Bishop Sankey's Underwhelming Rookie Season Gives Titans Cause for Concern

In a modern NFL where teams eschew drafting running backs early more and more often, the Tennessee Titans were the first team to step up to the plate in 2014, drafting Washington's Bishop Sankey with the 54th overall pick.

Sankey's rookie season was yet another strike against drafting running backs early, as he wound up not reading his blocks well enough to deserve a starting spot.

And it's saying something to point out that Sankey wasn't able to snag the majority share of the playing time under head coach Ken Whisenhunt in his rookie season.

Revisionists will point out that Sankey dealt with poor offensive line play, and while that may be true, the pulsating fact here is that Sankey played on a roster with Shonn Greene, Leon Washington, Dexter McCluster and Jackie Battle, and only managed 36.6 percent of the snaps.

Other than McCluster, who I would argue the Titans overpaid for, there's not a single back there who belonged on a 2014 roster outside of special teams.

The Titans gladly played all of them rather than commit to Sankey:

Player	Offensive Snaps	Percentage of Total Snaps
Bishop Sankey	354	36.6%
Leon Washington	235	24.3%
Dexter McCluster	233	24.1%
Shonn Greene	164	17.0%
Jackie Battle	112	11.6%
Antonio Andrews	14	1.4%

According to John Glennon of The Tennessean, Whisenhunt questioned Sankey's attention to detail during the season:

In a story by Glennon, Whisenhunt tried to dress up his feelings on Sankey with positivity, but the quote he gave wound up sharing his frustration with Sankey. 

"I certainly feel like Bishop Sankey can be an outstanding running back for us," Whisenhunt said. "We didn't get a chance to give him enough carries to show everybody else that he can do that, so hopefully that'll be something that we do a better job of next season."

Why didn't Whisenhunt get a chance to give Sankey more carries? Because he barely improved at all over the course of the season.

I don't even feel lazy about linking you to this old column about Sankey's early-season play because nothing actually changed.

The most damning stat I can manufacture about Sankey, given what I thought were going to be his issues coming into the season, are his splits between shotgun snaps and non-shotgun snaps. For a player with vision issues, shotgun runs can often give him more time to read and diagnose where the plays are going.

Split	Snaps	DVOA	DYAR
Shotgun	63	8.8%	46
Not-gun	89	-14.8%	-21

Sankey was a completely different player running out of shotgun. Of course, given his pass-protection struggles, he wasn't often trusted to actually run there.

Between those issues, his vision and his inability to break tackles beyond the line of scrimmage, it's hard to argue that Whisenhunt was wrong in his usage of Sankey last season. He's a very flawed back right now, and backs like that have to be spotted carefully.

Worst of all, Sankey managed just two—two!—carries of 20 or more yards on his 152 snaps.

Even when he was spotted well, his rushing production wound up looking like Chris Johnson without the six or seven highlight-reel long runs.

So despite all the physical comparisons to much better running backs, Sankey spent his rookie season floundering. If you look at his pure physical comparisons and college production, as rotoviz did, you'll see why the Titans drafted him in the first place:

Source: rotoviz

Now, I'm not here to bury Sankey's career. He was a rookie. NFL players often make the biggest leap in terms of learning systems and NFL-caliber moves in their first offseason.

But given Sankey's utter lack of ability to crystallize what he was supposed to be learning from Whisenhunt all season, I don't think I'd bet on it happening.

What does that mean for the Titans? Well, I don't think any running backs are off the board in this year's draft. I also might be willing to spend and get a committee head for McCluster and Sankey who actually challenges them.

Tennessee is likely going to be starting either a rookie quarterback or Zach Mettenberger next season. To not give an inexperienced quarterback even the chance of a good running game is simply setting them up to fail.