Mariota's Ceiling Heading Into the Season

That's football. It's not just Mariota who does that on 3rd and long.

If you can get past the sticks, great. If not, the plan is to get what you can and try and flip the field.

You try and force the ball in a situation like that, it usually will end up in a sack from holding onto the ball too long or worse.

 

Truth. there's 3 phases of the game. You give your punter 5-8-10 more yards to coffin-pin them inside their 5.. And works out great for us, having a Pro Bowl punter

 

The facts don't agree with you. First, it's pretty hard to get a 119 qb rating just throwing check downs because that does weigh heavily TD/INT as well as ypa which would be much lower if he was primarily checking the ball down well short of the sticks.

Secondly, Mariota was 12th in fd% across the board (all throws, not just 3rd down) for all qb's with at least 300 attempts. He'd be bottom 5 - 10 if what you said was true.

Try again.

 

Well, the OL and Henry were bad most of the season so we had no running game most of the time and that's not really on Mariota. Secondly, with Walker down, he had 1 real weapon and CD by himself isn't enough of a deterrence to 8 guys in the box.

While you're right we will have a new playcaller, the system is supposed to stay the same so no new learning for Mariota for once. We have upgraded the OL and Henry ran like a BEAST down the stretch. That SHOULD force defenses to try and load the box. But with a better ol to protect and Walker coming back, CD and 2 MORE good wr's...we should be able to make teams pay for loading the box.

Not only should we not be one dimensional, but we should stop any team from trying to make us so. I think many players beyond Mariota are fighting for their jobs this season.

 

Agree, you don't replace OL if you happy with them, and I'm sure it has alot to do with money but not picking up Conklin's 5th year is a sign he's fighting for his job too.

 

Let’s see what you look like after more than 40 sacks... IF it was an average number of sacks I could see fragile, this is abnormally high and you have to accept freak injuries like the broken leg as well as the nerve injury, those just aren’t common injuries.

 

The sacks arent an excuse, just more condemnation. Maybe he should try something like...throwing the ball away, or moving away from the pressure instead of running into it.

 

I don't agree with it necessarily being a sign. If a player is a long term player, do teams normally pick up the 5th year option or do they just negotiate a longterm contract? I think he is fighting for value, not so much his job. The 5th year option is valued higher than he is right now.

 

yes, yes they do

 

So sometime soon we will pick up the 5th year option on Byard and then work on a long term contract?