Tennessee’s offseason talk has been about an explosive offense. Whether it’s Matt Hasselbeck or Jake Locker at quarterback, he’ll be throwing to Kenny Britt, Jared Cook, Nate Washington, Kendall Wright and, of course, Chris Johnson.
Johnson’s overall determination was in question last year, when he got a big contract extension prompted by a holdout, but then got suspect blocking and fell into bad habits. Eddie George recently said on Nashville radio that he saw Johnson stop moving his feet at initial contact and never really get back to it.
Though he did have a career-best 57 receptions, he said it wasn’t necessarily indicative of his role in the pass game.
“I think I was a little bit more involved in the pass offense with Dinger,” he said. “But with the situation that we’ve got here, since I got here we got a lot of playmakers on this offense. So it feels good to see a couple receivers out there putting up good numbers. I feel like it’s a different situation, if there’s a lot of us contributing, a lot of us making plays, I feel like it’s not a bad thing that I probably don’t get as many catches as I usually do.”
Johnson will still get catches, but owners should expect a drop off from his career high 57 last year. The hope would be that the Titans vertical passing threat will open more holes up for Johnson on the ground. We currently rank Johnson as our #5 RB. He's certainly safer than MJD and McFadden from a health and holdout perspective, but the fact that Johnson played all of last season at a sub-par level has us concerned in the first round.
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