Locked On Titans - Daily Podcast On The Tennessee Titans - Locked on Titans: Adoree' playing more offense?

Episode Date: July 3, 2018

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Welcome in to another edition of Locked on Titans. I'm Jimmy Morris, joined by Terry Lambert. Terry, how are you today? Doing pretty well. What's up, man? Not too much. We've got a couple of topics to cover today. So it's Tuesday morning or lunchtime. We're recording this. So there will be another episode of Igniting the Fire tonight. So check that out. And we'll talk about that at some point later this week. But hopefully we get, we talked a little bit last week. If you didn't listen to those shows, go back and listen about Igniting the Fire, the show, and how we hope to see a little bit more with the players' interaction with each other and not as much the coaches talking and stuff. So maybe that will start to happen.

We'll see with the new episode coming out tonight. We'll jump into a couple topics that we have today. Blake Bedingfield talked on the Midday 180 yesterday, a couple interesting things that came out of that. He's the former Titans director of scouting. And then an Adore Jackson topic that we'll cover. So before we do all that, I want to remind you, Terry and I write for museummiracles.com.

We cover the Titans for SB Nation, so you can check stuff out there. If you want to follow us on Twitter, I'm at jmoresmcm. Terry's at tlambertfb. Check us out at both those places. And then for the podcast, Locked on Titans, you can get it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. Go ahead and subscribe to it there

so you get the new episodes as soon as they are available. All right, so first topic today is Blake Bedingfield, who was the director of scouting for the Titans for, or he was in the Titans scouting department for 16 years, and up until this last year was the director of scouting for a few years. He talked about the Jameis Winston-Marcus Mariota thing. He was there when that draft happened.

And just really the interesting part of it was he says, and this has been confirmed a couple other places, the Titans always liked Marcus Mariota over Jameis Winston. So even if they would have had the first pick that year, they would have drafted Mariota if they had the option to draft both. But he did say that had the Bucs taken Mariota at one, the Titans probably would have selected Jameis Winston. Now, they would have had the reservations and all that kind of stuff,

but Jameis Winston probably would have been a Titan in that scenario. So I don't know if there was any huge surprise out of that, but I did think it was interesting to kind of get that confirmation. But it did, for me, it was a little bit different because I kind of thought if the Titans would have had the chance to select Winston, they would have. I thought he was a guy that Winston Hunt would have liked better. So that part of it was a little bit interesting to me.

Yeah, and you think about what they had. The whole debate that year was, I think it was Leonard Williams, and you had Mettenberger on the roster. So you could give Mettenberger, who showed a little bit the year before, or you could go ahead and take Jameis or Marcus Mariota. Titans ended up taking Mariota. There was plenty of momentum in that Mettenberger camp early on. I think people forget that.

People latched on to Leonard Williams and really wanted them to take him. But, yeah, I would think that they would go with Jameis there. But I thought it was really interesting to hear him say, I mean, we had some reservations there. We kind of would have begrudgingly picked Jameis if we had to. But, you know, just thank God every day that Marcus Mariota fell where he did. I thought he was the better player coming out. I thought he was a little more conservative. But you still saw him do some advanced stuff

with his eyes, even though the system at Oregon, it was Chip Kelly's system, and he did some things with his eyes looking off linebackers and safeties and that type of thing. So I thought he was the more advanced passer. I thought Jameis was a little reckless at times. I was surprised at Jameis going number one and how that all played out. It was

no surprise that he went there at the time, but I was surprised that Marcus didn't emerge as the premier guy there. Titans got really lucky there. I just don't envy the Bucs at all. I don't know what you do with Jameis Winston at this point. Quarterbacks are hard to come by. He's kind of

a middle-of-the-road passer right now, but you also just don't let quarterbacks walk. Really interesting situation down in Tampa. Like you said, the crunch point is now because now they've got a decision to make. They've got the fifth-year option, so he can play the next two years without them having to make a decision on a contract extension now you know i guess he said in his apology or you know whatever it was that winston issued that he stopped drinking and you know that was a byproduct of all that and whatever i mean i don't know any of that. And so, I mean, I guess the Buccaneers, I mean, hopefully for their sake,

