Locked On Titans - Daily Podcast On The Tennessee Titans - Locked on Titans: Gabbert, Sua-Filo and some new NFL Rules

Episode Date: March 28, 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? Doing pretty well. What's going on, man? Not too much. So we've got a few things to discuss, and I've actually had a pretty news-packed day, which hasn't been the case much. We had the Sioux stuff yesterday, but it seems like the last couple weeks has been really slow. But I've got a few things today. we'll talk about an extension for john robinson titan signed another guard what that means we'll talk about a backup quarterback that they signed and then the nfl has voted on some rule changes today so we'll talk about that as well before we do that remind you terry and i write for you to see miracles.com covering the times for sb nation

so you can check that out throughout the day. We have all this stuff updated as it happens. So be sure and check that out. Subscribe to the podcast, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts. You can find us there, and you can also follow the podcast account on Twitter at LockedOnTitans. And we do Q&A episodes from time to time there. So follow that and look for those.

We'll be doing a couple more of those as we head into the draft later in april all right so first thing tonight uh it was announced today paul koharski uh broke the story that the titans have given john robinson a contract extension through 2022 which matches him up puts him on the same timetable as Mike Vrabel. Robinson's contract was set to expire, I think, after the 2019 draft, is what Kaharski said. But now you've got these two guys on the same schedule, and that's something that Kaharski has really been beating the drum for

since Vrabel was hired. It makes a lot of sense. It kind of gets them together, gets them on the same team, and it makes sense for the organization going forward. Makes a lot of sense. Kind of gets them together, gets them on the same team. It makes sense for the organization going forward. Obviously, we think John Robinson has done a really good job rebuilding this roster. He's gotten this team to the point where they have a competitive roster, which wasn't the case when he took over two years ago,

where they had arguably the worst roster in the league. So he's done a lot of good things. Hope to continue to see him do good things he's you know probably one good draft class away from you know being able to put a team on the field that should be able to compete for the afc championship to get to a super bowl that kind of stuff so no big surprise here but you know just just kind of good to see that everybody's on the same page moving forward yeah and you know i think you can probably start to put him in the the upper echelon of nfl front office people uh and i hope i'm not just being a homer there i think what he's done over the past two years is you know this team owned the first overall pick you know he's literally the worst the worst roster in the nfl

uh make a playoff make the playoffs this year, win a playoff game. Now he's fired the coach that he may or may not have wanted, and now he gets his guy. Now he's tied to his guy for the next five seasons. Ownership has given the two of those guys every opportunity to go win big. The first two years, if there's any indication, this team is just going to keep win big. So, you know, the first two years, if there's any indication, this team is just going to keep going up. So, it's

exciting. It's exciting to see the direction this team goes under new coaching. And, yeah, I think if he's going to do what he's done to the defense, what he's already done to the offense, that's going to be exciting.

And we haven't even seen the fruits of his work on the offensive side come true yet, but still so much better than with what he started. So I think you'll start to see him kind of mold that defense with heavy input from Vrabel. So it's an exciting time to be a Titans fan, get those guys locked up for the next five years. It's going to be fun. Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, you can't say enough about the job that he's done. Like we said, just taking over what he did and how bad this roster was. You know, you see some teams where they have a bad season, they have a few bad injuries, and they have a bad year. But this team was just legitimately bad and just no talent. I mean, look, that's kind of what we've been talking about as we've talked about the cap situation and all that stuff. They haven't had any of their own guys to pay

because they drafted so poorly for so many years that they really couldn't spend all their cap space because, I mean, I guess you can go outside all the free agents like some people want you to do. poorly for so many years that like they really couldn't spend all their cap space because i mean i mean i guess you can go outside all the free agents like some people want you to do but the titans i mean think about the last person that they've really given a big contract extension to jarrell casey other than that i mean they haven't had anybody to pay now we're we're going to see that change with taylor lejuan and mar Mariota. Now, granted, Robinson didn't draft those guys, but you've got Kevin Byard and guys like that coming down the road

that they're going to need to pay. It's a good problem to have. You would rather it be that way than the fact that they just don't have anybody on their own roster that they want to pay. So good for everybody. Like you said, it's exciting, and I think we're going to see just a much different Titans team, and they're going to be fun to watch

and just kind of see where they go from here. Yeah. They also – go ahead. Yeah. I was just going to say, yeah, absolutely. Just the work that this dude's done. I really want to drive the point home that this was the worst roster in the NFL. I mean, I just think that it gets lost in translation.

