Locked On Titans - Daily Podcast On The Tennessee Titans - Locked on Titans: A deeper look at Marcus Mariota's interceptions

Episode Date: June 6, 2018

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Welcome in to another edition of Locked On Titans. I'm Jimmy Morris, joined as always by Terry Lambert. Terry, how are you tonight? Doing pretty well. What's going on, man? Not too much. We have a special guest tonight, Justin Graber. We'll get to him in just a sec. Before we do that, I remind you, Terry and I write for MusicCityMiracles.com. We cover the Titans for SB Nation. So check us out there. Between podcasts, you can find everything that's going on with the Titans over there. You can also follow us on Twitter.

I am at jmorksmcm. Terry's at tlambertfb. Podcast account at LockedOnTitans. So you can find us at all those places. And you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Spotify, check us out there. Rate and review, that helps us out. So if you would do that, we would appreciate it.

Like I said, tonight we havein graver on with us uh justin graver also writes for music miracles.com you can follow him on titans i mean on twitter he's at titans film room a lot of cool stuff that he does over there recently he's been putting together a series on where he looked at all of marcus mariotta's interceptions from 2017 so we're going to talk to him a little bit about that tonight. Before we do that, we will let you hear a word from a new sponsor of our podcast. Guys, remember the days when you were always ready to go in bed? Now you can increase your performance and get that extra confidence. Listen up.

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Like I said, recently he's been breaking down each one of Marcus Mariota's interceptions from 2017. So at the beginning, just kind of a high-level overview, have you already looked at all of them? Well, first let me just thank you guys so much for having me on. I appreciate it, and I'm excited to talk about this. I have looked at all of them, yes. and I'm excited to talk about this. I have looked at all of them, yes. I've diagrammed the play concepts offensive and defensively for all the interceptions.

And, you know, it wasn't the easiest thing to go back and rewatch, but it's been pretty educational. Yeah, okay, so, you know, Terry and I obviously are big Marcus Mariota fans, as you are as well. And we were talking maybe last week about how we'll go on podcasts with different people that cover different teams. And they're generally surprised about how confident we are in Marcus Mariota going forward. They also never can pronounce his name, but that's another story for another day um but you know we obviously we've you know sat here and watched all all of his all of his games we we've you know followed that as it's gone along and we know

the offense and you know all that stuff that they wanted to play last year so um you know again we we probably put more of the you know the the reasoning for the for the backslide or the seemingly backslide that he did last year on the the offense but as you've looked at these different plays what's your kind of high level overview of what you think was going on with marcus mariotta last year right so I definitely expected uh when I started this experiment that I would find a lot of wide receiver error and impossible offense to operate type of stuff because I kind of feel and even after watching all this I don't really feel that Mariota regressed as a quarterback as a player on the field last year.

He may not have taken the steps forward that we expected to see in his third year. And statistically, of course, he regressed, massive regression by the numbers. But as far as going through his reads and analyzing the defense and throwing no-look passes and all the things we're used to seeing Mariota do well, he still was doing those things. The touchdowns were less frequent. I mean, if you try to judge a quarterback from passing yards and touchdowns, that's just a mistake from the beginning because so much of passing yards

and touchdowns is based on the offensive scheme that the team runs. And if you look at Mariota's total touchdowns, he had five rushing touchdowns last year, so he did have 18 touchdowns, even though only 13 of them were passing. Anyway, on to the 15 interceptions, 16 including the postseason game. I noticed that I put five interceptions on the year total on his teammates. One of those, Taewon Taylor straight up fell down. Rashard Matthews ran the complete wrong route on one.

