His Year: Chris Johnson 2009

Welcome back to the Gridiron Deep Dive everybody, where it’s a sad one today.

In case you somehow haven’t heard, on June 29, former NFL RB Chris Johnson took to Good Morning America to reveal his diagnosis with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, better known as ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. This is a nervous system disorder, affecting motor neurons in the brain, the nerves responsible for voluntary muscle movements. As these neurons degenerate and die, they stop sending signals to the muscles, leading to atrophy.

The disease is not always immediately fatal, but in 90 percent of all cases, muscles atrophy so badly the human body can no longer sustain itself, most often via weakness to the point of failure in muscles used to either breathe or swallow, within five years of the first showing of symptoms.

Regrettably, Chris Johnson appears to be rapidly progressing towards this outcome, as he already no longer has the ability to speak, communicating with a computer speech generator, thankfully programmed to sound like his own voice (one of few noble uses of AI voice generation). One year ago, he still had the strength to carry his seven year old daughter. Today, he no longer has the strength to lift his own cup.

I encourage you to watch Chris’s interview yourself, if you’ve not done it already. It’s harrowing to see a man we all knew as the peak of athleticism, the fastest man in the NFL, not even two decades ago, now offering an interview with his body wholly uncooperative, speaking through a computer, aged just 39 years old, but it’s also inspiring to see a man with every right to give up on life, refusing to do so.

Chris has done everything possible to fight the rapidly progressing disease. He caught it relatively early. He’s tried multiple experimental treatments. None of it has worked, but the man keeps fighting, all in an effort to extend his life by just a few months, because every day he saves is one more day to continue to be a father, a husband, a positive force in the world. One more day means one more chance to create a positive memory.

At moments like this, it becomes crucial for us outsiders to reflect on the positive memories Chris Johnson created for all of us, and to let him know how loved he is, while he’s still here. This is where somebody like me comes into the picture. My platform is small. Too small to make any real difference, but to all those within reach of my words, let’s do Chris a favour, shall we? At least for the length of this piece, let us not think about Chris Johnson’s disability. Let us think of him as the weapon he was on a football field.

Let us think about CJ2K.

This story begins as all stories about Chris Johnson begin, with a discussion about his blazing speed.

Quite frankly, Chris Johnson has no right to be a successful full-time RB at the NFL level, and after 2007, his final college season, wraps up, the consensus around Chris is that he will not be a successful back. In general, in the scouting reports on him, there are four main criticisms.

The first is that Chris played his college ball for ECU, in the CUSA. The Conference USA in 2007 is stronger than the CUSA in 2026, but nevertheless, it is not particularly strong competition for an NFL prospect.

The second criticism is the offensive scheme he was in at ECU. The knock is that Chris offers almost nothing between the tackles, and in college didn’t have to. In the NFL, that won’t fly. A full-time back needs to be able to run the ball inside as well as outside. Chris has shown no ability to do that as yet.

Third, Chris is small. By RB standards, extremely small. He is not six feet tall, nor does he weigh 200 pounds. When most people think of a small RB that made it in the NFL, they think of Barry Sanders, and while Barry did stand only 5’7”, he still played most of his career over 200 pounds. Chris Johnson’s body will never be able to hold 200 pounds, and everybody can see it. This creates serious concerns for his durability. How will he hold up over a full NFL season?

Fourth and finally, Chris comes out of his college career with a reputation for being afraid of contact. This is not explicitly a death sentence. There are plenty of contact averse players who do great things in the NFL (Hall of Fame WR Isaac Bruce comes to mind), but at the RB position, this further compounds the consensus in all the scouting reports, of a player who is soft, not willing to run inside, and may not be able to hold up at the next level.

Nevertheless, despite all these criticisms, teams are enthralled by Chris, for one reason:

Speed.

Chris’s feet are the fastest that most scouts have ever seen, and it’s not just the speed that catches the eye. He’s got good feet. Steady feet. He keeps his balance. He also runs crisp routes as a receiver out of the backfield, and should Chris find any open space on a football field, on the ground or through the air, there will be no catching him.

On athletic ability alone, having shown little on the football field except an ability to outrun his CUSA competition, Chris goes into the scouting combine projected as a late second or early third round selection.

As we all know, Chris Johnson’s life changes forever at this scouting combine.

Chris had trained for two straight months in the leadup to the combine, specifically to maximise his 40 yard dash performance, bringing in legitimate track and field coaches to teach him how to begin his run from a standing start like an Olympic sprinter (form off the start is much more important than foot speed in such a short race). In the end, he doesn’t quite maximise his 40 yard dash performance, enduring a very slight stumble on his legendary run, but despite the imperfection (without which 4.19 has been speculated), Chris runs 4.24 in the 40 yard dash at the NFL scouting combine, tying the record (since broken multiple times) set in 1999 by Rondel Menendez.

While Menendez’ 40 yard dash time boosted him from a WR who wasn’t going to be drafted into a man selected 247th, Chris’s half of the tie is much better remembered, as in the wake of his 40 yard dash time, his draft stock shoots through the roof. Rather than a late second or early third round pick, Chris is selected 24th overall in the 2008 NFL Draft, by the Tennessee Titans.

When the Titans pick Chris Johnson 24th, the pick is not taken well by the fanbase. First of all, as we’ve talked about, Chris is seen by many as a big reach, who artificially jumped up the draft board due to the novelty of his 40 yard dash numbers. Second of all, the Titans have already picked LenDale White 44th overall in 2006, and Chris Henry 50th overall in 2007, so this makes three years in a row using a top 50 pick on a RB, which is generally not the formula for success in the NFL.

Yet another testament to the fact that draft grades before the players play are worthless, the Titans are seen by most in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 Draft as having one of the worst (if not the absolute worst) drafts in the entire league.

This proves to be nonsense, as in 2008, the Titans have the franchise’s best season since 2000, and second best season ever, leading the NFL in point differential, finishing top five in Net EPA/Play, wrapping it up with a 13-3 record, and a one seed in the AFC.

The 2008 Titans had what it took to go places, especially in an AFC playoff bracket not featuring the New England Patriots. However, the season ended controversially, as in the second quarter of the AFC Divisional game against the Baltimore Ravens, the Ravens intentionally injure rookie RB Chris Johnson, who at the time of the injury had 100 yards already against the league’s top rush defence, just halfway through the second quarter.

Chris had not been especially notable as a rookie. He did finish seventh in MVP voting with 1228 yards in 251 carries in 2008, but his RYOE (Rushing Yards Over Expected) per carry was negative, indicating most of that work had been done by the Tennessee offensive line, rather than Chris himself, but he was having a monster day in the playoff game against Baltimore. In a game the Titans eventually lost by only three points without Chris, I strongly suspect Tennessee would’ve won, if not for the bounty put on his head by the Ravens. Terrell Suggs admitted to this crime, but it went completely unpunished by the NFL. I suppose intentionally injuring opponents is only a bad thing if you’re the New Orleans Saints.

On the back of this great season with a controversial ending, we head into 2009, where suddenly, expectations for both Chris Johnson and the Tennessee Titans are very high. He’d been considered a wasted pick on a team with no direction at the 2008 Draft, but a seventh place MVP finish as a rookie (even without the underlying numbers to back it up) on a team that flirted with the AFC Championship game changes a lot of things.

What cannot be changed however is the outlook of the Tennessee Titan offence, which (as usual) looks bleak. We were a negative EPA/Play offence last season, leaning heavily on one of the league’s best defences to carry us to the 13-3 record, and while the offensive line that led the way for Chris’s five flat expected yards per carry last season (per PFF) remains stout, as always seems to be the case with the Titans, there remain issues at the skill positions.

First and foremost, going into the 2009 season, we are deep in the midst of a QB controversy. Vince Young had won Offensive Rookie of the Year in 2006, and led us to the playoffs while posting a very impressive 0.153 xEPA/Play (much worse than that in the actual results, because this offence stinks) in 2007. However, in the opening game of the 2008 season, Vince sprained his MCL. The backup Kerry Collins took over, and the Titans did not lose a game for three months.

I disagree with most everything Jeff Fisher does, but even with a negative EPA/Play offence, it’s difficult to justify benching a QB who runs up a 10-0 record for you. I won’t crucify him for this, but it does lead to a promising young QB coming off a 0.153 xEPA/Play year two (better than Bo Nix and Caleb Williams in 2025) remaining on the bench for an entire season, watching what should’ve been his offence struggle behind a QB whom everybody knows is not as good as he is. This drives Vince off the deep end. He threatens retirement. He threatens suicide. Through it all, Jeff Fisher stands firm.

This drives a deep wedge both between QB and coach, and between owner (Bud Adams is a big Vince Young fan) and coach. This is a story that will get its own article at some point, but put a pin in it for now, because it’s not directly related to Chris Johnson. However, QB controversies cast shrouds over every offensive player in the building, so even in an article about a RB, it’s important to know this is going on.

