Could Raiders’ offensive line revive Marcus Mariota’s career?

By Mike Grimala (contact)

Friday, May 29, 2020 | 2 a.m.

Marcus Mariota was selected No. 2 overall in the 2015 draft, but the quarterback has yet to live up to that talent level through his first five seasons in the NFL. His production especially tanked last year, when he posted a career low in completion percentage and a career high in sack rate.

So given the opportunity to play behind Las Vegas’ strong offensive line, Mariota should be able to rejuvenate his career, right?

Not so fast. Some have attributed Mariota’s puzzling decline to poor offensive line play in Tennessee, and it’s true that Mariota got sacked a ton. In his first three seasons he started 42 games and was sacked on 6.5 percent of dropbacks, while the last two years that shot up to 12.0 percent. But can all of that be laid at the feet of his offensive line?

According to Pro Football Focus, the Titans’ offensive line graded out as the NFL’s eighth-best in 2019. A lot of that was due to their run blocking in front of Derrick Henry, but the pass protection was solid, too. Ryan Tannehill has famously poor pocket presence, yet when he took over for Mariota in Tennessee the team’s sack rate decreased from 13.5 percent to 9.8 percent.

After going through video of most of Mariota’s sacks and pressures last year, it looks like a lot of his issues were self-inflicted.

In a Week 2 loss to Indianapolis, Mariota was sacked four times and showed some faulty instincts in the pocket.

Tennessee is on the edge of field goal range on this 1^st-and-10 play, but Mariota is sacked for an 8-yard loss:

His receivers are covered at the top of his drop, but the blocking is terrific. Mariota has plenty of time to hit his checkdown man, Henry, out of the backfield for a catch-and-run gain of 10-plus yards. Henry is standing right in front of him in the middle of the field, wide open; Mariota doesn’t see it, holds the ball and takes the sack.

The Titans ended up losing that game, 19-17.

Four days later, Tennessee went to Jacksonville for a Thursday night game and Mariota was sacked an alarming nine times. Most of those were legitimate sacks — the Titans ran a lot of long-developing routes and couldn’t separate before Mariota was engulfed — but some were avoidable.

On this play, Mariota gets to the top of his drop and sees his primary receiver running wide open. The blocking is good, the pocket is clean, the receiver is open — and Mariota doesn’t pull the trigger. The result is a strip-sack:

The slot receiver, Adam Humphries, runs a good out and gets clean separation on his break. The still photo shows it very clearly — Mariota and Humphries make eye contact just as the ball should be thrown, yet Mariota eats it for the sack:

If anything, Mariota should be firing that pass before Humphries is even out of his break. For some reason, he was hesitant to pull the trigger on easy throws like that last year.

Mariota’s final start of the season was a Week 6 contest against Denver in which he was sacked three times in a 16-0 shutout defeat. It was ugly, but his worst play of the game wasn’t a sack.

The Titans keep seven players in to block on this play, while Denver only rushes four linemen. As a quarterback, Mariota should be able to read that and deduce where his advantage lies. Instead, when he drops back and doesn’t see an open receiver, he rolls out for no reason and ends up throwing the ball out of bounds:

When he gets to the top of his dropback, all Mariota has to do to extend the play indefinitely is shuffle one step to his left. That would give the Titans a double-team on all three pass rushers on that side and give him hours to wait for a receiver to break open downfield. Mariota panics, though, and runs straight toward the only single-teamed rusher and kills the play.

Mariota’s skyrocketing sack rate the last two years can be attributed to his tendency to gloss over checkdown options, his reluctance to pull the trigger on open receivers, and his own impatience in the pocket. He does not read his blockers well or manipulate the pocket at a starting-QB level. There was a lot of bad blocking in there, too, but Mariota created a lot of his own problems.

Las Vegas can give him time to throw — the Raiders offensive allowed 29 sacks last season (sack rate of 5.5 percent) — but if Mariota wants to breathe some life back into his career trajectory, he’ll have to figure out how to take advantage of good blocking when it’s right in front of him.

Mike Grimala can be reached at 702-948-7844 or [email protected]. Follow Mike on Twitter at twitter.com/mikegrimala.