While Tennessee Titans fans were celebrating the acquisition of free-agent wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins on Sunday, they were also inundated with some of the worst takes you will ever see.
Hell, even Hopkins himself caught wind of them, saying, “I always loved having haters and doubters but I appreciate it even more now.”
Not only did so many salty haters come out of the woodwork, we were also reminded of just how little people outside of the fan base and local media (with a few exceptions) really know about the Titans.
Of course, none of this stuff is new, and we see it anytime the Titans make national headlines for any reason, especially when it’s the result of the team making a big addition like Hopkins.
I always loved having haters and doubters but I appreciate it even more now. Titan up!!
— Deandre Hopkins (@DeAndreHopkins) July 17, 2023
So, I thought it would be fun to list some of the worst takes out there in the wake of the Hopkins signing and then go over why they’re so wrong.
Hopkins is washed up
If DeAndre Hopkins ended up in Kansas City or Buffalo, not ONE person would call him washed.
I understand analyzing those offenses versus #Titans, but the analysis of the player shouldn't change.
— Justin M (@JustinM_NFL) July 17, 2023
I’m guessing this is mostly jealousy from fans of other teams who wanted Hopkins on theirs, but the idea that Hopkins is washed just isn’t based in reality. Justin Melo of The Draft Network’s tweet above puts it perfectly.
I will preface this by saying it’s certainly possible Hopkins starts to decline in 2023 at the age of 31, but automatically assuming that will be the case just isn’t a belief rooted in reality.
Hopkins tallied 717 yards in nine games last season. If you take his 79.7 yards per game and apply it to a full 17 games, that comes out to 1,354 receiving yards, which would’ve ranked eighth in the NFL.
Also bear in mind, Hopkins didn’t have Kyler Murray for four of the games he played in, and Murray also exited another early after throwing just one pass.
Then, there’s these stats, courtesy of Player Profiler:
Reasons DeAndre Hopkins isn’t washed:
🥇 5.71 Average Cushion 1st
🥈 43.4% Air Yard Share – 2nd
🥈 47% Win Rate Vs Man – 2nd
4️⃣ 51.8% Route Win Rate – 4th
4️⃣ 29.4% Target Share – 4thElite Separator. Elite Target Commander. Elite Receiver.#Titanspic.twitter.com/dPWf75LQFd
— PlayerProfiler (@rotounderworld) July 17, 2023
My right-hand man Shaun Calderon did a great job dispelling this take in a separate article, which you can check out right here.
Hopkins is another Moss, Johnson, Julio
There’s no question the Titans have an ugly history when it comes to bringing in big-named wide receivers who are getting up there in age, and we’ve seen no shortage of people referencing that in the wake of the Hopkins signing.
But context is important here and simply pointing to those three and saying Hopkins is destined to fail just isn’t doing your homework.
RIP: 2023, DeAndre Hopkins career.
Tennessee is where receivers go to die.
He should’ve gone to KC or Philly and played with competent quarterbacks and have a chance to win a ring.
(Also if he would have played well with Mahomes or Hurts and got a ring, he would get PAID…
— MLFootball (@_MLFootball) July 16, 2023
Randy Moss was sent packing by two different teams and was clearly not the same player in the eight games he played prior to joining the Titans, with the Hall of Famer, who was two years older than Nuk, tallying 313 yards in eight contests before his arrival in Nashville, where he totally checked out.
Andre Johnson, who was 35, was also clearly washed before joining the Titans after totaling just 503 yards and four scores in 16 games with the Indianapolis Colts the campaign prior. He retired before finishing the campaign in Tennessee.
Julio Jones is the only semblance of a logical case to point to because he actually had more yards in nine games (771) in the year before coming to Tennessee than Hopkins (717) did.
But Jones was also a year older and showed signs of physical decline, with injuries hampering him during the 2020 season, leading to him missing seven contests, the most he had sat out since 2013.
That brings me to another lazy narrative I’ve seen that claims Hopkins is injury-prone. That couldn’t be further from the truth, as the 31-year-old played in 15 games or more in each of his first eight seasons, including appearing in every game in six of them.
He did battle injury in 2021, but one year is hardly enough proof to call someone injury prone. He appeared in just nine games in 2022, but six of those games missed were the result of a suspension, and the other two appear to be Hopkins simply not wanting to risk injury in two meaningless games.