In addition to issues at the QB position, the Titans are also weak at the WR and TE positions. Justin Gage was the team’s best WR in both 2007 and 2008, but those were his last good years. By the time 2009 begins, he’s past his prime. Our best receiver for this season will be Kenny Britt, who will spend some time in his career as a very good NFL receiver, but in 2009, Kenny is a rookie, whom we’ve just selected with the 30th overall pick, not ready for the WR1 spot we’re forced to slot him into.

In short, not only are we in the middle of a deep QB controversy, but we are also a team with only one above average NFL WR or TE, and in 2009, even that one guy (Kenny Britt) is not as good as he will later become.

What this all means to the subject of this article is that while yes, Chris Johnson does have the benefit of a very good offensive line in front of him, he must also deal with the burden of a subpar pass attack, to put it nicely.

It’s on this note we head into week one, on the road in Pittsburgh, for the traditional Thursday Night season opener against the previous season’s Super Bowl champion. We are seven point underdogs in this game, with most thinking we have little chance against Pittsburgh, and while our first offensive drive does not look competitive (two CJ carries, for -2 yards, a completed pass for four yards, and a punt), on our second, Chris gives us our first look at exactly why he’s so dangerous.

It’s a simple off-tackle rush to the left side, and Chris runs into a wall. There’s nothing on the play, but Chris Johnson (an extremely patient back, always looking for something else to open up) sees the Steeler defence has overcommitted to the left, so cuts it back to the right. Lamar Woodley is on the right edge waiting for him, but expecting a pass rushing LB to tackle Chris in the open field is not a fair fight. Chris gets around Lamar easily, and would’ve scored a TD on this play, if not for Troy Polamalu coming all the way from the left side safety position to make this tackle on the right sideline. In the end, it’s 47 yards, out of an off-tackle run that was stuffed at the line.

That’s the Chris Johnson experience.

Unfortunately, this drive ends in a missed FG, and for the rest of the game, the Steelers make absolutely sure Chris is not going to beat them again. For the remainder of the first half, his carries go for negative cumulative yardage. The first two plays of the second half, Chris gets it going a little bit again, going for 24 yards on two carries, but then the Steelers settle back into their plan. He accomplishes nothing for the rest of this half either.

Chris does not touch the ball on any possession on which the Titans score in this game, as we lose it, 13-10 in OT. In fact, Chris Johnson’s Year begins with one of its worst games. Chris goes for only 57 yards on 15 carries (with one of them being a 47 yarder). He only has three successful (positive EPA) carries all night long, in an OT game that easily could’ve been won.

All the attention paid to the ground game did allow Kerry Collins to have one of his better games of the year in week one, but at 0.14 EPA/Play, it’s not really enough to make a big deal, and we start the season 0-1.

After not losing any game until the end of November last season, to begin 2009 with an 0-1 record hurts, but never fear. Week two sees us hosting the Houston Texans, a team against which we have an 11-3 record in our time as division rivals. We have especially owned them over the last four years (2005-2008), where we’ve won seven out of eight games played. I intend no disrespect, but if there is such a thing as a circled win on an NFL schedule, it’s the Titans over the Texans in this time period. They simply have no luck beating us.

Fittingly, we enter this game as seven point home favourites, and when the Texans punt their first drive away, netting only one first down, it’s our time to go to work.

Our first drive is all CJ. To be fair, he is the one that works us into a deep hole, with a -3 yard carry on first down setting the stage for a third and 15 play, but on this third and 15, Chris catches a checkdown pass and has made it 17 yards before anybody can catch him. From here, our next two plays again go nowhere, facing third and 19 from our own 43. We call a simple draw play, trying to just get out of the drive without making any mistakes, but with an athletic specimen like Chris on the team, no play is ever simple.

It’s on this third and 19 draw play where one can see how effortlessly Chris can outrun any angle a defender may have on him. There are multiple Texans in position to angle him out of bounds, but Chris just runs through all their angles. In the end, no defender even gets near, as he runs the ball 57 yards into the endzone. Touchdown Titans.

The Texans are not prepared to go lightly. Maybe an old Texan team would’ve wilted and died when we started putting the pressure on, but not this 2009 edition. They put a TD right back on us, leaving us with the ball again, and a 7-7 score, where at this point, we see one of the oddest football plays I have ever seen.

Chris comes out on first down and nets a solid six yard gain off-tackle, and then on second down, we come out with Chris lined up wide. The Texans (unwilling to put a LB out there to cover the fastest man in football, even if he is a RB) get so hopelessly confused that by the time we snap the ball, nobody is covering Chris Johnson. Kerry Collins lobs the ball out to him, and Chris just jogs 69 yards into the end zone, uncontested, in one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen on an NFL field.

Seriously. Watch it. Have you ever seen an NFL play this uncompetitive?

After another Houston three and out, Chris bounces a stuffed run outside for 16 yards on his only carry of our next possession, as the passing offence scores against a lacklustre Houston defence without him, to stretch to a 21-7 lead.

At this point, up 21-7 in the second quarter, sporting a defence that’d been one of the best in the league in 2008, NFLFastR sees us as having a 95 percent chance to win this game, but what NFLFastR can’t yet know is that the 2009 Titan defence is not the 2008 Titan defence. In 2009, our defence is terrible, and it shows best right now, as within three minutes, we go from a commanding 21-7 lead, to a 21-21 tie, still with ten minutes left in the second quarter.

Quite frankly, the other team has Matt Schaub, the seventh best EPA/Play QB in football, and we don’t. A shootout is not advantageous to us, so it’s to our benefit that nothing else notable happens in the first half. Both teams kick FGs, and we walk into the locker room with the scoreboard reading 24-24.

What a half for Chris individually, with better than 80 yards both rushing and receiving, and a TD apiece through the air and on the ground, but we are not winning, against the Texans, a team we always win against. For a team that finished 13-3 last season, and comes into this season with high expectations, that is not an encouraging sign for the remainder of the year.

Welcome to Chris Johnson’s Year, where exceptional performances on an underachieving Titan team are quickly going to become the norm.

The first drive for each team in the second half goes nowhere, but a splendid Houston punt traps us on our own one yard line. No Jeff Fisher team is even going to try to play real offence from here, so we just rush the ball a few times, and with aid from a Houston penalty, are able to get out to our own nine yard line. From here we face third and ten, and are still not really even trying to play offence, so we just run a textbook counter, trying to get out of the possession with dignity.

Once again, with Chris on the field, it’s never that simple. Houston gets tied up at the line of scrimmage, which allows our man through the hole and into the open field, still with his pull guard to block for him. At this point, it’s over. Chris is hard enough to bring down in the open field without blocking help. It’s a 91 yard TD, and a 31-24 Titan lead, with 25 minutes left to play.

At this point, Chris’s stat line reads nine carries, for 178 yards, and two TDs, so when I tell you that his stats at game’s end are 16 carries for 197 yards, you’ll understand that his impact in the final 25 minutes of the game is very limited. He gets one carry on each of the next two possessions, neither of which go for positive yardage.

We’re now into the fourth quarter, facing a 31-31 score, where Chris gets four carries, all of which generate negative EPA. When we get the ball back again, still facing a 31-31 score, Chris gets carries on each of the first two plays, leaving us on third and two, which is solid enough, but an incomplete pass ruins that effort, and suddenly, we find ourselves behind 34-31 with two minutes left, a situation that does not allow us to effectively use our best offensive weapon, so we lose.

We lose 34-31, at home, against the Houston Texans, despite Chris generating 0.46 EPA/Rush as a runner, 0.26 EPA/Pass as a pass target, and in the more traditional numbers, putting up 197 yards and two TDs on the ground, plus 87 yards and a TD through the air. For those interested in this kind of thing, Chris Johnson in this Houston game sets the record for the most fantasy points ever scored by one player in one game, although this record has since been broken.

Getting back to real football, just take a look at the differing offensive production profile of the two teams in this week two game:

0.69 EPA/Play means this is one of Matt Schaub’s best ever games as a pro, and of course it had to happen at precisely the same time as Chris Johnson had the best game of his career, in terms of total yards. In every article I write about a RB, we run into this issue at some point. It just so happens that in this one, we run into it right away.

A great QB performance on the opposing side will trump a great RB performance on our side, every time, largely because RBs have little to no influence on the two minute scenarios, so while Chris Johnson had an all-time great game today, we still lost, and now sit with an 0-2 record.

There is no rest for the weary. In week three, we’re pitted against the 2009 New York Jets, one of the best defences in NFL history, and not only that, but we face them having to play catchup the whole game, as they score a TD on their first drive, then we fumble the kickoff, and they score again, trapping us in a 14-0 hole before our offence ever touches the football.

We do actually manage to come back from this, briefly taking a 17-14 lead, before everything falls apart, and we lose this game too, 24-17. Once again, taking one look at the breakdown of our offence in this game, we can see that the pass attack has to take a lot of the blame for this:

However, although the pass attack must take a lot of the blame, one thing that must be said is that the pass attack is not helped by these persistently low success rates, even in the run game.

