5 bad reasons people write off Tennessee Titans QB Marcus Mariota
By Will Lomas
4. Winning doesn’t matter?
In the NFL it is so easy to jump to extremes. Forever the idea was that if you don’t have a good quarterback you can’t win games.
That idea morphed into, how many wins a QB has is a good way to judge how well he is doing.
Which turned into QB Winz.
Now everyone rallies so hard against the people talking about quarterbacks being so important that it almost seems like the idea of “clutch” QBs has been ditched.
I’m not comparing Mariota to Tom Brady, but how often did we see Tom Brady have the ball with 2-minutes or less in the 4th quarter and everyone raved about how clutch he was and how he was going to lead the offense to a score?
Isn’t that what you want from your quarterback? A guy who can win the game when given the opportunity?
Mariota has started and finished 47 games in his career. Whether he was pulled because the team was ahead or behind, he got hurt, there was nothing at stake, or whatever, that is the number of full games he has played in his time in Tennessee.
In those 47 games, he has had 11 game winning drives (23%) and since Ken Whisenhunt was fired, he has a record of 25-19 despite coming off of a complete rebuild of a team that had won just 5 games under Whisenhunt because of just how poorly coached and how bad the talent was.
No one talks enough about how quickly Marcus Mariota turned around that team when they finally started getting even a little bit of talent around him.
I showed you already how much he improved cast offs from other teams like Rishard Matthews and Delanie Walker (who is great, but was never given the chance to be great until he was paired with Mariota), so what more could you want from him?
Was he supposed to win a Super Bowl in year three? You may have noticed that teams were exactly chomping at the bit to sign free agents that left Tennessee during that time, but what about the coaches he had with him?
Have we seen Ken Whisenhunt or Mike Mularkey blow the league away? No? Well color me shocked.
However, in spite of all of the issues around him Marcus Mariota did the one thing that very few QBs have been able to do in Tennessee. He won. Not only did he win, but he did it on a regular basis.
TL;DR: Mariota has won 57% of the games that he has played in with the Tennessee Titans since Ken Whisenhunt was fired and he did that with a group of players and coaches that are either retired or have only found work because of their connections in the NFL. 23% of his wins have had to come with him leading a comeback or game winning drive in the 4th quarter to seal it, but because he succeeded so quickly people mistakenly blame him for not being even better for some reason?