The Kansas City one, Corey Davis, obviously ran the wrong route. That one's probably the most famous receiver error of his interceptions last year. And then the other two were both in the Pittsburgh Steelers game where Mariota had his first four-interception game of his career. But other than those five, the other 11 were really on him. And it's nothing that's glaring or going to be a problem going forward in his career, but it's okay to sit here and admit that he still has work to do as a quarterback, even though he shows all the traits of excellence that he can grow into

once he becomes more consistent and cuts out some of these mistakes. So the biggest mistakes that I noticed were footwork, got sloppy, and in the series I'm doing, I feel like I'm painting him in a really bad way because I'm only showing the negatives over and over and over again. So it looks like he has sloppy footwork on every throw, but it's just all of his interceptions so far he has floppy footwork. And then the other big thing is just trying really hard to make a play and forcing the ball downfield when there's really nothing there

when it's covered downfield and passing up an open check down option underneath. Those are the biggest issues I'm seeing. Footwork and testing a defense when you shouldn't test a defense. Now, in this series, there's maybe three interceptions that are just straight up. What were you thinking? Why did you throw that? Bad plays. And that's going to happen to every quarterback at some point. And they're all learning moments. They're all teaching moments. I think that Marietta is going to learn from all this, and I think the new offense will definitely help because it will not stress so much the downfield element of passing. It'll be more

balanced. They'll put the players in space, receivers in space to catch the ball with no defenders near them. Marietta had the highest percentage of tight window attempted passes last year. So I think that you give him space to operate and clear defined reads and stop asking him to press downfield so much, and we'll see massive improvements statistically this season.

So you said there were only, I think you said five instances that you put on the receivers. That's surprising to me because after every game, you saw Malarkey kind of put it on the receiver over Mariota, and he certainly did that more than five or six times. It seemed like we heard that from him every game. So talk a little bit more about that. Were there built-in option routes were

receivers picking the wrong way to go or was it just flat running the wrong route and why on earth was it so complicated yeah there's a lot of things that don't make sense about the passing game it doesn't seem like the concepts that were designed by the staff were meant to like work in concert with each other and free up other options. A great example is his first turnover against Houston, which was actually the first play of the game from scrimmage. And the Titans had a bunch set tight to the line of scrimmage, which they did an awful lot last year. The thing with bunch passing sets is you bring all these players over to the line of scrimmage,

you invite the defense close to the center of the field, and what that does is it opens up the field horizontally and laterally for the players to catch the ball running sideways with a guy on their back hip not enough time to catch them. But the Titans offense didn't run those types of concepts from

bunch formations. They run these curl routes 10 yards downfield, but the receiver has to run 45 degrees towards the sideline because their starting spot is at the left hash mark instead of outside the numbers. So it just like congests all the space rather than using the space to help the players. Mariota has a three level read on this interception and the furthest player downfield is 15 yards, and the closest player is five yards. That is not enough space between three receivers to throw a pass and realistically expect that it won't be incredibly contested by the defense.

So there are a lot of things that the offensive, just the play calls we're doing that were making it more difficult on him. But that said, even in those instances where he's throwing it into double coverage because there's three receivers on the same side of the field, those three receivers on the same side of the field draw a lot of defensive attention and it opened up the middle of the field. And DeMarco Murray on this play, for instance, is leaking out right in front of the quarterback right in the middle of the field and it would have been um a much better decision to just dump it off to the to murray in that particular instance but yeah so um as far as receiver error goes and offensive error goes

there were plenty of option routes there's plenty of option routes, I think, in most offenses today, but the one against the Cardinals, for example, sometimes it's hard to tell. Is it an option route, or is it just the receiver didn't know his assignment and did the wrong thing? But I think that it's based on the safeties. They have terminology like middle of the field open versus middle of the field closed, which if it's a cover one, free safety, that's middle of the field closed. If it's cover two with two deep safeties, one on either side of the field closed, which would, if it's a cover one, free safety, that's middle of the field closed. If it's cover two with two deep safeties, one on either side of the field, that means there's no one in the middle.