Chris Johnson is the prototypical boom-or-bust player. He rushed for 57 yards against Pittsburgh, 47 of them on one carry. He generated 7.9 total EPA against Houston, but on only eight (out of 28, combining carries and pass targets) successful plays. This Jet game is no different. Chris rushes for 97 yards here, but generates positive EPA on only six of his 22 carries.

Nobody is saying Chris is a bad RB. He just accrues his value in a very specific way. In this Jets game, he generates 0.45 RYOE per carry. That’s good, but he generates more yards than expected on only eight of 22 carries.

In short, Chris is not a back who keeps the chains moving. He will rush for three yards, then two yards, then negative, then 55. If the plan is to use Chris as the workhorse (which it is), his team must live with the up and down nature of his game, but with Kerry Collins and an inconsistent (or outright poor, if you feel less nice) pass attack, this proves difficult for the 2009 Tennessee Titans.

The rest of September is more of the same. Against Jacksonville, we enter the game as three point favourites, but lose by 20. Against undefeated Indianapolis, we are somehow only three point underdogs as an 0-4 team, but lose 31-9, in a game Chris gets only nine carries and not even 40 yards, because we were out of it immediately.

Then, the fateful day comes.

We enter week six as an 0-5 team, but it’s difficult to flex an early season game, so we go on the road to play New England in the coveted 4:30 Game of the Week slot. By this time, everybody understands that the Titans are not the top of the line AFC team we were last season. With an 0-5 record, it’s impossible not to understand that. Amongst the Brady-Belichick Patriot teams, 2009 is one of the worst ones (either 2009 or 2013 is the worst), but things have gotten so bad for us that even against the 2009 version of the Patriots, we go to their stadium as full ten point underdogs, and deservingly so, because this game will become infamous for the beating they put on us.

The game does not start overwhelmingly badly. We open the game with a three and out, but for our offence, that’s not out of the ordinary. The Patriots miss a FG in response. On our follow up, we net one first down without Chris touching the ball. The Patriots score a TD. On our possession after that, we go three and out without Chris touching the ball. The Patriots extend the lead to 10-0.

NFLFastR gives the Patriots a 92 percent chance to win, up 10-0 with 41 seconds left in the first quarter, and our best offensive weapon has barely even touched the football yet. That needs to change, and it does change with this possession, as the first five play calls are all handoffs to Chris, for a combined 37 yards. The first play that is not a handoff to Chris ends in a fumble and a turnover, but these five carries alone trump the 19 total yards of offence we had before that, so clearly, if we’re going to win this game, we’re going to need to ride our workhorse back.

The problem with wanting to ride our RB is that, with a deep ball to Randy Moss, the Patriots extend their lead to 17-0, and after Kerry Collins fumbles the snap on the very first play of our next offensive possession, yet another deep ball to Randy Moss against our porous defence makes the score 24-0, just 21 minutes into the football game.

So far in this game, Chris has seven carries for 38 yards. That’s over five yards per carry, against a Bill Belichick defence. It’s a pretty good game he’s having, and yet, because Kerry Collins is having the meltdown of all meltdowns (one of the worst QB games ever played), a good RB game against the Patriots just doesn’t matter.

Now that we’re down 24-0, even with how horrendously Kerry is playing, I can hardly fault our offensive play callers for not letting Chris touch the ball. We try to pass our way out of this. That effort lasts three plays and ends in an arm punt on third down. The Patriots respond with their third 25+ yard TD pass in as many possessions, to make the score 31-0, and reach the NFLFastR Win Probability model’s mythical 100 percent chance of victory, with eight minutes left in the second quarter.

Ouch.

We go three and out on each of our remaining two first half possessions. The Patriots respond with TDs in each instance, so we go into the locker room trailing by an absurd halftime score of 45-0.

In case you haven’t clocked it yet, I am indeed talking about that 59-0 game.

By the time we even touch the ball in the second half, with the Patriots receiving, we’re already down 52-0. We come out of the locker room playing real offence, because facing such a deficit we’re not going to come back even if we throw every play, so on our first drive of the second half, our best offensive drive of the afternoon, Chris has two carries for 48 yards, before on fourth and ten from the Patriot 13, we throw the ball for a 22 yard loss. I didn’t know it was possible to complete a pass for a 22 yard loss, but such is the performance of our pass attack in this game. We again score no points.

Since we are still playing real offence, so are the Patriots (albeit with Bryan Hoyer now in at QB), and in a bit of play calling that is ridiculous to the point of getting a pretty big chuckle out of me, the Patriots go for it on a fourth and six from our 31 yard line, en route to scoring the TD that makes this game 59-0.

Was this necessary?

You’ll have to ask Bill Belichick.

Our next drive contains two Chris Johnson carries, pretty solid ones, for a combined 11 yards, but ends in yet another INT. The Patriots again drive right down the field on us. In what must’ve been a glorified practice play for them, New England again go for it, this time on a fourth and seven from our 11 yard line, and hallelujah, we manage to keep them off the scoreboard.

This is the oddest second half of football I have ever watched in my life, because one team is up 59-0. The other is behind 59-0. One team throws only two passes in the entire fourth quarter. The other throws seven, and goes for it on two separate fourth downs. The allocation is precisely the opposite of what you’d think it would be.

It’s our Titans just trying to run the clock out, to prevent losing by the biggest margin in NFL history, and it’s the Patriots still playing real offence deep into the fourth quarter of a 59-0 win, likely just for practice, and probably also in a failed effort by noted NFL historian Bill Belichick to set the record for largest margin of victory in any NFL game.

All of this is only tangentially related to Chris Johnson, but since he was here, you’d better believe I was going to take the chance to talk about this ridiculousness, and to bring the conversation back to Chris, this is unironically one of his better games of the year. There are no TDs, and it is a 59-0 loss, but 17 carries for 128 yards (7.5 YPC), on 5.24 RYOE per carry, against a good if not electric 2009 Patriot rush defence, all despite a Titan pass attack that went for -5 yards, and -1.48 EPA/Play on the day, is a fantastic RB game.

A fantastic RB game against a Patriot defence that may not have been trying their hardest? Perhaps. A fantastic RB game that meant precisely nothing to the final score of the football game? Absolutely, but one of the best games of the entire season for Chris? That’s also true, and this typifies the life of a RB. Even a great one. Your ability to help in the pass attack is limited, and if that pass attack is playing poorly, you simply will not win the game, regardless of how great you play.

However, just because a fantastic RB game is meaningless to the final score of this 59-0 games, that does not mean it is meaningless, as after the first five games of the season, which featured one all-time great game against Houston, and 62 carries for 271 yards (4.4 YPC, not historically notable) in the other four games, this Patriot game is a clear turning point. After rushing for 100 yards in a game only once in the first five, Chris will not fail to hit 100 yards at any point, for the rest of the season.

I’ve already welcomed you to Chris Johnson’s Year, but at this point, allow me to introduce you to CJ2K.

After an 0-6 start, following the absolute meltdown in New England, even Jeff Fisher can no longer justify keeping Kerry Collins in the starting QB spot. From here on out, Vince Young will be the man taking the snaps, and the much more talented QB will help turn Chris Johnson into CJ2K, in two ways.

First, Vince Young (contrary to his reputation) was a positive CPOE QB in his last full season (2007), who will present a serious threat through the air, something Kerry Collins (who once was a great passer himself, but in 2009 is 37 years old) simply cannot do. A real, serious threat to throw can only help a rush game, mostly by forcing smaller pass defenders onto the field, in place of larger, more difficult to block, run defenders.

Second, Vince presents a serious threat to rush himself. He’s not a particularly notable rusher at the NFL level (nowhere near where he was in college), but just the threat of him keeping the ball and rushing it himself will keep defences honest, putting them just that little bit on their back foot, and with a RB as quick as Chris Johnson, that half second’s hesitation is all you need. Vigorous analyses have been done in the modern era, coming to the conclusion that the mere presence of Lamar Jackson adds a non-trivial amount of EPA to every non-Lamar rush. It’s easy for me to believe that Vince Young has a similar effect on Chris Johnson’s rushes in 2009.

For our first game under the new starting QB, we’re playing Jacksonville for the second time. Recall, the first time we played Jacksonville, we went to their stadium as road favourites, and got humiliated, 37-17. Since then, we’ve been humiliated twice more, 31-9 against Indianapolis, and 59-0 against New England. As such, we walk into this game as only three point home favourites, after being three point road favourites in Jacksonville only three games ago.

Things are going to go just a little bit differently this time.

On our first offensive series of this game, Chris Johnson has four carries, for 21 yards. Nothing spectacular, but enough to keep the offence ahead of the game, on a drive that leads ultimately to a FG and a 3-0 lead, despite it featuring just 20 Vince Young passing yards. After a Jaguar three and out, Chris begins playing more like himself. It’s a low success rate, high explosiveness type of game.

