Locked On Titans - Daily Podcast On The Tennessee Titans - Locked on Titans: Talking Luke Falk with Mark Schofield

Episode Date: May 4, 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 good. What's going on, man? Not much, and tonight we're also going to be talking with Mark Schofield. You can follow him on Twitter at Mark Schofield, does Locked On Patriots, our quarterback guru. We talked to him back before the Titans took on the Patriots in the playoff last year, so you probably remember that. took on the Patriots in the playoff last year, so you probably remember that. We're going to get into Luke Falk a little bit with him. So before we do that, before we bring him in, I want to remind you, Terry and I write for MusicCityMiracles.com, covering the Titans for SB Nation,

so check us out there. You can follow us on Twitter. I'm at jmorrismcm. Terry is at tlambertfb. You can follow the podcast account at LockedOnTitans. So with all that being said, we'll bring in Mark Schofield. Mark, how are you tonight? I'm doing well, Jimmy. Terry, how are you guys doing tonight?

We are good, and we really appreciate you taking the time to jump on here. So the Titans only had four picks in this draft after all the trades that they made, and with their fourth pick, they selected Luke Falk, the quarterback out of Washington State. So if you could, just kind of give us your scouting report on Falk, what your thoughts were about him heading into the draft. Sure, and what's interesting about the Titans draft and Luke Falk is this is a player, one of a handful of quarterbacks that were actually linked to the Patriots sort of throughout this entire draft process.

A lot of people thought that the Patriots would go quarterback relatively early in the draft, not with the first pick of the seventh round like they actually did but but Falk was a player that had been linked to them sort of throughout the process certainly that really picked up steam down at the senior bowl itself and we can get to that in a minute but you know we talk about Lou Falk you're talking about a person that a quarterback could put up you know prolific numbers you know at the Pac-12 level um the interesting sort of backstory on him he you know when moved from Utah uh to a prestigious high school in California when he was a junior in high

school and you know that basically sort of put back his recruiting a bit you know he had an offer from Florida State in hand but they left California the family left California moved back to Utah for his senior year even though he had gone to this high school and won the starting job it was sort of a football type factory but that really sort of set his entire recruiting schedule back he didn't have any offers ended up walking on at Washington State and saw significant playing time as a redshirt freshman became the steam team starting quarterback the sophomore his redshirt sophomore season left school with a ton of records under his belt sort of careers school yards for you yardage, total offense, passing touchdowns, pass completions.

Obviously, he's coming from an air-raid system, and so there's going to be some sort of schematic concerns there. But I think the landing spot that he's found himself in, which we'll get to, I think that's a good spot for him, was asked to do a lot sort of from a mental perspective and that actually increased as he got into sort of his senior year leach basically gave him free reign to call run plays of the line of scrimmage basically said i'll handle the passes you're going to run that stuff but you run games on you and i think that's an interesting thing that he was tasked to do very good sort of in decipher and coverage is very good when the post-snap look matches up with the pre-snap look there are a lot of times that he was able to sort of speed up his process especially sometimes against the blitz to sort of make plays happen take advantage of blitz looks from the

defense when i was watching him i thought it was best against zone coverage i thought it was sort of a pretty adept at challenging narrow throwing windows, probably due to his experience. The big thing with him is the confidence level. You know, one of the knocks that I sort of have on him is his somewhat tendency, sometimes he has a tendency to succumb to quicksand. You know, you watch his game against Stanford in 2017. He throws a bad interception. I believe it was, yeah, he throws a pick six and a fourth down,

and it takes him, I think, two or three more drives to sort of get back on track. He misses the next throw high, then he doesn't trust his eyes on the following play and doesn't get the ball out quickly. So I'd want to see him sort of get tougher from a mental perspective. But a very nice developmental quarterback. I think coming into Matt LaFleur's offense,