That's middle of the field open. So there's lots of reads that the receivers have to make on the fly like that. And I think the interception he threw to Richard, intending to throw to Richard Matthews against the Cardinals, I think it was his first interception against the Cardinals, but it might have been his. Yeah, it was the first interception against the Cardinals. Richard Matthews runs the Cardinals. I think it was his first interception against the Cardinals, but it might have been his. Yeah, it was the first interception against the Cardinals. Shard Matthews runs a corner route,

and Marcus Mariota lets it fly, expecting it to be a post route. Those kinds of things are going to result in interceptions every time. There were two other confusions like that. One of them was Delaney Walker against the Steelers. Marcus Mariota expected him to run like a five-yard curl, sit in the zone. Delaney Walker ran five yards and broke inside. The ball comes out, expecting it to be a curl. That's an interception.

You can't really put that on Mariota, even if it might have been his fault, because we just don't have enough information sometimes. There was another play, the Johnny smith interception against jacksonville where johnny smith runs the same kind of play except it's further downfield 10 yards and cuts inside marcus mario to throw the 10-yard curl and it gets picked off by the inside linebacker coming underneath talbot smith but i don't think that that miscommunication was the reason the ball was intercepted because tal because Calvin Smith was coming underneath to break that up anyway. As his own linebacker, he wasn't in man coverage on Johnny Smith there.

So sometimes the miscommunications were clear, the result of the interception, and sometimes it was just a bad play anyway, and he shouldn't have thrown the ball. Most of them, he shouldn't have thrown the ball where he threw it. That was the biggest problem. throwing the ball. Most of them he shouldn't have thrown the ball where he threw it. That was the biggest problem. Okay, you talked earlier about sloppy footwork being a problem, and it seemed like that was an area that he really went backwards on in 2017.

I'm of the belief a little bit that he didn't trust that leg coming off that surgery and the bad injury that he had at the end of 2016. It seemed like at times he just didn't trust that leg to play on and throw. Obviously, that's not anything we can know, but did you see anything that would kind of lead you to that same conclusion? And then the other thing I would ask is, just as far as from a confidence thing, do you think at times he just wasn't, if he wasn't trusting what he was seeing, or if he was just kind of predetermining his read before the snap, and then something happened and threw it off, it just seemed like there

were a couple different things there that were going on that, you know, it just didn't look like the guy that we had seen the two years prior. I definitely agree with that. I think that, firstly, stepping into throws in the NFL is kind of like a perfect world thing. Most of the time the pocket is too either crowded, collapsing, or you're getting outside of it, or the receiver comes open and the window is so short that you just have to get the ball out. Matt LeFleur actually talked about this a little bit in the press conference today after the OTA practice, but saying how you can't always step into a throw in the NFL,

and that's why it's important to have a wide base to start so that if you're not able to step into the throw, you kind of already have your shoulders square and your legs apart, which I think is an interesting point because it didn't seem like that was stressed at all by the coaching staff. I don't know how Jason Michael was as a QB coach, but I just think that he wasn't very good because we didn't really see a lot of growth from Mariota,

and maybe that was the injury. But I also think he wasn't well coached, and I think a great example of that is the Houston game because he threw two interceptions in that game, like a few possessions apart, both in the first half, on plays that were identical and errors that were identical. And Mike Malarkey, after the game, attributed the second interception to his hamstring injury

and said that Marcus couldn't step into the throw because of his hamstring. But his throwing motion, including his footwork, looked exactly the same as the first throw that was also an interception in that game. So either his hamstring wasn't the problem, or his hamstring was already a problem before he, quote-unquote, injured it diving into the end zone. So I think that it's just kind of a coaching thing honestly marcus is it has the ability to be very accurate with the ball with sloppy footwork so if you add refined footwork onto that equation then he's only going to get better i just think it's mostly about being coached the right things to do.

It just didn't feel like he was being coached what to do correctly last year. Maybe that's me making excuses for him, but that was how I felt throughout the season. I kind of think the reason I'm so confident in Mariota was the sum of all parts was just so bad. Everything around him was bad last year. He had the injury to start the year. He had the offense that we all didn't agree with, the coaching staff.

He had receivers running the wrong routes. There was a clear disconnect there within the offense. Am I right on that? Was his confidence shaken? It just seemed like he wasn't the same guy we saw 2015, 2016, you know, his first two years. It was just a different player that we saw on the field last season. I totally felt that.

