those five commodities. That’s a good thing. But the Titans aren’t the only team that knows this. In a league where so many other teams are behaving similarly, there’s no guaranteeing that making the right decisions will lead to immediate, transformative success.

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