There’s a fair argument to be made that rookie defensive tackle T’Vondre Sweat was the most impressive player on the field for the Tennessee Titans on Sunday against the Chicago Bears, and he made that happen without recording a single tackle.
“I mean,” Titans coach Brian Callahan said Monday, “he was a force.”
Sweat didn’t have a stat-filled debut. In fact, the only place his name shows up on the traditional stat sheet is to say he played 38 snaps. Look at a more detailed recap, however, and you’ll see Sweat garnered two quarterback hurries, which is impressive but hardly a dominant performance.
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So let’s try to put this in context. Among all defensive tackles who played 30 or more snaps in Week 1, Sweat graded out as the ninth-best, per Pro Football Focus. This includes grading out as the second-best pass rushing defensive tackle in the sample, behind back-to-back All-Pro Dexter Lawrence.
Sweat, the Titans’ 2024 second-round pick, occupied more snaps lined up as the defender in the A- or B-gap this week than all but nine other defenders in the league, and the Bears only bothered trying to run the ball in between those gaps six times all game.
On a day where Jeffery Simmons, Sebastian Joseph-Day and Keondre Coburn all made more eye-popping plays behind the line of scrimmage, Sweat was the engine making everything go.
“I think Sweat has sort of been on a consistent arrow up,” Callahan said. “He’s been rising, I think, ever since he’s gotten here. Every week that went by in training camp, he got more comfortable, he got better, his weight went down. He’s getting more in shape. He’s learning how to play, and that was really, really good to see.”
Seeing a slimmer, better-conditioned Sweat is a great sign after an offseason of scuttlebutt about how the big defensive tackle would handle an NFL workload. His 38 snaps against the Bears actually outpaced his average snap count from last season at Texas, when he played an average of 35.9 snaps per game. And for what it’s worth, the grade Sweat received as a pass rusher Sunday would’ve qualified as his third-highest grade in 2023, a year that — again — he was playing college football.
Sweat’s dominance made it easy for the Titans to get by without an overwhelmingly strong performance from Simmons. Simmons still made a tackle for loss and often had to absorb double- and triple-teams from the Bears’ offensive line. Which, in a way, only makes Sweat better with so little attention being passed his way.
“Jeff and Sweat inside are — that’s a force,” Callahan said. “That’s a duo in there that’s going to be really hard to deal with.”
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Nick Suss is the Titans beat writer for The Tennessean. Contact Nick at [email protected]. Follow Nick on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, @nicksuss.
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Publish date : 2024-09-09 10:57:00
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