The reason the Titans can only have either a good offense or a good defense at any one time is due to two factors: a) our depleted roster, and b) Vrabel’s desperate attempts to keep the Titans viable.

In the past, and even this year, Titans go with the run game in order to burn clock. We’re lucky Henry is here, but I think Vrabel would do some variation of this scheme even without him. Vrabel would rather run the clock out in a close game than attempt to close a game out by balling out because that means that our defense would give opponents another chance to score. This means that our opponents PPG is low overall. You may notice in the past few years, that our per-play stats are not as good as our overall game stats. The years we have a low PPG, come from what we think is “unsung greatness”. And we, the fans and analysts, crow about our defense (when it is good) like we are actually elite. We’re good, yes, but it is Vrabel’s scheme that puts the defense over the top.

Our defense mindset plays into it as well. Against the Steelers, we played deep, but let Pickett dink and dunk us into scores. But that takes time off the clock, thankfully, a lot more than getting burned over the top. We are vulnerable on the deep ball when we go man to man, and being burned would posterize Vrabel’s players and give opponents a higher score.

So what happens when we get good on offense? We score, we use less time per drive. Which gives the opponent more drives per game. Then they score more per game.

All this means that Vrabel is a great coach. (But also great and hiding the things that would make him look bad.) He’s doing the best he can with a bad roster; worse than we think, actually. He’s limiting the opponents’ scores, and hoping beyond hope that we can simply score more efficiently, instead of getting out there and taking more offensive risks.

The real culprit, the real reason why the defense gets bad when the offense gets good, is drafting and recruiting. JRob is gone but his stink remains. He gambled and had some big scores, but came away from the blackjack table in the red. And Vrabel is doing everything he can to overcome it - by cheating the clock on offense in order to keep defense off the field.

This is why we dislike our OC’s playcalling, no matter who it is. Until we are comfortable with Levis slinging the ball, Vrabel is going to misdirect attention away from the defense by slowing the game down. He probably dictates individual calls to the OCs, keeping the run/pass ratio on the run side, one eye constantly on the clock.

So when the offense gets better, the defense will get worse, guaranteed. And we will continue to be on these balancing scales until we truly draft and sign enough players good enough for a stalwart defense.