they're familiar with all of that. And so they have a little bit more information on if he's grown up any and all that kind of stuff since then. But like you said, I mean, it was good to get confirmation that the Titans would have taken Moriota, you know, whenever they had the chance, whether it would have been first or second. And like you said, just thankful that the Bucs went ahead and took james and so the titans weren't faced with that decision um but yeah i mean that's a that's another situation that that probably we could revisit at some point

just the whole the the temperature around the franchise at that point and like you said there was there was a lot of momentum for mettenberg um there were at least people that thought that he was good enough and that you could you know you didn't have to take a quarterback there you could have taken a player like a leonard williams um you know you know somebody like that so um you kind of forget as the years go by all of the all the other stuff that was going on there with the franchise so um you know do you remember there was the whole thing when they had the draft party at nissan state i don't remember if it was called nissan state at the time it might have still been lp field but and you know there was the reaction to just of

justin hunter and kendall wright when they drafted uh mariota and because you know everybody made it and they liked mettenberg and they were mad at the titan stick of quarterback it's just just thinking about you just forget some of that some of that stuff that was going on. There was so much momentum for Mettenberg. It was strange. And now I think he's still dating Wizenhunt's daughter or something like that. Yeah. That's an interesting dynamic too.

But, yeah, at the beginning of that draft, that draft season, it seemed like it was Leonard Williams or Bust. And I just thought that was wild. How often do you get to pick up in the top three? How often do you have these top two quarterbacks up at the top of the class? So the Titans had no choice in my mind. And I remember Wizenhunt saying about Marietta just how he remembered plays and how that sold him.

He recalled a certain play at Oregon, just a random third down play, and how that sold him. So that always sticks out to me. That's just very Mariota for him to remember a specific play at Oregon from his college days. So thankful that Rustin Webster, Ken Wisenhunt, at least gave us Taylor LeJuan and Marcus Mariano. Yeah, and that's the difference, too.

Like, Rustin Webster was terrible. I mean, there's no doubt about that. Awful. But the two, like you said, the two cornerstones of what we have right now came from Rustin Webster. And so at least he was able to hit on a couple picks there. Anyway, that was an interesting nugget to get.

If you didn't get to listen to Bedingfield on the Midday 180, they podcast everything now, all their stuff, so you can go search for that. It was worth listening to. He was on for a whole hour, and it was good. You don't get much opportunity to hear behind-the-scenes stuff like that,

and they've had him on a couple times, and he's done a great job. So cool to hear there. All right, so coming up, we'll talk a little bit about Adoree and the chances of him being used on offense this season. All right, so Terry, I think you have the quote up from Adoree talking about wanting to play offense maybe more this year. Yeah, Adoree was on Good Morning Football on Friday morning, and he was asked about playing offense, of course.

That's what everyone wants to know. And he told him, he said, I'm that bug in his ear just trying to make sure I keep being out there if I can. Whatever he needs me to do, focusing on defense and special teams as in returning. But if he throws me out there, I'm going to be excited and fired up. So clearly the guy has a passion to play offense. He's got a desire to have the football in his hands. And he's right in offense. He's got a desire to have the football in his hands, and he's right in that. He's special.

We saw it in flashes last year. We saw him get in space, make some people miss, make some big plays, and give the Titans something they didn't have, which was an electric offensive playmaker, an explosive playmaker, and they typically use him in the backfield. So I'm not totally opposed to using him on offense. But now with Deion Lewis, who is going to be a huge factor in this passing game, I don't know where you put him.

I don't know where you line him up. Maybe you get creative and put him in the backfield with Deion Lewis, maybe with Derek Henry. But I don't want him playing receiver, because I think there's a lot of nuance to receiver. I think you've got another route tree. I don't think you can just throw him out there and tell him to go run dig routes and out routes and stuff like that it's precise down to like the half yard line so i'm i'm interested in in utilizing him as a playmaker i just don't know where i'm putting him in this offense now yeah i think that's the interesting part of this is last year there was a huge need for him on offense because like like you said, he's a playmaker.

