When the Tennessee Titans drafted Marcus Mariota with the No. 2 overall pick in the 2015 NFL Draft, they envisioned having him as their franchise quarterback for at least the next 10 to 15 years.
However, it didn’t pan out that way and after being replaced in Week 7 of last season by Ryan Tannehill, who ended up taking the Titans to the playoffs, Mariota is moving on to play for the Las Vegas Raiders in 2020.
In the traditional sense of the term, Mariota is a bust. After all, you’d expect a No. 2 overall pick to last longer than five years and to have far more success than he was able to in Nashville.
But on the flip side of that, Mariota did pull the Titans out of the dark ages and helped them become a competitive team that made the playoffs on his watch in 2017, which was the first time the team had done so since 2008.
Regardless, Mariota was named on Pro Football Focus’ list of the biggest draft busts of the PFF college era, according to Michael Renner.
Of any guy on this list, Mariota probably has the fewest holes to poke in his college profile even in retrospect. He was the guy who anonymous scouts at the time jokingly said that the fact he had no red flags was itself a red flag. His 93.0 overall grade in 2014 is still one of the highest-graded seasons at the position we’ve seen in our six years of grading. His 15 turnover-worthy plays weren’t great, but eight of them were fumbles (a problem we’ve seen carry over to the NFL, too).
The fumbles haven’t been why he was benched for Ryan Tannehill and signed a backup deal in Las Vegas. Truthfully, I can’t tell you why he never really improved after year two in the NFL. It’s very much a head-scratcher, and I’m not sure you can even explain it with him coming from a “college-y” Oregon offense.
There’s a lot that goes into the Oregon product’s struggles in Tennessee and his failure to develop into the franchise signal-caller the Titans had hoped.
Of course, some of that blame lays on Mariota’s shoulders, but the organization didn’t exactly help with the revolving door of head coaches and offensive coordinators that created an unstable environment.
A situation like that is hard for any young quarterback to overcome. In fact, Mariota pointed to stability as one of the biggest factors in his desire to play for the Raiders.
He also didn’t have a lot of talent around him for the first four years of his career, but that was not the case in 2019.
Mariota had a strong supporting cast around him last season and was still only able to go 2-4, while looking completely lost in the process. Tannehill took that same unit and posted league-best numbers, taking the offense to new heights that the franchise hadn’t seen in many years, if ever.
But none of that matters now. Mariota is moving on, the Titans have a new franchise quarterback, and all that’s left is for fans and experts to do is to look back and wonder what could have been.