But I also think we saw flashes last year of the confident Mariota. And I feel like all of those came in no huddle situations where he was given the freedom to call the offense based on what he saw the defense doing and I don't I mean that seems like an obvious logical conclusion to draw was that he was comfortable in that shotgun spread hurry up attack the defense quickly and uncomfortable in the other style of offense, which frankly was that the whole, we're going to do it our way, and they're going to stop us, kind of offense, which is just completely asinine at the highest level of football to think that you can just out-muscle every team you play without, when they are out-scheming you,

is totally crazy. And, you know, great examples are like the Browns game where the Browns have the 32nd ranked pass defense a historically bad defense that's missing players and a great run defense top five DVOA run defense and the Titans come out and run the ball against them all game like you know those kinds of things definitely affect the quarterback and I agree that that you can see traces of it in every player from the offense and you know I actually saw something on these exceeding miracles in the comments that was I thought was interesting I can't remember who said it so I'm sorry to not give proper credit here but the person said um if you look at Marcus Mariota's development trajectory since high school

he's a player that has gotten better at every single stop in every single year. He never had a downside in college. His first two years in the NFL, we obviously saw the improvement until last year. Meanwhile, everywhere that Mike Malarkey has ever been the offensive coordinator or head coach has had one great year followed by a year of stagnation. So if we're tracing patterns here and trying to attribute to whom we should assign the majority of this blame, it seems pretty obvious. And, I mean, John Robinson agreed, and Mike Malarkey was shown the door.

So I think that all those factors should give Titans fans confidence. I mean, basically they could have picked Malarkey and said, no, the quarterback needs to get better, right? But they didn't, and I think that should give us all confidence that Mariota is the player we think he is. All right, last thing before we let you go, and I think you kind of answered this at the end there, but after doing this, did it hurt your confidence any at all that mariota is the guy going forward i mean did you i guess did you walk away with any any vastly different conclusion

after watching all those plays than you thought you would yeah not even for a second did i ever begin to wonder if marcus mariota was the quarterback of the future for the titans he's just i mean he's got things to work out, but we've seen it too much. I'm actually, after I finish the interception breakdown, I'm going to do two other threads, which I'll convert to articles for musiccitymiracles.com. One of them is going to be a no-look pass thread because he, even last year in an offense that I don't think he was confident in,

I mean, I've only done one game, to be honest, but four. He threw four no-look passes in the Raiders game. It was pretty awesome. So I'm going to do a thread on that. And then I'm also going to do, like, a dropped passes slash missed opportunities thread that shows, like, how much better just statistically he could have been if, you know, Delaney Walker doesn't drop three touchdowns,

if Eric Decker doesn't drop all those passes that he dropped throughout the year. Just to remind everyone that Mariota is really good, even though he threw these interceptions that I'm breaking down in detail. Perfect. Well, that sounds awesome. I'm going to be really interested to see... You talked about the four-nil-lick pass

that he threw in the Raiders game. I'm really interested to see what that number was after that game, because it seemed like it still felt good in that game, at least confidence-wise. It just kind of seemed to go downhill from there, and then there was a little bit of upswing there at the end. So I'll be interested to see

how that plays out. Anyway, like I said, follow Justin on Twitter. Really, really good follow at TitansFilmRoom, so check him out there. He'll do those threads and then I'll remind him that those are good ideas for articles. He's always good about converting into articles and doing that, so I

appreciate that. Justin does really good work for the site and on Twitter, so check him out. Justin, thanks so much for joining us tonight. Thank you guys for having me. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, absolutely. So, again, that was Justin Graver talking about all of Marcus Mariota's interceptions in 2017.

He writes for musicmiracles.com. Follow him on Twitter at TitansFilmRoom. All right, coming up we'll have just a few comments from the OTAs that have been going on this week. So we talked a little bit when Titans LTAs opened up about Kevin Dodd not being there and how odd that was.

