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Mike Mayock did a marathon conference call with the media yesterday. I just read through the transcript and it was 27 pages long. The dude knows his stuff.
As you mgiht imagine, there wasn't a whole lot of Tennessee Titans talk, but Mayock was asked this question:
Assuming your gut is right on Jameis Winston going to the Bucs at No. 2, if you're the Titans sitting there at 2, would you rather have Marcus Mariota or Mettenberger, a guy you graded in last year's draft?
MIKE MAYOCK: Man, I knew you were going to go here. I don't know how they're going to evaluate this because I don't see them with Zach. I don't get the daily benefit of Zach Mettenberger last year. Mettenberger might have been a sixth-round pick but he was coming off an ACL and he had some questions off the field, work ethic, et cetera.
Now, if Ken Whisenhunt and that staff who have now had the benefit of seeing him for a year, and by the way, as you know, Mettenberger has got a big arm. He's got NFL-starting caliber arm strength, so this is not a normal sixth-round pick. This is a guy with plus arm talent and ability, so if you go through a year with him and you go, wow, he can make every throw, he works his tail off, we love him in the film room, he's a leader, he's lifting with the offensive line, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, then you sit at two, and you go, okay, now we can deal from strength, we don't have to take a quarterback. We can trade down for somebody who wants to come up and get Marcus Mariota, or we can take the No. 1 player in this draft, whoever that is on or board, probably in their case an edge rusher. If I'm Tennessee, I'm hoping that my evaluation of Mettenberger is high enough that I think we can win with him because it gives me more options on the other end. However, if it's not and we think we can upgrade that quarterback position to a franchise quarterback in Marcus Mariota, then you've got to pull the trigger.
That is really the question we are all wondering. Mayock said a lot of words but didn't really give us anything that we didn't already know.
The only people that have the answer to this question are Ruston Webster and Ken Whisenhunt. We won't know what the answer is until we see what they do with the second pick. That leaves us a lot of time to sit around and speculate.