On first and ten from our own six, Chris goes for just one yard, but on third and nine from our own seven, Chris makes a give up draw play into a first down. Nothing more happens on this drive, but it gets us off our own goal line, and after a couple punts back and forth, we end up scoring a TD on a possession where Chris does not touch the ball at all, an indication that this is not the same Titan team we were when we last played Jacksonville.

This never would’ve happened before. The last Jaguar game was only three weeks ago, but we feel like a completely different team now.

Chris is still our best offensive weapon, but if we get into a position where we do not need him in order to score, that’s trouble for the opponent, because we can always go back to it, as we do on our next drive, where Chris generates 26 yards on just two carries, and we expand our lead to 13-0.

However (as Chris is wont to do), he goes into a cold spell after this, so by the time he has another positive EPA carry, we’re into the second half, with the score now tied at 13.

Our opening drive of the second half begins with yet another negative yardage carry for Chris, but Vince digs us out of that hole for a first down. Chris immediately puts the offence in yet another difficult position with yet another difficult carry, and the pass attack again bails us out of it, at which point, on first and ten from our own 48, Chris shows us why we put up with all these negative plays and difficult offensive positions, as he turns a first and ten toss play into a 52 yard TD rush, running through two arm tackles in the process, once again showing that if he can ever get into the open field, he is incredibly tough to bring down. It’s 20-13 Titans, a lead we will not be giving up.

We go up 23-13 with basically no help from Chris, and following yet another Jaguar punt, netting us the football on our own ten, we get perhaps the most ‘Chris Johnson’ drive of Chris Johnson’s Year. First down, we come out in the I formation. Chris is stood up at the line for no gain. Second down, we stay in the I. Chris runs behind the FB for six. Third down, we come out in the gun, and Chris makes a very simple power rush into an 89 yard TD run, and a 30-13 Titan lead.

At this point, at least in the relentlessly conservative mind of Jeff Fisher, the game is over. We throw zero fourth quarter passes, and pull most of the starters (including Chris) off the field. The defence holds up throughout the fourth quarter, so we are able to cruise to our first win of the season, 30-13 over Jacksonville, and just look at this new-look offensive production breakdown:

Now that is more like it.

With a pass attack that holds up its end, our low success rate, boom-or-bust run game becomes an asset. Chris carries the football 24 times in this game, and makes our team more likely to score on only seven of them, a very poor 29 percent personal success rate, even worse than the team’s 32 percent in this game, which is already not very good.

Nevertheless, despite hurting the team more often than he helps us in terms of the number of plays, the big plays are so big with Chris that despite him having only seven good carries all day, he runs for 228 yards, two TDs, and generates positive 0.37 EPA/Rush on his 24 touches in this game. That’s yet another fantastic RB game, in spite of the fact that his carries left us behind the chains a lot, and for a nice change, we actually won this one, at last getting that horrible looking zero off the board, moving to 1-6 on the year.

As a 1-6 football team, with the AFC’s sixth best record sitting at 5-3 currently, there really is not much to play for, but we have to keep playing, which is what takes us on the road to San Francisco for a week nine matchup, in which we’re substantial five point underdogs, against a 49ers team that is only 3-4 themselves, such is the state of our season so far.

No need to worry about that though, as despite going against a Jim Harbaugh defence that is third in the league, both overall and against the run, our offensive line has a fantastic time against their rush defenders, blocking up for 5.04 expected yards per carry on the day. Chris follows through on his end too, rushing 25 times for 135 yards (5.4 YPC) and generating 0.20 EPA per rush, part of an offensive performance that ultimately puts up 34 points on the league’s third best defence, one of only two teams all year to score that many against the 49ers, and ultimately defeats them, 34-27 (one possession game only with the benefit of a garbage time SF touchdown), to move to 2-6 on the season.

Week ten is a deeply boring football game, one I promise you would not like me to talk about in detail, as we blow out an overmatched Buffalo Bills team 41-16. It’s not a fantastic Chris Johnson game, as he generates positive EPA on only eight of 27 carries, and generates precisely 0.00 EPA/Rush on the day, but with carries of 32, 28, 22, 16, and 15 yards sprinkled through the day, he is able to get to 132 yards on his 26 carries, a respectable 5.1 YPC, on a day where Vince Young was clearly the star of the show.

Nevertheless, I stop at this week ten game, because this is where I first remember there being whispers about the possibility of Chris going after a 2000 yard season. With the 132 yards against Buffalo, he crosses the 1000 yard plateau, and now sits with 1091 rushing yards on the year, through just nine team games. That’s an average of 121 yards per game, which is a pace of 1940 yards, over a full 16 game season.

However, that’s not the whole story. We know his full season average is not exactly representative, because we know that his performance has dramatically ticked upwards ever since Vince Young took over the starting QB spot. To get from 1091 to 2000 with seven games remaining, Chris is going to have to average 130 yards per game.

With Vince Young at QB, he hasn’t had fewer than 130 yards in any game yet.

The Tennessee Titans are sitting at 3-6. The sixth best record in the AFC currently is 6-3. We have virtually no chance of making the playoffs, but the chase is on. Seven games, at 130 yards per game, is what separates Chris Johnson from history, becoming just the sixth RB ever to rush for 2000 yards in a season.

If you were going to start a quest like this, the same Houston Texans against whom you’d already rushed for 197 yards and set the record for most fantasy points ever scored in a game, back in the week two, seem a fine opponent to start with. Irrespective of the early season game, the 2009 Texans are the perfectly mediocre defence, 16th overall and tenth against the run. For Chris to get to 2000 yards, he’s going to have to be able to perform against opponents like this, and almost as a side note, if we want to keep our thin AFC playoff chance alive, we absolutely cannot afford a second loss to the 5-4 Houston Texans, one of many teams we must pass.

This game is both a must-win for the team, and an absolute must in terms of rushing yardage for Chris. In the beginning, both of these pursuits appear to be going horribly wrong.

In our first two drives, Chris touches the ball only three times, for just ten yards, as we fall down 7-0. As a man who’s seen how well Vince Young has been playing lately, it’s difficult to blame OC Mike Heimerdinger for this. As a man who wants to see Chris Johnson get to 2000 yards, it is mightily frustrating, but on the third drive, nearing the end of the first quarter, it gets better.

Chris’s first carry of the new possession goes for just three yards, which does not help, but he does manage to finally break a 17 yard carry around the right edge on the final play of the first, to avoid going the whole quarter without even a single successful carry. He contributes piecemeal to the rest of the possession also, racking up 33 rush yards on this possession in total. In conjunction with a fantastic possession for WR Kenny Britt, who ultimately catches the TD pass, this performance helps us pull back even, 7-7.

On the first possession of the second quarter, Chris is the ‘bust’ in boom-or-bust, and we fall behind 14-7, but getting the ball back with four minutes left in the half, Chris is the ‘boom,’ with carries of one yard, five yards, and then 36. Vince Young throws just two passes in the two minute drill, as we score a TD to walk into the locker room tied at 14.

In many ways, Chris can be incredibly frustrating to watch. On his 13 first half carries, he generated positive EPA on only four, meaning the vast majority of the time, a handoff to him was doing nothing but putting us behind, but when he does break off a big one (as he did in the two minute drill for 36 yards), it puts the offence in a fantastic position to score TDs, which we did, and overall, it turned out to be an 86 yard first half for Chris, which is more than good enough when the target is 130 per game.

In the second half though, this frustration continues, as in his first seven carries (split over our two third quarter possessions) in the second half of a game we absolutely must win, he goes for no gain, then two yards, then six (which is a positive EPA carry), but then -2, 3, 3, 2, as we rely heavily on Vince Young to keep this game tied, which he does, the score reading 17-17 as the fourth quarter begins.

Through most of that fourth, it still gets little better, as Chris’s first six carries go for five, one, three, two, five, three. The five yard carries are marginally positive plays, but there are only two of them, and as such, we do not score on any of these drives. Thankfully, neither do the Texans, which leaves us once again with the ball, and one final chance, with 2:52 remaining in the football game.

The first play goes well, in a manner of speaking. It’s an option run with Vince and Chris. Vince pitches the ball, but the play goes nowhere, as Chris is brought down with a horse collar tackle. The 15 yard penalty plus a stopped clock on the end of a three yard run makes this a solid beginning to the two minute drill. Then, the dam finally breaks.

On first and 15 following a false start penalty, we go draw for Chris, and he breaks it, running up the middle for a 22 yard gain. This is not a huge play for the 2000 yard chase, but in terms of Win Probability Added, this is the most valuable play of the entire football game, as not only does it run the clock down to two minutes, virtually ensuring that the Texans will not have a chance to score on us should they get the ball back, it also gets us all the way out to our own 41, a very short distance away from a game-winning FG.

Our offence does not go much further from here, but with another seven yards from Chris, a 12 yard scramble from Vince Young, and only one pass completion for just five yards on the entire drive, we have successfully executed the two minute drill. We kick the FG, taking the 20-17 lead, that will ultimately remain as the final score.