You know, we can sit here and complain about his second-round picks like we kind of did last night. But the work that he's done in the short amount of time that he's done it, you know, give this guy five years. And, you know, with Marcus Mariota in the fold, now working with a new offensive coordinator, Matt LaFleur, that could be a special combination right there yeah yeah i mean again that just go back and watch those games from

the the zag mettenberger games at the end of you know the marcus's rookie year it was it was rough um not not only because mettenberger was playing quarterback which is everything around him was just a man's man. Yeah, and Svitek playing left tackle. It was bad. So anyway, along the lines of roster maybe improvement, I don't know, the Titans signed Xavier Suofilo. That's how we're pronouncing his name for now.

If we get a pronunciation update, we will do that when we see it but um so a guy that was you know highly regarded coming out um a lot of people had him as the best guard in his draft uh texans took him i think at the top of the second round and just hasn't it hasn't panned out well for him in Houston. He's had some injuries that has contributed, but he's a guy, like I said, that had a lot of promise coming out. I haven't seen it. So maybe he comes here and they can get something out of him. I don't think we should think of him as, hey, man, this guy was the 33rd pick in the draft. He's going to come in here and be the starter and play really well.

But this is now the second free agent guard you've seen them sign in the last week or so. So I think, one, there's pressure on Quentin Spang at this point. Are they regarding him as the starter? We talked about how they obviously didn't have that high of regard for him when they tendered him at the lowest level possible as a restricted free agent. Now they've brought in two guys to compete with him. So I think we're going to see that. I think that's going to be an interesting thing to watch in camp.

Two, does this remove interior offensive line as a need for the Titans in the draft? I don't know if it removes it necessarily, but I think it definitely takes it out of the conversation on the first two days. You've got enough guys there now that surely one of these guys can emerge in camp as a serviceable player, and you shouldn't need to invest high draft capital in somebody else to come in at this point. That was my initial reaction. I was like, all right, well, I can knock guard off of my draft needs list.

So I immediately texted my buddy in Houston who's a Texans fan, and I asked him about Suofilo, and he said, and I quote, worst guard in the league. So not a great start. But then you dig a little deeper, you look at his combine performance a few years ago. This guy was really agile the guy can move around 96 percentile in the 20 yard shuttle uh had one of the best 40 yard dash times of any guard uh pretty good in the three cone pretty good 10 yard split in the 40 yard dash the guy can move around a little bit and we've talked about

with the zone schemes unblocking scheme, Titans need to get more athletic, and they've done that here. Now, is this a guy that can come in and push for playing time? Maybe. I doubt it. If Quentin Spain is on this team, I'd fully expect him to start. But it just feels like they're wanting to light a fire under Quentin Spain for whatever reason.

Signing Suofilo, signing Pamphile, it just feels like they want to create a competition there, and that's not a bad thing at all. They went into camp last year, and I think they had Schwenke and Corey Levin, maybe some seventh-round rookies. There wasn't a lot of competition there, and maybe that was the problem. Maybe this offensive line got complacent. Maybe they weren't fighting for their jobs.

So maybe this is a new technique that John Robinson is trying, hoping to get the best out of his guys by lighting a fire under him, by signing a few people to potentially play in their spot. Yeah, absolutely. And again, competition is never a bad thing, right? And so maybe he can find something in this guy that for whatever reason they didn't get out of him in Houston. But yeah, it's just interesting.