And, you know, Vrabel, from the beginning, you know, basically kind of said he wasn't going to comment on who was there and who wasn't. He wasn't taking attendance, that kind of stuff. But then today, he was asked about some of the people that weren't there. And I didn't taking attendance, that kind of stuff. But then today he was asked about some of the people that weren't there, and I didn't see this, so I'll kind of let Terry take it from here,

but I think his comments on Kevin Dodd were pretty telling. Yeah, he ran through a list. The headliners were Corey Davis and Taylor LeJuan, and he said that basically they had an excuse, and he knew where they were and everything was good. And then there was Kevin Dodd and he said, Kevin Dodd is not here, so we'll clear up that mystery. And that's all he said.

So a clear tone difference there basically told me all I needed to know. I mean, we said it two weeks ago. We really didn't want to speculate. You never know what's going on with the guy. But at this point, the Titans seem at least a little annoyed with the fact that he's not there in such a make-or-break situation. Yeah, so that's crazy. I mean, it just blows my mind that he would not be here and not have a really good reason for not being here, which it appears at this point that he does not. I will say this. I watched some of Regal's press conference today, and I felt like the back and forth between him and the media has gotten a little bit more comfortable.

There was a lot of talk early on about his press conferences and how weird they were and that kind of stuff um you know we talked about a little bit and i kind of was of the thought that it's just a new guy filling out a new group of media members same name of media members a new coach um you heard koharski if you listen to midday 1a talk about how you know with mike malarkey they kind of knew when he was done answering a question, so people could jump in right there. And a couple times, like, they thought Braywell was done, and somebody was trying to jump in.

And then, you know, kind of talking over each other and that kind of stuff. Seems like they've gotten a little bit more comfortable with each other. So I think maybe, you know, there were some pretty big Twitter fights between people about, you know, what was going on in those deals. But it seems to me, at least, that all that stuff's kind of settled down. He's settled into his role as an NFL head coach. The media's getting more comfortable with him. So we kind of talked about how it was pretty much much ado about nothing.

But it is good to see everybody just kind of settling into that role. Yeah, you watched Vrabel and I watched LeFleur. I'm really interested to see what he had to say and what he would say. And he was surprisingly honest. You know, he was talking about his transition to calling plays. He was talking about how difficult it was having the shot clock up there and thinking on his feet and having to be one step ahead. I thought that was kind of interesting.

You know, we kind of give him a pass for not being a play caller, but that's new to him, so that's something to follow and some kinks to work out in some of these scrimmages and preseason games. But he also said that the route tree was significantly different, and he talked about being multiple, and he talked about playing receivers in multiple spots. So maybe we're doing the wrong thing by pigeonholing Taewon Taylor into the sly and Corey Davis and Rashard Matthews on the outside.

So just some things to think about going forward. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of cool stuff to watch as we get into this stuff. And like I said, you have the mandatory mini camp next week. So we'll learn a little bit more there. I think that starts next Tuesday on the 12th. And then, like you said, camp, preseason, that kind of stuff. And, yeah, it's just a lot of different stuff.

And like you said, I think we'll see as that stuff goes along that a lot of things that we think we know right now we might not necessarily be accurate on. So, yeah, it's going to be all fun stuff to watch. And you just have a new staff and stuff. That's really cool. So we'll keep you up to date on all of that stuff. We're probably going to get a little bit of a hiatus from the podcast here for a week or so.

I've got some things going on. So it'll probably be after the min mini camp before we're back doing shows. But between now and then, you can check us out on immunicitymiracles.com. We'll have stuff going up there every day still covering all that. So check us out there. Again, follow us on Twitter at jmorrismcm, at TLambertFB, podcast at LockedOnTitans. Terry, anything else we need to hit tonight before we get out?

I got nothing. All right. Sounds good. So like I said, check us out at those places. Keep checking back. We'll have a new episode up before you know it. And then hopefully we'll – training camp will be just around the corner, so hopefully we can hit that before it happens. So for Terry, this is Jimmy saying thanks for listening to LockedOnTitans,

and we will talk to you again soon.