My gosh, Chris waited a long time in that second half to come through, but right when we needed him most, the 22 yard rush was waiting there for us, playing the biggest part in moving us to 4-6, pulling Houston back to 5-5, and in Chris’s personal pursuit, pushing him well over the 130 yards necessary to keep on pace. Despite the malaise with which he went through much of this game, Chris ultimately finishes with 151 yards. The 29 carries to get there were a bit ugly, but with his final three carries all generating positive EPA, he ultimately ended up with eleven successful rushes out of 29 carries, one of his better success rate games of the season. I would not call this a virtuoso performance, but in the end, it was in the positives (0.03 EPA per rush) in terms of helping his team score, and win, and was also in the positives in terms of his chase towards 2000 rushing yards. All in all, this was exactly the game Chris needed to have, and a vital conference game against the Houston Texans was a great time to have it.

We are now 4-6, with the final AFC playoff position being locked behind a 6-4 record. To many teams, that would sound like a grizzly situation, but not long ago, we were 1-6, with the six seed sitting at 5-3. We’ve made up two full games since then. Don’t look now, but inch by inch, with four straight wins, we are crawling our way back into this fight, and at the same time, Chris is gaining on his personal goal, now on pace for 1987 yards by the end of the year.

In week 12, our hot streak continues, albeit with a stroke of luck. We host the defending NFC Champion Arizona Cardinals, but we do it as four point favourites, because instead of having to compete with Kurt Warner, the Cardinals come into Nashville with Matt Leinart starting at QB, with Warner out, nursing a concussion.

This serves as the backdrop to another one of Chris’s very best games.

By the end of the first quarter, Chris has 27 rushing yards and three successful carries already, plus 13 yards through the air, as we’re limited to two FGs, but exit the quarter with a 6-0 lead. On our first drive of the second quarter, he adds 19 more yards, on only three total carries.

This may not sound exceptional, and in yardage terms, it isn’t. Chris finishes the first half (which we exit with a 6-3 lead) with only 50 yards rushing, which does not put him on pace to reach the 130 yards per game benchmark, but context is key. We know with Chris that he’s going to break off the big one eventually. He’s gone only one game (Indianapolis) without a 20+ yard carry all season. It’s not atypical in 2009 for Chris to end up with less than 50 yards in a whole game, with his 10+ yard carries excluded. Today, he’s at 50 yards already, without a 10+ yard carry yet.

Chris is being kept away from the big play, by a disciplined Arizona defence, confined to a high success rate game that is not really his, but that’s a delicate dance for any defence to try to maintain. Coming out of the locker room, he adds 15 yards on his three carries. More serviceable but unimpressive play on yet another drive that does not score, but after a six minute Cardinal drive, where they also do not score, when we finally get the ball back with 3:50 remaining in the third quarter, it happens.

On a second and ten play, we run off-tackle to the left, Chris cuts it back inside, bursts through the hole, and finds himself angling back to the sideline, chased by one of the foremost tacklers in the NFL, Cardinal ILB Karlos Dansby. I love Karlos Dansby, but if you think a LB, even a very good one, can keep an angle on Chris Johnson, you’ve got another thing coming.

Chris outruns the angle, and is gone. A fun novelty is that at the very end of this run, he’s actually caught, by Cardinal CB Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, another one of the very fastest men in the NFL, but all Dom can manage to do is tackle Chris once he’s already in the endzone. It’s an 85 yard TD run.

For a bit of perspective on precisely how explosive 2009 Chris Johnson is, this is his third 85+ yard TD run in the first 11 games of the year. As of November 29, 2009 (the date of this week 12 game), there is no other RB with three 85+ yard TD runs in an entire career.

\There have been plenty of explosive backs in NFL history, but nobody on this level.

RBs who play like Chris have been derided through NFL history. They’re ‘change of pace’ guys. They’re ‘third down’ guys. In his scouting reports before the 2008 draft, nobody thought Chris could be a lead, workhorse back at the NFL level, but with games like this, he’s breaking the mold. Not only can a RB like Chris be a lead back, but he can generate 0.39 EPA/Rush in a must-win game against a Cardinal team that even with Matt Leinart at QB was still a formidable opponent.

I skip straight to the end, because after this 85 yard TD run, Chris only touches the ball three more times for four more yards, as in a one possession game in the fourth quarter, the team turns to Vince Young and the pass attack, which ultimately culminates in the play that leads every Vince Young highlight reel, the TD pass to Kenny Britt as time expires, as we steal this game out from under the Cardinals, 20-17, to move to 5-6 on the year.

For Chris individually, he ran the ball for 154 and a TD, all on just 18 carries. That’s 8.6 YPC, the third best game by that metric of Chris’s Year, behind only the legendary week two Houston game and the 228 yard performance in the win over Jacksonville. By EPA/Play, 0.39 for Chris makes this the second best game of His Year, behind only the first Houston game.

It’s interesting to me that this game is remembered for Vince Young’s late game heroics, which buries the fact that this is one of the best games of a season that is now officially on pace for 2000 yards, with 1396 yards through 11 games, putting Chris on a pace for 2031 yards by season’s end.

From here, I think we just need to take a second to reflect on Chris’s performance during our five game winning streak. Through the first six games of the year under Kerry Collins, despite the best game of His Year coming during this span, Chris had 596 yards. That’s a pace of less than 1600 yards, through more than a third of the season. Not particularly close to 2000.

In the five games since we ditched Kerry Collins and went to Vince Young at QB, Chris has gone on a tear, averaging 160 yards per game, dragging himself from a pace that was not particularly close to 2000, all the way back into having a real chance at it, 604 yards short with five games to go.

It must be said that we’ve been ahead a lot more in these last five games, so Chris has gotten 122 carries in the last five, compared to 95 in the first six. This never hurts when discussing volume statistics, but even from an EPA/Play perspective, the Tennessee Titans (mostly Chris) have gone from perfectly league average in the first six weeks (-0.113 EPA/Rush), to a very impressive 0.051 since the QB change.

We are also the best offence in the league, at 0.162 overall EPA/Play since then, and we are also undefeated since then, crawling out of the depths of an 0-6 start to now sit here with a 5-6 record, just one game out of the final AFC playoff position.

The 59-0 loss to New England and the ensuing QB change is absolutely what spurred all of this, but let’s not kid ourselves. Vince Young in 2009 is a good QB, verging on very good. He’ll finish this season 11th in EPA/Play (the same position Jared Goff occupied in 2025), but he alone is not enough to spur an 0-6 team into a five game win streak. It’s solid QB performance, in conjunction with the white hot streak out of Chris and the rush game, that has turned this entire team around, and if Chris does end up getting to 2000 yards this season, we are going to look back to this stretch of 800 rushing yards in the first five games with Vince Young at QB as the reason he did it.

Now, we just have to finish.

Unfortunately we cannot keep the momentum going, as our hot streak comes to an abrupt end on the road, at the hands of 11-0 Indianapolis. We go down a quick 21-3, and from there, have no real chance to win the football game. Not only that, but this also becomes only the second game all year (after the first game against Indianapolis) with no 20+ yard rush from Chris.

He still plays well, with a 44 percent personal success rate and 0.05 EPA per rush. That’s a good game for a normal RB, but this is not a normal RB, so 113 yards on 27 carries against a merely workable Indianapolis rush defence is Chris’s worst game in over a month.

One final thing I must say is that Chris catches some flak in the 2010 offseason for publicly admitting that the team begins late in this season to prioritise his rushing yard totals over winning football games, but this Indianapolis game provides some evidence in favour of that. For instance, we touch the ball late in this game, down 27-10, with less than three minutes left, and despite these circumstances, Chris gets three carries on the possession. Even though Chris’s EPA/Rush this game is higher than Vince Young’s EPA/Play, that’s still not really justifiable, and clearly an effort to artificially boost Chris’s rushing yardage totals, regardless of what Jeff Fisher says.

This is not an inherently bad thing. Every 2000 yard RB season without exception has some goosing like this, so it’s not a dig at Chris, but to all those Titan coaches who vociferously claim in the aftermath of this season that they did not prioritise Chris’s numbers over trying their hardest to win football games, I dare you to explain this play calling.

For week 14, we get the opposite of the 11-0 Colts, the woeful 1-12 St Louis Rams (who according to my Expected Wins model, are the second worst team of the new millennium, better only than the 2008 Lions). For perspective, our 5-7 Tennessee Titans, not exactly world beaters even during our five game win streak, walk into this game as 14 point home favourites. That’s just how poor these Rams are.

We win this game easily, 47-7, but despite this, it’s yet another poor game from Chris individually. He’s plenty explosive, with multiple runs of 15 yards or more, plus a 66 yard TD catch, but on a whopping 27 carries, he gets only to 117 yards, and is held to negative EPA/Rush for the first time since the QB change, against the woeful St Louis Ram rush defence.

Vince Young got injured early in the game, and even Kerry Collins tore the Rams to shreds, but even in a 47-7 loss, Chris Johnson was absolutely positively not going to be the one to beat them.