which I know we're going to talk about, I think it's probably the ideal fit for him. A sort of a potential West Coast air raid hybrid type offense I think would be the ideal fit for him. But interesting development of quarterback. He's somewhat of an athletic kid too, so I think that will fit with what LaFleur wants to do. Also needs to stop sort of staring down roads. But that's kind of where I was on him coming in to the draft. he was my quarterback nine of the 20 quarterbacks i ranked it inside the pylon you know there were some guys that i might have had him higher you know he was behind a guy in

logan woodside it was my quarterback eight that i know i was higher on than the nfl and that's fine but that's kind of where i had him and how i viewed him uh go a little deeper on on this offensive system you know coming from michael eats there seems to be this stigma about him, the college spread offenses. Were there pro concepts incorporated, or was it heavy on some of these bubble screens and the things you see around college football today? No, I mean, I'd say that there are a lot more pro concepts

than sort of Mike Leach's offense gets credit for in Mike Leach's offense. You look at teams like the Jets last season. You look at teams like the Philadelphia Eagles. They're running air raid stuff. They're running mesh concept. They're running wide cross or shallow cross. These are air raid type designs that date back to how mom and the Bu offenses of

eval edwards but they're being used in the nfl a lot more i mean the patriots are running some mesh concept stuff they're running some air raid stuff a lot of offenses incorporate that and it wasn't sort of screen heavy it was just your typical standard mike leach does you know has like six or seven pass concepts and then builds in variance to them but it's very heavy on sort of your mesh concept your shallow cross concept your y cross concept but those are now plays that we're seeing in the national football league so it wasn't so much that he was running sort of the spread type stuff that you see like you know you watch some quarterbacks like start talking about the next quarterback class guys like justin hansen justice hansen excuse me

at arkansas state he's throwing a ton of screen passes a lot of bubble stuff drew lock the missouri quarterback a lot of bubbles a lot of tunnels a lot of smoke routes fock was doing more stuff downfield it was just this air raid type offense that sometimes people sort of think is too simplified but it's really not because on each play you have different conversions different variations and he's tasked with making progression style reads one of my favorite throws of his was a throw against stanford sort of on a mesh i believe it was yes and what stanford um no actually i take that back no it was stanford sorry about that um it was a red zone mesh concept that we get the two receivers cross it underneath but leach always builds in a couple of you know other routes you can throw on that play.

Usually you'll have running back wheel route to one side of the field, and then sometimes you get a post route from the other side of the field. And the rules of the progression structure on that are that if you see the middle of the field open, cover two, cover four, where there's no single high safety, you've got to look to throw that post route. And they call that in the red zone. And Falk made a tremendous read and tremendous decision when he saw that there was sort of a red zone red zone cover to look with the middle of the field open and rather than throw into one of the mesh receivers he goes through his progressions

and splits the safeties for a touchdown and that's the advanced sort of progression style stuff that sometimes we see quarterbacks coming into the national league they don't have that because there are a lot of one or two read guys, more simplified progression structures. This is sort of a more advanced stuff that Falk was doing, and I think that's going to help him as he transitions to the NFL. It's interesting because you see these huge numbers that he put up, and then I turn it on a couple times, and he's getting benched. So that was interesting to me.

What happened in those particular cases? You talked about it a little bit with the quicksand stuff. Just go a little deeper there. Titans fans are wondering why their sixth-round pick was on the bench when he's supposedly the Washington State's best player. Yeah, I mean, there were times when they sat him down for a number of reasons. And part of it was, you know, and Leach set up some times himself that, you know, there were times when that team either needed a spark and when Falk played poorly. I mean, he was benched in, you know, a loss to Arizona. And part of it was he threw four interceptions in that game, you know excuse me he struggled excuse me he struggled Travis

ended a puns he couldn't get the offense going at all the offense was just stagnant with him and they brought in Tyler Hilinski who gave the team a little bit of a spark and Falk was also battling sort of a left wrist injury the entire season he had a broken bone in his left wrist which he did undergo surgery for he missed their bowl game so there was an injury issue there as well and so you know leach is somewhat of a difficult guy i think to play for and you know what's interesting was you see some people sort of outside the program sort of question ryan leaf for example was somebody that sort of questioned why he would sit down luke falk but that's one of those situations as a quarterback where you if you get sit down and that, that happens to quarterbacks, you're going to get benched at times,

