NASHVILLE, Tenn. – The Tennessee Titans have great confidence in Marcus Mariota, but one thing they are not asking him to do much in his rookie season is to audible at the line.
“I think if you’re doing your homework as an offense, you should have a pretty good feel for what they are doing,” interim coach Mike Mularkey said about the plays being called by coordinator Jason Michael. “But we’re tinkering a little more into that.
“We’re conscious of [the need to audible at times]; we’re not going to handcuff him by any means. But we should have a pretty good feel of calling a play that we think we’re going to run. If we have to get out of it, there are some of those. But there are not a lot. I’m not a firm believer in that.”
The issue isn’t as much about Mariota’s ability to handle such changes.
Quarterbacks coach John McNulty said it’s about a rookie quarterback calling an audible for an offense that will include two other rookie starters on Sunday in left guard Quinton Spain and center Andy Gallik. The offense also includes two rookie receivers (Dorial Green-Beckham and Tre McBride), a rookie fullback (Jalston Fowler), a rookie running back (David Cobb), two running backs in their second seasons (Antonio Andrews and Bishop Sankey) and a second-year left tackle (Taylor Lewan).
“He can handle just about anything anybody else can handle, but everybody else has got to be ready handle that, too,” McNulty said. “You don’t want to run bad plays into bad looks. But you also don’t want to switch a play and then snap the ball and then have a lot of young guys out there who have to process stuff.
“You don’t want to put them in that situation too many times, either. We give him a play that we think will work. He has some options, sometimes specific options, sometimes general options to get to other things. But we haven’t gone too overboard with it because of where we are with some of the guys offensively.”