This is a sometimes underrated factor of being an individual player trying to reach a massive statistical milestone. The rest of the league really doesn’t want you to reach the mark. Even in a 47-7 defeat, the Rams consistently allowed us to throw on them, all to keep the rush game in check. It’s horrible football strategy, and look at where it got them, but it cannot be denied that it was effective at hemming Chris in. He’s just had his worst game of the Vince Young era for the second week in a row.

With the falloff of the last two weeks, Chris is now sitting with 1626 yards on the year, with three games left to play. That is barely on pace for 2000 (2001 yard pace), and leaves Chris needing to average 125 yards per game over the final three to reach the 2000 yard mark. On top of this, with a 6-7 record, we are still in with a shout at the final AFC playoff position, if we can go undefeated from this point.

This is decidedly inconvenient, because at least until we take an eighth loss, we cannot simply throw all of our resources into getting Chris this record. Needing to win, and also needing to get our RB big volume numbers, are two concepts that are often times at odds with one another.

Week 15 sees the two issues coming together at once, as we host the Miami Dolphins, who bring with them the unique combination of being one of several AFC teams one game ahead of us, tied at 7-6 for the final playoff position, but also having a very exploitable (23rd ranked) rush defence.

Not only is this a must-win game for the Tennessee Titans to stay in the playoff picture, but with our final two games coming against a mediocre San Diego Charger rush defence in week 16, and then a very good Seahawk rush defence in week 17, it begins to feel like a must-win game for Chris Johnson individually as well. If he can’t rack up yardage against Miami, it’s only going to get harder from here, so it would massively help if Chris could take a big bite out of those 374 yards between himself and 2000 in week 15.

He can’t.

Chris picks a horrendous occasion to have by far his worst game in months. In the first quarter, he has a lot of carries. Seven in total. One of them goes for positive EPA. Our first drive of the second quarter, where Chris goes for 40 yards on just four carries, saves this game on the stat sheet for him, and in retrospect, saves the whole 2000 yard effort, as the entire second half contains just one positive EPA carry (in 12 tries). That alone would be bad enough, but this second half also contains a back breaking fumble. This is only Chris’s second fumble (not just fumble lost) of the year, which as a RB verging on 300 carries already, is exceptional ball security, but this one is brutal, and greatly assists in allowing the Dolphins back into a game that we had been leading 24-6, squandering a 98 percent estimated WP at the beginning of the fourth quarter.

In the end, we stumble into OT tied at 24, where thank goodness we need to play no offence. The Dolphins start with the football, and promptly throw an INT deep in their own territory. We give Chris the ball three times to juice the rushing yard total just that little bit more, and then kick a FG to win this game 27-24, and keep ourselves alive at 7-7 in the playoff race, but for Chris Johnson, this game is an unmitigated disaster.

On 29 carries (the most he’s had all season), Chris can get to only 104 yards rushing, against a bottom ten Miami rush defence. He scores no TDs. He generates -9.9 total EPA individually, and our offensive malaise in the second half (to which Chris was a primary contributor) came within an eyelash of costing us a desperately needed win, that we already had all but wrapped up, leading 24-6 at the beginning of the fourth quarter.

Thankfully, we did not lose this game, so we can forget most of this, and in fact, the Tennessee Titans are looking pretty good, all things considered, with only two more teams left to pass between us and the final wild card position, but what can’t be forgotten is the scar this game leaves in Chris’s rushing totals. With only 104 yards in this game, that leaves Chris with 270 yards remaining between he and 2000, with only two games left to play, both against above average rush defences.

That’s a necessary 135 yards per game over the final two, and it’s now been a month since the Arizona game, the last time Chris got to 135 yards in a single contest.

It’s not time to grieve yet, but this feels like a tall order.

The funny thing about this particular statistical milestone is that no RB has ever gotten close to 2000 yards, but failed to achieve it. As of 2009, the most yards any RB has had in any season without actually getting to 2000 is Earl Campbell’s 1934 yards in 1980, but Earl required almost 400 yards in the final two games to reach that number. It was not a serious push at a 2000 yard season. The second most is Ahman Green’s 1883 yards in 2003, and that’s a similar story. He ran for 345 yards in the final two games just to get to 1883, and was never on pace for 2000 at any point in the season.

When a RB (and his team) commit to chase this 2000 yard goal, in the whole history of the NFL, no one has failed yet, but here we are, staring down the grizzly reality that Chris spent about five weeks on pace for 2000 yards, and with 1730 yards through 14 games, he’s on pace for only 1977 yards now.

That hurts, not only because it’d make Chris the first man ever to truly be on pace for 2000 and then fall off that pace, but also because of the missed opportunities we’ve had along the way, particularly in two games at home against the poor rushing defences of the Dolphins and Rams.

Even 30 more yards spread out over those two games would have Chris in a really good spot right now, but alas, we don’t have 30 more yards to play with, so Chris walks into a crucial game, at home against the 11-3 San Diego Chargers, 270 yards away from 2000.

The good news is that the Chargers at this point are locked into the AFC’s second seed, no matter what, and have very little to play for. The bad news is that they’re a really good football team. Of course, with seven wins in our last eight games, we’re not too shabby ourselves, and our 7-7 Titans actually come into this special Friday Night Christmas Day game as home favourites over one of the best teams the AFC has to offer. Small favourites. Basically a pick ’em, but who would’ve predicted that when we were 0-6, reeling from a 59-0 loss to the 2009 New England Patriots?

We come into this game with a real chance, in the eyes of the football community, and when Chris breaks his first carry of the game outside for 25 yards, part of a drive that nets us a FG and a quick 3-0 lead, this to me is the first time all season that the Tennessee Titans in the playoffs feels like a real thing, with a real chance of happening. We might actually defeat the San Diego Chargers. We might actually overtake the faltering Ravens and Broncos for the AFC’s final wild card position.

Then, reality sets in.

The Chargers waste almost all the rest of the first quarter with a grinding, seven minute TD drive. We respond fairly well ourselves, with Chris contributing four carries for 31 total yards to a drive that gets straight back into the San Diego red zone. Unfortunately, this chance ends in a Vince Young INT, we score no points, and before you know it, we’re down 14-3.

Regretfully, this pattern is going to continue all night long. In large part, it feels like we’re back in the first part of the season. Chris puts the team in great positions to succeed, and Vince Young squanders those opportunities. Just take a look at our offensive production breakdown in this San Diego game. It’ll look familiar:

We simply cannot beat a great team like San Diego, with Vince Young operating at -0.49 EPA/Play. This split in production is precisely what has stopped happening since we changed QBs, but for one dreadful night it’s back, and ultimately, it sinks us. We lose this game 42-17, and are mathematically eliminated from the playoffs.

Just that quick.

It feels cruel to be winners of seven of our last eight games, and still be in a must-win position against San Diego, but that’s the position we forced ourselves into early in the year. With just one loss, it’s all over for us. The guillotine that’s been hanging over the neck of the team all season long has finally fallen.

In some ways, this is painful, as ultimately, Chris’s mad dash in the middle of the season, averaging 160 yards per game over a five game win streak that brought an 0-6 team into the periphery of the playoff picture, has come to absolutely nothing, but in other ways, it’s liberating, as without the requirement to worry about the playoff push, it frees me (and the team) up to finally zero in on Chris’s individual push for 2000.

From this perspective, let’s talk about this San Diego game again.

Chris enters the game 270 yards short of 2000. One carry into the game, he’s got 25 rushing yards. 245 short of 2000. By the close of the first quarter, he has 43 total rushing yards already. 227 short of 2000. The first three plays of the second quarter are three carries for Chris, for seven, one, and six yards. 213 short of 2000.

Now behind 14-3, Chris can add only five yards on our next series before Vince Young fumbles the football away, and we fall behind 21-3. 208 short of 2000. In the two minute drill at the close of the first half, Chris has a lot of yards through the air, but only adds four on the ground. We do score a TD, but Chris remains 204 short of 2000.

The second half opens with an incompletion, then a second and ten carry for seven, and a third and three carry for two. Three and out, but nine additional yards. 195 short of 2000. Our hopeless defence has no chance of stopping Philip Rivers. We fall behind 28-10. Regrettably, since the coaches are not willing to throw the playoff chances away yet, we spend out next drive exclusively throwing. We do not score. The Chargers do, and now behind 35-10 with five minutes left in the third quarter, our play callers are singing a different tune.

The first three plays are all carries, for 14 yards between them. The fourth play is yet another INT. 180 short of 2000. We fall behind 42-10. From this point, weirdly enough, the two football teams begin working together to achieve the same goal. Of our nine offensive plays in the fourth quarter, six of them are handoffs to Chris. The Chargers, content to watch us run the clock out on ourselves, are happy to allow this. They remain in their nickel package for the bulk of the fourth quarter, encouraging us to rush. The lack of effort from the Charger defenders is also staggeringly obvious.

As a result, Chris gashes through them in the fourth, going for 53 yards (including a 30 yard TD run, during which the Chargers clearly just don’t want to chase him) on his six carries in just this quarter, to finish this game up with 142 rushing yards, and go into the final week of the season just 128 yards short of 2000.