DeAndre Hopkins upset some in the Cardinals organization by sitting out the final two games of the 2022 season even though he was healthy, per sources. It may have been a sticky situation if he remained with the team until the trade deadline.
— Kyle Odegard (@Kyle_Odegard) May 26, 2023
Hopkins is injury-prone
The point about Julio’s injury concerns brings me to another horribly wrong narrative I’ve seen that claims Hopkins is injury-prone.
That couldn’t be further from the truth, as the 31-year-old played in 15 games or more in each of his first eight seasons, including appearing in every game in six of them.
He did battle injury in 2021, but one year is hardly enough proof to call someone injury prone.
He appeared in just nine games in 2022, but six of those games missed were the result of a suspension, and the other two appear to have been Hopkins simply not wanting to risk injury in two meaningless games.
DeAndre Hopkins upset some in the Cardinals organization by sitting out the final two games of the 2022 season even though he was healthy, per sources. It may have been a sticky situation if he remained with the team until the trade deadline.
— Kyle Odegard (@Kyle_Odegard) May 26, 2023
Titans should've just paid A.J. Brown
For the Titans, not signing AJ Brown forced the team to overpay for DeAndre Hopkins. No one else was close to offering 2-YRs / $26M. It's "The Three Stooges" drilling a hole to let the water out of a sinking boat.
Check out #GMShuffle at https://t.co/b4sYN4CC91 pic.twitter.com/MiRBVDElqo
— Michael Lombardi (@mlombardiNFL) July 17, 2023
Former NFL GM Michael Lombardi gives us two bad takes for the price of one here. We’ll start with the idea that the Titans should’ve just paid A.J. Brown and it having anything to do with the Hopkins signing.
For starters, yes, the Titans should’ve paid A.J. Brown, but that has nothing to do with the current situation. The guy who made that blunder, Jon Robinson, isn’t with the team anymore, at least partly because he botched it so badly with Brown.
Connecting that with new general manager Ran Carthon trying to clean up the mess Robinson left at wide receiver is just silly in every sense of the word.
I’d also venture to guess Mike Vrabel would’ve paid Brown if it were solely up to him. I mean, just look at his reaction upon learning the Titans traded their star wide receiver.
Mike Vrabel won the power-struggle with Jon Robinson. This was his reaction to the A.J. Brown trade during the Draft.
Of course, it was also Robinson that drafted Brown in the 2nd round in the first place. Gave the Titans 4 cheap rookie years and then flipped him for a 1st. pic.twitter.com/mMUryPNlkC
— Dov Kleiman (@NFL_DovKleiman) December 6, 2022
On top of all that, the Titans paid Hopkins a deal that could reach up to $32 million over two years, while Brown netted a deal that pays him $100 million over four. I’m no mathematician, but those are vastly different figures and, in turn, levels of commitment.
Titans overpaid for Hopkins
For Round 2 with Lombardi’s bad takes, we move to the idea that the Titans overpaid for Hopkins.
We start with the fact that the Baltimore Ravens are paying Odell Beckham Jr. $15 million (and up to $18 million with incentives) for one year after he didn’t play a single snap in 2022 because of a torn ACL, which was his second since the 2020 campaign.
That in and of itself shows that the Hopkins deal is a good one, and I’d argue an absolute steal if Hopkins pans out. But it’s also worth noting that mostly unproven guys like Allen Lazard and Jakobi Meyers are getting an annual average of just $2 million less than Hopkins in their respective deals, and with a longer commitment.
Top 2023 Free Agent WR Contracts
Allen Lazard: 4 yrs, $44M
Jakobi Meyers: 3 yrs, $33M
DeAndre Hopkins: 2 yrs, $26M
JuJu Smith-Schuster: 3 yrs, $25.5M
Adam Thielen: 3 yrs, $25M
Robert Woods: 2 yrs, $15.25M
Odell Beckham, Jr.: 1 yr, $15M
Darius Slayton: 2 yrs, $12M— Spotrac (@spotrac) July 16, 2023
If I had lined up the deals of Hopkins, Meyers, Lazard and Beckham and asked someone to choose which one they’d take, there isn’t a soul on the planet who wouldn’t have picked Hopkins’.
