This Sunday, the Tennessee Titans will "visit" the Los Angeles Chargers at Wembley Stadium in London, England. They're traveling across the pond, and they are going to upset the "home" team favorites. Right now we have the Bolts as 6.5-point favorites in a low-scoring 45-point game.
The Chargers have been one of the more sneaky-great teams in the NFL this season. They're 4-2, but their two losses have come at the hands of the two best offenses in the league according to our power rankings. Heck, going into Week 7 our metrics have the Chargers as the third-best team in the league! But going against them is the fact that they're a long way from home. The West Coast team played a road game against the Cleveland Browns last Sunday. Then, rather than returning home, the team stayed in Cleveland to prepare for their upcoming London game, leaving them with a pretty brutal travel schedule.
The Chargers offense has been rolling recently, but the Titans defense has been a quagmire for opposing offenses. They're not great, but they're only giving up 15.7 fantasy points per game to opposing quarterbacks (fifth-fewest in the league) and 16.4 fantasy points to opposing running backs (also fifth-fewest). Teams are beating the Titans, but they aren't doing it prettily.
The Titans offense has been one of the most frustrating units in the NFL this season. They flashed moments of brilliance -- like when they bested last year's Superbowl champs in overtime in Week 4 -- and moments of complete incompetence -- like last week when they surrendered 11 sacks to the Baltimore Ravens' elite defense. Last week's shutout loss was demoralizing for sure, but they'll turn it around against a Chargers defense missing Joey Bosa and generating just an average number of sacks per game.
Marcus Mariota will have more time to throw and will be throwing against a defense that plays surprisingly well to his strengths. According to Warren Sharp's Directional Passer Rating and Directional Passer Rating Allowed charts, Mariota's strengths -- short throws and throws deep and to the right -- are coincidentally the Bolts' weaknesses. Passes to the deep right of the Chargers' secondary should particularly stand out. Mariota has a 96 passer rating on such throws, while the Chargers are allowing a crazy-high rating of 146 to that area of the field.
A similar trend shows up in this week's edition of The Report for rushing attempts. According to the Team Directional Rushing heat map JJ Zachariason put together, the Titans have the most success rushing the ball in the same direction that the Chargers struggle the most at stopping it.
This doesn't mean that the Titans will all of a sudden look like a totally different (or competent) offense -- it just means that the Titans' strengths on offense match up well against the Chargers' weaknesses. The Chargers have been 12-14 in games played in the Eastern Time Zone dating back to 2007 and lost in their only other appearance in Wembley Stadium. This is a perfect bounce-back spot for the struggling Titans on neutral ground.