And like I said, this is one of the reasons we talk about this before free agency. When you talk about draftees before free agency, it's really a little bit of a silly conversation because you're going to look you know two weeks later and everything's going to have changed again you know we thought running back you know we had led john john ledger on to talk about running backs and now that with the signing of deon lewis again not that they won't draft a running back but they're definitely not going to do it in the first round probably not in the first two days.

Interior offensive line, now you've got two guys that have come in. You've re-signed Klein. You've retained Quentin Spain to this point. So, you know, I mean, again, that's just how things change. I thought cornerback was something they'd be looking at. Signed Malcolm Butler, not going there now. So it's just, you know, it's funny. We want to talk about all this stuff and

we're so curious and everybody loves the draft free agency and all that kind of stuff but when it comes to draft needs especially it makes sense to really wait until after the first couple weeks of free agency to start to have those conversations so you know probably not going to do that even in the future but just something to remember going forward all right coming up we got a backup quarterback signed today and then we'll talk a little bit about the league the nfl rules changes that have happened at the owners meetings so blaine gabbert will be your backup quarterback for the titans in 2018 and yeah and i gotta say i was overall really kind of impressed with the reaction to the gabbert signing um it seemed like when they when it was announced they brought him in for a visit a couple weeks ago everybody's like oh my gosh

blaine gabbert he's terrible you can't sign him yada yada yada you know and i guess over the last couple weeks people have realized that we're one, who are you going to get? Number two, as far as backup quarterbacks go, you can do worse than Blaine Gabbert. The Titans were worse than Blaine Gabbert last year with Matt Castle. Is there any doubt? I mean, we saw Blaine Gabbert play against the Titans. Is there any doubt that if Blaine Gabbert is the Titans' backup quarterback that they go down to Miami and win last year? Not in my mind.

I mean, I think you're talking about the Titans being the division champs last year if Gabbert is the quarterback, you know, the backup quarterback that plays against the Dolphins instead of Matt Castle. So, again, you know, this is not something that we're, you know, screaming to the heavens about because we're so excited. But, you know, as far as the guys that were left on the market that you weren't going to have to give up a draft pick for or something like that, I think Blaine Gabbert was, at this point, the best option.

Yeah, I don't know if he was the best. I'm not sure what was left out there. But he was one of the better ones for sure. You don't have to give up anything to get him. And he's a clear upgrade over what you had. I mean, the Titans had the did the Titans have the worst backup situation in the league last year? They were bottom five at least.

And as we've seen with Mariota, he's going to miss a game, maybe two per year. That's just kind of been the thing. And you can call it bad luck or whatever. But he's probably going to miss a game or two this season. And Blaine Gabbert is a guy that can steer the ship. You know, six touchdowns, six interceptions. He's about as average as they come in the league.

But at this point, the Titans will take average considering what they had. Now you hope the run game is better. You hope the run game can carry this team like it couldn't do last year. You know, if the run game was going down there in Miami, it might have been a different story. But Matt Castle had to make some plays, and it just wasn't happening on that day. So, the bottom line is Titans got an upgrade from where they were last year. And it was one of the top three or four needs that they had to fill

coming into this offseason. Yeah, and in addition to the run game, you hope you've got an offensive staff this year that if you do have Blaine Gabbert for a week or two, can do some things to put him in situations to be successful. Again, he's not Aaron Rodgers, obviously. He's not Marcus Mariota. But you hope you have a staff that can at least say, okay, he can do these three or four things well.

We're going to design our offense around that, and hopefully it'll be good enough. Titans defense this year should be good enough that even in those games where the offense is not going to be putting up a lot of points, they should be able to keep them in games. So, yeah, I mean, I think this is a clear upgrade over last year. And, again again you know we all were excited about a tate bridgewater or josh mccown or you know sam bradford whoever it

may be but all those guys wanted to go places where they had a chance to start and they did you know the i mean the jets on two of those three guys was interesting they're going to draft a guy they've got you know three other quarterbacks on their on their roster so that that's an interesting thing bradford went to Arizona. Well, he'll start until he hurts his knee again. But, you know, I mean, all these things that these guys that we wanted to see them go after, they didn't want to come here, and not for any other reason than Marcus Mariota's here, and they weren't going to have a chance to start unless there was an injury.