you know, you sort of learn from it. And I think Falk showed that he could learn from that because, you know, even though he went through these struggles, he still came back, you know, played as well as he could sort of down the stretch for that team, had a pretty nice senior bowl week as well. And I think that's a learning lesson that as a quarterback, you're gonna have to sort of get through and get past and take some positives away from the experience and some lessons from it and move on all right so bottom line on falk uh you know end of the day what is his ceiling as an nfl player i think sort of in the right offensive system you're looking at somebody that you know could give you potentially you know a case key

type development you know that you know if he catches light in a bottle you know in the absolute ideal offensive structure he could become an nfl starting quarterback i think most likely he's somebody that's going to be a career career like long-term backup spot starter type you know i think he's found himself in a really good setting i think he could push for a starting job somewhere in the national football league say like the third year of his contract i think an offense like the one he's in is an ideal one for him but i'm not sure he's going to be pushing marcus mariota out of a job this might be i think for titans fans their best case scenario here is sort of your brady garoppolo situation where he becomes a very very good you know backup that draws a lot of attention and then sort of at some point you do wonder if you spin him off to get you know a first or second round pick out of i'm not sure you're moving marcus mariota and installing luke falk as your

starting quarterback but there's the potential there for him to grow in this system. All right, perfect. So we will talk a little bit more about the offensive system and what Mark expects from Matt LaFleur and Marcus Mariota coming up in just a minute. All right, so again, we're joined by Mark Schofield of Locked On Patriots inside the pylon at Mark Schofield on Twitter. All right, so we got a little bit into it, but let's talk about what you expect to see from a Matt LaFleur offense with Marcus Mariota under center.

Yeah, I think, you know, and we touched upon it a little bit, but I do think the fit is right because you're talking about somebody that spent basically his entire career in a Shanahan or McVay system. With Kyle Shanahan, that offensive structure is basically your traditional West Coast offense, incorporating a lot of boot action type of stuff. Think about the Atlanta Falcons when they made that run to the Super Bowl 51. You saw a lot of Matt Ryan on the move, getting him outside of the pocket,

a lot of booting to the right, throwing that backside slant, throwing that backside post to Julio Jones. Obviously, Julio Jones is a tremendous talent. But it's West Coast-rooted in that you're going to be doing a lot of quick game stuff, getting the ball three steps and getting rid of it. A lot of slant routes, hitch routes, curl routes. Quick stuff to get the ball into the receiver's hands, hopefully in space before the defense can sort of converge on them.

And then you get sort of Sean McVay, who is also similarly rooted in West Coast concepts but has incorporated more air raid stuff, has incorporated more vertical stuff in the past games, somewhat of a hybrid offensive style. And those have been the two main influences on the floor. And so I think when you look at how I expect him to use Marcus Mariota, I think if Titans fans want, they should go back and watch some of the 2016-2017 Atlanta Falcons

and see how he used Matt Ryan, see how they got Matt Ryan, who's not the most athletic quarterback, on the move a little bit. And then watch some of what they did with Sean McVay and Jared Goff last year, where they used motion at times they use a lot of different shifts and alignments to sort of attack defenses to get advantageous matchups and then use the running backs as well to get them involved in the passing game and if there's you know a guy to look to who might sort of benefit in addition to Marcus Mariota it's Deion Lewis. I look at some of the ways Sean McVay used Todd Gurley as a receiver, and as a Patriots guy, I can't help but wonder how they're going to incorporate

Deion Lewis and stuff like that. I mean, one of the more creative plays I saw this past season was using Todd Gurley in sort of a seam route out of the backfield for a touchdown. The Rams did that against the Dallas Cowboys, I believe, in week four or week five. And it was basically copying a play that Andy Reid used against the Patriots where you show jet motion, get the defense rotated in the secondary, and you use that running back sort of up the seam up the middle of the field. That's perfect for Deion Lewis.

