Great Expectations? Who The Heck Are We?

Maybe we are just going to be a 4th quarter team.

You know, like the Jeff Fisher days.

 

Today totally sucked, but this rant is a bit extreme.

 

It's practice man... we're talking about practice here...practice!

 

These threads wasn't made in our starters drove the Panthers last week

 

Not taking the preseason into account, we could just as easily turn into a sub-500 team as a playoff one. A few things that are worrisome:

-We have Mike Mularkey as a HC

-Despite having a horrific secondary, the points allowed per game were middle of the pack. It easily could have been worse and our current secondary isn't guaranteed to be better

-Minimal injuries last year. Orakpo and Morgan made it through most of the season, despite having a history of injuries. If either lives up to their reputation of becoming injured, the defense suffers.

-Mariota produced at a rate in the redzone which will be hard to sustain.


-Performance of the O line could be just as difficult to sustain. We don't know if Conklin just had a good year or can be expected to consistently play at that level , Lewan became a franchise LT overnight, Ben Jones suddenly becomes a very good C, and a couple of nobodies perform at high levels at the G positions.

-We were lucky with the timing of some of the matchups. GB, Detroit, and Miami had yet to find their rhythm, Denver was struggling and looked like a shell of what they had been earlier in the season, and the last Texans game really didn't matter.


The pieces to be a playoff team are there. But the offense always comes out sputtering, and the weaknesses on defense could potentially put us in a lot of holes if the offense doesn't play like a top 5 unit, as they should.

 

I am resolved to believe todays game was a test project.

We did not run our normal offense. We played a very vanilla scheme with a bunch of gimmick/trial plays. Of course Mariota played poorly either way you look at it, but I am gonna put on my rose colored glasses and believe that the coaching staff was really not putting our best effort out there, instead they used it as a test session.....which failed miserable.

How else do you explain the 3 Taylor runs? The blown double handoff play? The multiple throw aways?

In other words, nothing to see here, please move along.

Week 1 we will have Davis and Decker back and a REAL offensive gameplan.....yeah, that's whats up.

 

Why does this offense always start slow? We had the same issue last year. Not panicking but this is a worrisime, if we end up sucking this year Mularkey has got to go.

 

All last year it seemed like many were on the bash Mariota for his "turnover problem". Today, how any did he have?
I point this out only because it seems like a few jump to the deep end whenever the Titans aren't shutting out opponents and scoring 40 points.
The defense is still my big concern. We saw what THIS offense was capable of last year and with only additions of WR, I have zero reason to expect less.
The defense was a mess last year. JRob added pieces. They still have to prove they are the right pieces to make this defense dominant. I'd like to see progress, but until they are losing meaningful games, I'll hold my gripes.