They couldn't win a training camp battle and be the starter. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know. Again, we're not this is not the greatest thing and that's ever happened but at the same time it's a positive move from last year and you know again you want the best 53 guys that you can have on the roster and you want to continue to be looking for an upgrade in gathers and upgrade over castle so there's that all right rule changes. The last thing we're going to hit on tonight.

A couple pretty big things. One, there has been a targeting rule instituted. Terry and I were talking about this before we came on, and honestly, it sounds like a little bit of a disaster. Brian McCarthy, who's the

NFL PR guy on Twitter, this is his tweet. Playing rule article 8. It is a foul if a player lowers his head to initiate and make contact with his helmet against an opponent. The player may be disqualified. Applies to any player anywhere on the field. The player may be disqualified. So the thing that gets me there is it applies to any player anywhere on the field. So, again, the beginning, it's a foul if a player lowers his head to initiate

and make contact with his helmet against an opponent. So, you know, in college you see it on, you know, quote, defensive receiver. Down the field, defensive backs, mainly safety, are the ones that get hit with this. And you get that. You get why they don't want that going on, and we understand why these rules are in place, because the NFL needs to appear like they care about head injuries, right?

But when you talk about any player anywhere on the field, I mean, how many times do you see running backs coming through the line, lowering their heads and initiating contact? You're going to eject Derrick Henry when he does that? Terry made the point before we came on, what about when a nose tackle fires off the ball and puts his head into a center? You're going to eject that guy? So I don't know.

Again, we're coming off of a year where officiating was nothing short of a disaster. And now you're putting more on these guys, more subjectivity on these guys to watch these plays, add to high rate of speed, see them live, throw the flag, decide that a guy needs to be disqualified. We haven't seen any mention of replay. I hope that like college they will have the ability to replay these plays, these fouls, and see if they actually were a foul, if the guy should be ejected or whatever. But I don't know. To me this just seems like – I just don't know how they're going to be able

to consistently implement this. Yeah, I think it's kind of funny. You talk to any average NFL fan, they would probably tell you they want the game to be less about the officials. Well, you've just made it a lot more about the officials. I mean, because this is a judgment call 100%. You're going to have bang-bang plays that look bad, full speed, and they might not look so bad once you slow it down. So like you were saying, I hope there's a replay element to this.

And even if there is a replay element to this and you know even if there is a replay element you're talking about slowing down the game you're talking about breaking up the flow of the game 10 minute delay it just seems like you're opening up a can of worms here uh but the nfl did have to do something there's been so much talk about the the concussion stuff i i get it i just i'm not a fan of it uh it just seems to be changing the game there's a lot of gray area they that tweet that that you just read that just leaves a lot of opening open holes there you know like you were saying with the running backs and and even on the line of scrimmage so one one thing that the college game doesn't do, they don't penalize the ball carriers for lowering their head

and taking a linebacker out. So I'll be interested to see if the NFL does that a little bit differently. They said any player on the field. So that tells me that the running backs are in play, but I'll kind of believe it when I see it. Yeah, I don't know how they're going to see that in those instances. So it's going to be interesting to see how they implement that rule. The other big thing is the catch rule, which was the story of the league last year.

And Terry and I were talking earlier again about how – I mean, I always thought that the rule was you had to have control of the league last year. And Terry and I were talking earlier again about how, I mean, I always thought that the rule was you had to have control of the ball, you had to have two feet down, and you had to make a football move. And then at some point, that changed, the whole survive the ground and all that stuff came into play, and that was the phrase that everybody used this year. But it sounds like that they're going back to that. So, I mean, basically I think the rule now is going to be they're simplifying the language on a catch.