When things like this happen, it begins to feel somewhat artificial, but that’s only a feeling. Empty yards in blowout losses (especially in older eras, where teams running out the clock on themselves was once more common than it is in 2026) are just as much a part of the work of a RB as any of the other yards are.

We can talk a little bit about how it happened, but in a results-oriented business, Chris came into this game needing a fantastic performance to retain a realistic chance of getting to 2000 in week 17, and not only did he get that, he ate up more than half of the 270 yards he needed. He also went for his highest success rate of the season (55 percent), and 0.22 EPA/Rush, albeit with many of those carries coming against a Charger defence deliberately trying to entice us into running the football, and not trying especially hard to tackle Chris when we did hand it off, but that’s not his fault. Sometimes as a RB, you get the advantage of running into an 11-3 team whose defenders do not want to hurt themselves in the fourth quarter of a blowout win, and you get 53 desperately needed fourth quarter yards out of it. That’s the brakes.

Any way you slice it, this was a fantastic game. It rings similar to the Patriot game earlier in the year, where Chris also played very well in a blowout loss, but at the end of the day, especially to a position with such a minimal impact on the outcome of the game as that of a RB, they all count, and when you add up all of Chris’s production to this point, you get 1872 rushing yards, through 15 games.

128 short of 2000, with one game to play.

On a side note, yards from scrimmage (or total yards) is not a statistic that many people care to pay attention to, but Chris also enters this game with 2355 of those, just 75 yards short of Marshall Faulk’s record of 2429, set in 1999. If he reaches 2000, his abilities as a receiver (mostly a few long TDs) mean he will be also be the all-time single season scrimmage yards record holder. He can also set this record without getting to 2000, but going into the final game, all the focus is on the 2000 yard season. Will Chris become the sixth RB ever to rush for 2000 yards in a season, or will he become the first RB ever to be on serious 2000 yard pace, and fail to reach the mark?

What better team to come up against in the final game of such a quest than the 2009 Seattle Seahawks, who are very bad (5-10 coming into this game), mostly due to one of the worst pass defences in football, but they do come packing the league’s ninth best EPA/Play rush defence.

It’s a horrible opponent to run into in week 17, because they know their main weakness is in pass defence, as do we, but they also know, as do we, that we will be hesitant to attack this weakness, in fear of leaving Chris a little short on yardage, as we did in the 47-7 win over St Louis.

This is the second best rush defence we’ve played all season (once again, no knock on Chris. There is no 2000 yard back without an easy defensive schedule), and the second of only two top ten rush defences we come across all season long. To Chris’s credit, he did go for 135 yards against the other one (San Francisco).

135 yards against Seattle will do the trick, but this is a good rush defence, who knows we’re going to be rushing. This will not be easy.

We come out on the first drive showing our colours immediately. We will try to throw enough to keep the Seahawks honest, but with the playoffs no longer a possibility, we are here to get Chris Johnson 2000 yards, come hell or high water. On the first drive of this game, he carries the ball eight times, which by my count, is the most he’s touched the ball on any possession all season. I cannot argue with the results though, as on his eight carries, he goes for 35 yards, including the six yard TD rush that puts us up 7-0.

97 short of 2000.

We spend the rest of the first quarter doing nothing offensively. Chris does manage to accumulate five miscellaneous rushing yards during this period, but it becomes clear quickly that if he wants to set this record, he’s going to have to do it against eight man run boxes. There are exceptions, almost exclusively on third downs, but for the first stage of this game, it’s an eight man run box basically all the time.

By the time Chris breaks Earl Campbell’s Oiler/Titan franchise rushing record of 1934 yards, we’re already at the three minute mark of the second quarter. The two minute drill at the end of a half is not the time or place to chase rushing records, but the Titans do smartly sneak one carry in, when we finally find an opportunity without an eight man run box. That one carry goes for ten yards, and we go into the locker room. The game is tied 7-7, but does that really matter at this point? Tell me the number we all really want to know.

55 yards short of 2000.

This has not been a particularly good rushing game for Chris, nor has it been a good offensive game for the Tennessee Titans. He’s also set the all-time single season scrimmage yards record on a pass catch in the midst of that first half, but by this point, we’re beyond all that. Through sheer volume of carries (19 in one half), Chris has managed to get more than halfway there. 73 rushing yards down. 55 to go.

Seattle kick a FG on their opening drive of the second half, to put us behind 10-7, but the outcome of the game is entirely secondary to what we’re really here for. For our real purpose here, what we need to worry about is the continuance of the eight man run boxes. Barring third downs, there is an eight man run box on every play of our opening series of the half.

Perhaps due to these eight man boxes, and perhaps due to his own haste to get to the 2000 yard mark, Chris Johnson is clearly not his usual self today. Not only does Chris post rushing yards below expected in this game (his only negative RYOE game all year), but you can see it, even with an untrained eye, watching the game. Normally, Chris is a very patient RB, to the point of frequent criticism, over supposedly wanting to break every play outside, but today, Chris is getting straight up and down at every opportunity.

For some backs, North and South as a style works, but Chris Johnson is 5’11”, and less than 200 pounds. He is the polar opposite of a North-South RB, but right now, he’s playing like one. It’s not very successful, but it’s difficult to stop an offensive line as good as ours from generating yardage when we commit to doing it, even if our RB is not playing the greatest.

Chris carries the ball another seven times on this drive, for four, two, four, seven, four, five, and four yards, as we kick a FG to tie the game at ten. 25 yards short of 2000. Our next drive is a total disaster for Chris, as after fumbling just once in the first 13 games, he fumbles for the second time in the final three, gifting Seattle precious field position, and a 13-10 lead. Nevertheless, it is nine additional rush yards, and we enter the final quarter of the season just 16 yards short of 2000.

With a whole quarter left to play (even though we don’t touch the football until the 12 minute mark), and only 16 more yards needed, the final result is becoming a foregone conclusion. The 13-10 deficit is a hindrance, but Chris almost certainly (barring injury) is going to make 2000 from this position.

With this now decided, we come out in a personnel group I really like to begin the fourth quarter. It’s three WRs, two backs, and no TE. Spreading the defence out like this forces their hand, gets them out of the eight man run box, and almost puts Chris in a position to make an entirely different kind of history.

After an eight yard carry on first and ten that leaves Chris just eight yards short of 2000, on second down and two, the plates Seattle had been trying to spin for the entire game finally break. Chris is still not his patient self, but the hole opens up wide for him, and even on a bad day, his speed will never abandon him. There are two DBs with angles on him. Chris outruns them both. It’s a 62 yard TD run.

In typical CJ2K fashion, Chris has not merely reached 2000. He’s done it with a bang, and we’re not finished, because now here we sit, with 2054 rushing yards, and 11 minutes left to go in a game that we’re now leading 17-13. This leaves Chris with an outside chance to challenge Eric Dickerson’s magical 2105.

54 rushing yards is a lot to ask in the final 11 minutes of the fourth quarter, particularly since Seattle’s offensive possession is going to take plenty of time off that, but there was a chance here. Had this 62 yard TD been allowed to stand, there’s a possibility we could’ve seen 2105.

Alas, some things just aren’t meant to be. The 62 yard rush is called back by a holding penalty. A correctly called holding penalty, I must add, but behind the play, with no impact on its outcome. In the wake of this game, the officials are criticised heavily, particularly by Titan fans and those who dislike Eric Dickerson (there are many), that given the moment, such a penalty (an obvious hold, but with no impact on the final outcome of the play) should not have been called. Regardless, it was called, and instead of 2054 and a somewhat realistic shot at Eric Dickerson, Chris does get six yards of credit for this play, but all the rest of wiped out, leaving him back on the other side of 2000. Two yards short.

This holding penalty is a huge disappointment, and takes Chris’s name out of a much more prominent position in the NFL history books, one which he may have been able to occupy, as the all-time single season rushing leader.

Now back to 1998 yards with 11 minutes left in the game, Chris will not be the all-time single season rushing leader, but there is one more thing I feel I have to prove to you, and the perfect chance to do so reveals itself on the very next play. In the wake of this 62 yard run, Chris is tired, and takes a play off, so the next play of our possession is a one yard rush for LenDale White.

This one yard rush for LenDale White is the first carry taken by any Titan (not counting scrambles) other than Chris Johnson since we played Indianapolis, on December 6. The current date is January 3. It’s been a month since the Tennessee Titans have handed the ball to anybody else in the rush game.

In fact, after the second Jacksonville game, which really got this march towards 2000 started, if you add the whole rest of the season together, you come to a grand total of 15 carries taken by RBs other than Chris Johnson. Chris himself has taken 239 carries in the same nine game time span.

Going back to the 2008 Draft, virtually everybody said Chris would never be a lead back at the NFL level. He was too small. Too insistent on trying to create the big play all the time. Chris was a so-called ‘change of pace’ guy, and would never work as any team’s main RB. Worth drafting highly for his immense athleticism and big play ability, they said, but not the main guy, they said.