So I think there's an opportunity here in the floor system to take advantage of what we've seen some teams do recently, some more new age type stuff from the offensive passing game from Shanahan, from McVay. And I think it's going to be very beneficial for Marcus Mariota. The question is, are they going to get the development from guys like Corey Davis, Tywon Taylor, the addition of Deion Lewis, will that give them enough weapons? I think it does. So the Titans should be in pretty good shape offensively. One of the most frustrating things last year was this run game.

It came out in 2016 with Malarkey's system. It looked great. And then the last season it looked terrible. It was just three yards in a cloud of dust. What exactly is going to be different with this new zone blocking scheme? We've seen Todd Gurley just absolutely destroy in the system uh do you get the feel that derrick henry can kind of give you some of that i know it's a little different with deon lewis in the fold uh but do you see a resurgence on the way for the tennessee ground? I think the potential is certainly there for that

because you look back to Derek Henry and his time at Alabama. Alabama obviously did a lot inside zone, outside zone blocking schemes. The Crimson Tide relied on that heavily. It helped sort of set up their RPO and even their quarterback run game. And so he's got a lot of experience running that. I think he's a very good fit for it. He's shown sort of the decisiveness and the vision that you need to operate behind a zone block and speed

because running behind zone block, it does take some time to learn it. Sometimes if you haven't run it before, it's a little bit difficult because you have to really sort of trust the guys in front of you, trust your eyes, and then be decisive. And Henry's shown the ability to do that over his time, both at Alabama and the times when they've used

a little bit of zone blocking scheme. His team's incorporated in now and again, but zone blocking heavy now with the Titans' direction they're going, I think he's a good fit for Henry. And it's a good fit for Lewis as well. He was used on both zone and gap power stuff by the Patriots over the past couple of seasons. They used him as a runner in between the tackles.

That's something I don't think he'd get enough credit for because the Patriots ran him between the tackles a ton on power stuff. But obviously zone, particularly outside zone, is a good fit for Deion Lewis, allowing his quickness and his speed to get to the edge. And then similarly, like we talked about with Henry, has that sort of vision to read and feel and then decide and go and make the reads off the blockings blocking scheme up front because you've got those three reads to get through on those own plays whether it's you know

you know to hit the hole to bounce it to the outside or even to cut back and i i think it's going to be a good fit for both of these guys and i think it meshes well with where this team wants to go offensively. Alright, well Mark, we really appreciate the insight, appreciate the comments on Luke Falk, and then what you kind of expect from that floor offense. Titans and the Patriots play again this year, so hopefully we can catch up

with you on the road. Anything you want to tell people about on your way out? You know, if they want to follow me on Twitter at Mark Schofield the best place to find me you can check out the work over at inside the pylon.com as well as some of the work i've been doing with pro football weekly over at profootballweekly.com got a piece up just came out on thursday about you know the five first round rookie quarterbacks and some play designs i think their new coaches should implement with them if they do see the field as rookies. So you can check that stuff out as well.

All right, absolutely. Thanks so much for joining us. And if you're looking for quarterback breakdown, I mean you heard how good his stuff was on Luke Falk, check out Mark again at Mark Schofield on Twitter. You can find all of his work. All right, so that will do it for this edition of Locked on Titans. We will be back next week,

and we'll probably start to just take a look at the roster as it stands now and what we think will be coming up as we enter into, you know, like we talked about earlier this week a little bit the third wave of free agency and all that

kind of stuff. So between now and then again you can check us out at museummiracles.com I have stuff up there every day so check that out at mucmiracles.com i have stuff up there every day so check that out follow us on twitter i'm at jay morris mcm terry's at t lambert fb and if you want to follow mark he's at mark scofield so for terry this is jimmy saying thanks for joining us and we will talk to you again next week