If you say otherwise, you’re either uninformed or flat-out lying.
Ridley is a better addition than Hopkins
Calvin Ridley better than aging DeAndre Hopkins as a veteran receiver added to the AFC South.
— Pete Prisco (@PriscoCBS) July 16, 2023
CBS Sports analyst and noted Jaguars fan, Pete Prisco, came through with this banger in the wake of Hopkins choosing Tennessee, and it couldn’t be more wrong, at least before things kick off in 2023.
I personally love Calvin Ridley as a player and think he has the potential to be one of the league’s best, but can we see more than one year of elite production before crowning him better than Hopkins, who has several?
Adding to that, Ridley didn’t play a single snap last season due to suspension, while Hopkins was still balling out.
I also love Prisco calling Hopkins “aging” as if he’s ancient as compared to Ridley, who is set to turn 29 in December and is just two years younger than the 31-year-old Hopkins. Nuk also had six seasons of elite production under his belt at Ridley’s current age.
Now this is not to say Ridley won’t prove to be better than Hopkins when it comes to 2023 specifically, but saying so before seeing a single snap is just a bad, bad take, Pete.
I’d also like to point out that the Jags had a top-10 passing offense even without Ridley last year, while the Titans are coming off a season in which they sported the 30th-ranked unit. The Titans needed Hopkins far more than the Jaguars needed Ridley.
We owe Carthon, Vrabel an apology
This one is definitely more on the tame side of the takes listed here, but it’s still worth noting.
Greg Arias of All Titans believes Titans fans and media owe Vrabel and Carthon an apology because we doubted both when they preached patience, noting there was still time to get an impact wide receiver later in the offseason, which was absurd at the time.
After all, the free-agent market at wide receiver, which wasn’t great to begin with, had dried up and the team opted not to take a wide receiver in the early rounds of the draft, instead taking Colton Dowell in the seventh round.
And, at the time Vrabel and Carthon were preaching this, Hopkins wasn’t even a free agent yet, let alone someone the Titans were considered a frontrunner for.
Unless you can show me proof the duo knew Hopkins would ultimately join the Titans while spurning Super Bowl contenders and not having much of a market overall to give the Titans a better chance, they got more lucky than anything else, and that’s not something we owe them an apology for.
Now, that’s not to say there isn’t credit due to both, because their patience paid off and, when taking into consideration his talent and the deal itself as compared to others for free-agent wide receivers, landing Hopkins was the very best outcome possible.
But that’s as far as I’ll go, because while everything worked out, the approach was risky as hell and could have left them with nothing.
Pats and Jones were a better option than Titans and Tannehill
DeAndre Hopkins really chose Ryan Tannehill over Mac Jones. That’s wild.
— Jordan Moore (@iJordanMoore) July 16, 2023
My response to the tweet above is, why wouldn’t he?
Mac Jones had an impressive rookie season, no doubt, but he struggled mightily in 2022 and there was talk at one point he would be replaced by seventh-rounder, Bailey Zappe, who could still take his job in 2023.
Meanwhile, Tannehill has been the quarterback of an elite offense in multiple seasons (2019 and 2020) with the Titans and has supported a 1,000-yard receiver twice.
In what was considered a down year in 2021, Tannehill still threw for 3,734 yards and completed 67.2 percent of his passes. The Titans also finished with the No. 1 seed despite being ravaged by injuries.
There’s no doubt 2022 was an abject disaster for Tannehill and Co., but again we have to add context to that. The Titans were again ravaged by injuries and Tannehill played behind arguably the worst offensive line in the NFL, while also having a group of receivers that couldn’t get open. The veteran signal-caller also missed five games due to an ankle injury.
Even with all that, the Titans were one Josh Dobbs win away from winning the division and making the playoffs.
All of this is not to say that Jones won’t end up being as good or better than Tannehill at some point down the road, but there’s not enough track record for Jones to make that statement right now.
I’ll also say there were several potential reasons why Hopkins chose the Titans.
Certainly the quarterback could be one of them, but the Titans also have a better team overall on both sides of the ball, a much better situation in the division, giving them a clearer path to the playoffs, and they reportedly offered more money.
So, to take my initial question a step further, why wouldn’t he choose the Titans over the Patriots?
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