He's really good with the ball in his hands, and you had a lack of that, the whole speed dynamic of everything. But now, with Deion Lewis being on board, you think, okay, they can use him in some of those same situations, and he's a better offensive player than dory jackson is so there's a lot and we talked so much last year at the beginning of the year about dory jackson and about how you know when he was in college he he did you know he played special teams he played offense he played defense he ran track so we talked all about you know the the lack of you know football practice he had compared to other guys or you know cornerback practice that he had compared to other guys that come out that are those blue chip prospect

cornerbacks that did nothing but play cornerback in college um you know and he was different than that the the funny thing was last year he was probably you know we thought i or at least i thought he would make an immediate impact on special teams. And then he would kind of start off slow at corner and then come along, you know, as year one ended up into year two. I think he played a lot better than I expected him to at corner last year and wasn't quite as good in the return game as I thought he would be. But, yeah, when you talk about splitting his time between all the different things, I just, if it's a thing that's really going to help you, I understand why you do it. We saw the Titans did that all the way back with Pac-Man Jones. He had a package deal of some plays. So maybe if you look at something like that, like you're saying,

if you're going to use him now, it seems like the most effective way to use him, the biggest upgrade or to get the biggest impact on offense, would be as a receiver to maybe take the top off the defense or something like that. Like you're saying, there's so much nuance that goes into playing a receiver. How much time does he have to do that? Would it really be effective? I don't know. Do you think this group will give him some snaps on offense this year?

I could see it. I think it would be more of a decoy role, and I think that's probably for the best. I see Marcus lining up in shotgun with Adoree on his right, Deion Lewis on his left, something like that. You get both guys going different directions, and you pick one to throw to, something like that. I don't want him playing any legitimate receiver.

I don't want him running routes or anything unless it's a nine route right down the field, which he could certainly do. You know, you talk about Taewon Taylor, a guy that we've been a little frustrated with. Maybe that's fair, maybe it's not, but Adore would be playing his role if he did play any receiver at all. So I would much rather see Taewon Taylor, a guy that's getting plenty of work at receiver, a guy that's what he's supposed to do.

I'd rather see him get those. But, yeah, going back to Adore on the return game, a lot of people forget he had, I think it was two called back, two touchdowns called back. Yeah, that's true. Due to blocking the backs. Whether they were blocking the backs or not is a different story. But they were called back. So I think the spark is there.

He had a couple bonehead returns, decisions to catch the ball deep, and stuff like that. You've got to remember he's still a rookie. I think he's still going to be coming along. But the strides he made at cornerback, especially in the second half of the season, he was one of the better corners. Maybe not one of the better ones in the league, but he came a long way from that first Bears game where they targeted him five or six times on his first career drive in the NFL. So excited for him at corner. I don't mind sprinkling him in, but at the same time,

I want him focusing on what he was drafted to do. Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, it was a very pleasant surprise to see how good he was at corner in year one because I didn't expect that. And I was going to be okay with you know some some pretty significant bumps in that road but he came in and was better than everybody expected so that's got that has to have you excited um about you know what what they have in him going forward like you said as he comes out of his rookie year he's only going to improve from there so um yeah it'll

be interesting to see what they decide to do with that and we saw it last year more at the beginning of the year at the end they they kind of abandoned it so um anyway it'll be interesting to see what they decide to do with that. And we saw it last year more at the beginning of the year. At the end, they kind of abandoned it. So anyway, it'll be interesting to see how this new group feels like that, feels about that. All right, before we wrap up today, a word from one of our newer sponsors. 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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Blue Chew is the better, cheaper, faster choice, and we thank them for sponsoring this podcast. for sponsoring this podcast. All right, so that'll do it for today's episode. We appreciate you listening. We'll try to get another one out this week, probably not till the end of the week, but the 4th of July coming up on Wednesday. So hope everybody has a safe and fun holiday on the 4th.

We're now just a couple of weeks away from training camp, so it won't be long until we'll have actual on-the-field stuff to talk about. We'll be putting out shows more often, obviously, when that starts happening, so it won't be long until we'll have actual on-the-field stuff to talk about. We'll be putting out shows more often, obviously, when that starts happening, so we're excited about that and appreciate you staying with us through these lean times. In the meantime, check out musicseemiracles.com, where you can get all your Titans information, any news that breaks anything

there. You can find that there, and you can also, again, follow us on Twitter, at jmorrismcm, at tlambertfb, or the podcast account, at LockedOnTitans. So for Terry, this is Jimmy saying thanks for listening, and we will talk to you again later this week.