You have to have control. You have to have two feet or another body part down. And then a football move such as a third step, reaching or extending for the line to gain, or the ability to perform such an act. So this seems like they're applying common sense here, and so hopefully this will eliminate some of the nonsense that we had last year with the Jesse James play in the game with the Steelers and the Patriots. There were a few other plays like that throughout the year that common sense said that's obviously a catch. I mean, the guy has control of the ball. He's trying to get in the end zone or trying to get the first down or

whatever um so with the you know with the rule of the the the third thing the football move such as you know including the third step or that um so i mean hopefully that one's a good one hopefully it eliminates some of that kind of stuff because again you don't have the game to be about the officials and you want to see a fair a good product on the field and when we're spending time debating that dumb stuff it's taken away from the actual football game and again nobody that has a brain and it's not a patriots fan thanks to that Jesse James play wasn't a catch but you know by the way the rule was implemented for the majority of 2017 I mean I guess the officials got it right if you want to look at it that way so I I don't know if this will eliminate that but hopefully it at least reduces the amount of times that we are looking at the outcome of a game and saying, well, that was obviously a catch,

but by the way the rule has been talked about and implemented this year, it was ruled not a catch, and so X team won, and they should have lost or whatever. Yeah, it just hit a boiling point this year. I think the Jesse James point was probably the part where the NFL said, all right, we've got to do something because that was just ridiculous. So you go back to a common sense approach, establish yourself in bounds, make a football move.

That's how it's always been until it wasn't. Out of thin air, it seems, came, well, you've got to finish it even though you go to the grounds. I don't know where that stuff comes from. But hopefully the officials can get themselves back accustomed to calling the game like it should have been called all along. You can just poll the audience almost and figure out what a catch is. It's pretty simple.

The Calvin Johnson catch, the Dez Bryant catch, Jesse James catch, they were all catches, and the NFL just totally overthought this, and it's good to see them correct it. Yeah. So, again, what we want to see is the game decided on the field by the players, not the officials, and hopefully this moves in that direction. So good for that, and hopefully, just i hope well back to the targeting rule i just hope we get a little more clarification on that and again the ability for replay has to

be in there because it's just impossible for these guys to see this stuff full speed i mean think about how many times like with a catch and not a catch on on the sideline you know how many times you worse than here on on the couch watching at home and you're trying to figure out if that second foot got in or not, and we've got it slowed down, they show up from three different angles, and it's still really hard to tell. When you're talking about a player being ejected or not, you know, that obviously affects his paycheck, that affects, you know, his team, the opposing team, all those things. You just, you need to have the ability to go back and look at it and make sure the call is right because ultimately

that's what we all want you know if you're if you're talking about it objectively and you're not from your fan bias you you want the calls to be right you that that's what we're all we all long for when we watch these games so So hopefully we're moving in that direction. Again, with the targeting thing, I just hope they can slow down and look at it. So we'll see how that gets implemented. All right, so that will wrap us for tonight. Like I said, it was a pretty news-heavy episode with the stuff that the Titans did today. Tomorrow night we'll probably get a little bit more into some draft stuff.

We haven't talked a lot about how we think the top of the draft is going to look um because we're at 25 with the titans being at 25 there's just so much distance there but i think if we can look at i mean we've got you know teams in division obviously that are picking early uh talk about what what we think they'll be doing and just you know some things to look for there so we'll talk a little bit more about the draft tomorrow night when we record and then as we move closer to there. So we'll talk a little bit more about the draft tomorrow night when we record, and then as we move closer to draft time, hopefully we'll have a couple more quote draft guys on to share their expertise on some different players and some different positions

that we think the Titans could be looking at at 25 and beyond. So in the meantime, again, subscribe to the podcast, Locked on Titans, wherever you get your podcasts. Check us out at musicseamiracles.com follow us on Twitter, I'm at jmorrismcm, Terry is at tlambertfb, so for Terry this is Jimmy saying thanks for listening to Locked on Titans

and we'll talk to you again tomorrow