Looking back on the last nine weeks of NFL action, where the Titans lead the NFL in rushing attempts, virtually all of them taken by Chris Johnson, and not just empty rushing attempts, but rushing attempts on a team with a 7-2 record to boot, I wonder what they are saying now.

It would’ve been a much better ending to the story to end it with one of those signature CJ2K 60+ yard runs, but instead, Chris reaches 2000 yards on a rather nondescript four yard gain up the middle. There is shockingly little fanfare. We punt the football, but he has done it.

Chris Johnson has joined OJ Simpson, Eric Dickerson, Barry Sanders, Terrell Davis, and Jamal Lewis, as the sixth RB in NFL history to rush for 2000 yards in one season.

We do end up winning this game, 17-13, to close the season a respectable 8-8, but it’s not got much to do with Chris’s individual contributions. As I said, this is likely his worst individual game of the season. Don’t let the ending distract you though from exactly what Chris accomplished here.

2000 yards in one season.

Think about that. Two thousand. A good NFL team in 2009 will have around 5600 yards of total offence in a year, and we were a good offensive team, finishing with 5623 total yards on the season. Of that total, Chris’s 2006 yards rushing account for 35.7 percent of that. Neither of our QBs can match that proportion. Vince Young threw for 1879 yards. Kerry Collins threw for 1225. No receiver can come anywhere near that proportion, our leading WR (Kenny Britt) topping out at just 701 yards.

Perhaps the best way to praise Chris Johnson in 2009 is to simply say this Titan offence was good. This Titan offence, with Kenny Britt and Nate Washington at WR1 and WR2, with Bo Scaife starting at TE, with a deeply heated QB controversy going on for almost half the year, which ultimately resulted in Vince Young being the QB we went with. I intend no disrespect to any of the men I’ve just named (and must also shout out a rock solid offensive line, without whom none of this would’ve been possible), but the list of guys up there is a veritable ‘who’s that?’ of the NFL in the late 2000s.

This gaggle of guys, led by HC Jeff Fisher and OC Mike Heimerdinger, neither of whom are offensive gurus either, was a positive EPA/Play offence in 2009. If we segment things to after we’d finally resolved the QB controversy, we were the fourth best offence in the final ten weeks of 2009.

I continue to reference the Vince Young turning point, and that change at QB very much was the turning point, for Chris and for the whole team, but Vince had been a very good QB who dramatically underachieved his 0.153 xEPA/Play in 2007. In 2009, he got 0.143 EPA/Play out of 0.140 xEPA/Play, and why do you think that is? Was our receiver group in 2009 better than that of 2007? I’d argue it was worse. Did Vince’s offensive scheme get much better, moving from the offensive coaching duo of Jeff Fisher and Mike Heimerdinger to… Jeff Fisher and Mike Heimerdinger?

Obviously not. The difference is that in 2009, the Titans had a back who scared opposing defences. That allowed the QB to play better, and everybody else alongside him.

The offence went as Chris did, ranking fourth in EPA/Play in those final ten weeks, despite ranking 17th in offensive success rate in the same span. The difference in the rush game is even more pronounced, as we ranked third in EPA/Rush, but 23rd in success rate.

As I’ve been saying all along, Chris Johnson is an unapologetically boom-or-bust player. In 2009, there was a lot of bust, but enough boom to make this into a viable offensive strategy, for a team that went 8-2 in our final ten games.

This makes Chris unique amongst his 2000 yard peers. Amongst the nine players who have rushed for 2000 yards in a season (five before Chris, three afterwards), Chris’s 43.6 percent football reference success rate (NFLFastR success rate is not avilable for all these players) is by far the lowest of the group. The next lowest is Jamal Lewis, and he’s over 45 percent. Most 2000 yard seasons feature success rates 50 percent or higher, RBs consistently keeping their teams ahead of the chains, which is why they kept getting the ball.

This is not true in Chris’s case. The opposite is true. In terms of keeping the Titans ahead of the chains, he was not even as good as the league average RB in his own 2009 season, and in historical terms, he is utterly blown away, but as I said, Chris is unique amongst the 2000 yard club. He did it his way. He did it via the big play.

He did it via the three 85+ yard runs in one season. He did it with 14 runs of 30 yards or more. He did it with 22 rushes of more than 20 yards, all in one season. For reference, the most recent 2000 yard rusher, Saquon Barkley, not an unexplosive player himself, had only ten rushes of 30 or more yards in his 2000 yard season, and only 17 rushes of 20 yards or more.

These differences (four more runs of 30+ yards, five more runs of 20+ yards) may not seem big, but they are big. 14 vs 10 is a 40% increase, and this is a comparison against Saquon Barkley, in his 2000 yard year. What chance does a regular old RB in 2009 have to stack up against Chris Johnson?

If there is such a thing as an established formula for getting to 2000 yards in a season, Chris completely ignored it, but with his immense athleticism, and unprecedented explosiveness even amongst 2000 yard rushers, he reached the goal anyway. He did this despite his low success rates, and even despite only 0.95 RYOE per carry in 2009, fourth among the four 2000 yard seasons in the RYOE era, and not even his league’s leader.

Additionally. Chris is the outlier in the 2000 yard club in one other very important way. He is the only one to cross the 2000 yard plateau on a team that did not make the playoffs. Not only that, but if we’re being realistic with ourselves, this Titan team did not even come close to making the playoffs. We did do an admirable job of making an 0-6 start into a team that still had a chance at the playoffs in week 16, if we managed to beat the 11-3 Chargers, and got help over the final two weeks from both the Ravens and Broncos, but if it’s even possible to be mathematically eliminated with a game left to play, you’re not that close, and we weren’t that close.

In fact, of all Titan offensive snaps in 2009, we were trailing for 47 percent of them. That may sound good on the surface, because it’s less than 50, but those are horrible conditions for a RB to try to put up volume numbers. In 2024, Saquon Barkley’s Eagles were trailing for only 31.7 percent of all offensive snaps. Even Adrian Peterson’s 2012 Vikings, not exactly the world beaters that the 2024 Eagles were, were only trailing for 32.4 percent of their offensive snaps.

To put up big volume numbers as a RB, you generally have to be on a good overall team, because you generally have to be ahead, but if there’s anything CJ2K is not, it’s general. These Titans were not a good team, did not make the playoffs, and were behind for basically half of all our snaps, but Chris overcame all that, to become a 2000 yard man anyway.

I do not mean to paint all seasons with the same brush, but every 2000 yard season goes the same way. The workhorse back on a good overall team, with QB play that is not good enough to force the coach into throwing it. Chris Johnson’s 2009 takes all those rules and does not just break them. It ignores their existence.

We were not a good team. We finished with negative Net EPA/Play, largely because of our 23rd ranked defence. We also did not suffer through especially poor QB play. Vince Young ranked 11th in EPA/Play in 2009, which is unexceptional, but as far as QBs for 2000 yard rushers go, only 2020 Ryan Tannehill and 1998 John Elway are better.

Perhaps it’s fitting that CJ2K is such an absolute outlier, even amongst the 2000 yard club, because it encapsulates what an absolute outlier he is in life. From the record breaking speed, to being one of the first of the new vanguard of ‘change of pace’ backs becoming RB1s in the NFL, to lasting eight solid years in the NFL (still staying strong around zero RYOE per carry in his final injury-free season in Arizona), despite his small frame, to surviving a drive-by shooting in Orlando, FLorida, to everything he’s accomplished after his football career.

It was never the same for Chris Johnson on the football field after 2009, mostly due to his offensive line dropping off by over a full yard in terms of expected yards per carry from 2009 to 2010, and never truly recovering, but all it took was one season for the man to leave an indelible mark in the minds of football fans everywhere.

Then, on June 29, he made another indelible mark in my mind.

An ALS diagnosis forces those diagnosed into a single, brutally unfair choice: fight or give up. Chris chose to fight. To fight despite the fact that progress on ALS research continues to prove stubbornly slow and disappointing. To fight despite the fact that this choice will force him to watch his own body, once the peak of human athleticism, wither away before his eyes. More and more every day.

For an athlete like Chris, whose livelihood was his body for a four year college football career, and then a ten year NFL football career, the pain of having to watch that body abandon him like this must be indescribable, but he fights on anyway, both because his name is big, and his public struggle may help others going through the same thing he is, both through inspiration and through increased attention to the cause, and also because of his wife Brittany, and their four children, for whom his body was never the primary source of love to begin with. Every additional day with their father is a day those children will remember for the rest of their lives, and I applaud and respect Chris greatly for doing everything he can to give them even just a few months more of those days.

Everybody out there, I encourage you to send up a prayer (or just a well wish, if praying isn’t your thing) for Chris and the Johnson family, and for all families with one of their own stricken by this cruel affliction.

Normally, this is the part at the end of the article where I close with ‘never forget Chris Johnson’s Year,’ but given the circumstances, this time I’ll shorten the sentence a little bit.

Never forget Chris Johnson.

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Thanks so much for reading.