Bucky Brooks Grades Marcus Mariota

Bucky Brooks graded a player from each AFC team in week 2 of he preseason.  For the Titans he graded rookie quarterback Marcus Mariota (who else?).  Brooks had a lot of really good things to say about Super Mario, and he even gave him an "A" for his performance against the Rams.

Here is one of the "strengths" Brooks saw from Mariota:

He is quick enough to turn the corner on bootlegs and waggle passes, but he also throws well on the run, as he demonstrated on a 35-yard completion to Craig Stevens in Sunday's contest against the Rams.

That play was a thing of beauty and something we are going to see a lot from Mariota. The important thing is that isn't all there is to his game.

Here was something Brooks identified that Mariota needs to work on:

For all of the progress Mariota has made transitioning into a traditional pro-style offense, the rookie still needs to work on making full-field or pure-progression reads from the pocket.

Brooks does go on to talk about the play where he went through his progressions and found Dexter McCluster in the end zone. That play shows me that Super Mario has already come a long way in his understanding of the offense. There are a lot of young, "mobile" quarterbacks that would have taken off right there. Mariota understood what the Rams were doing, found room to step up in the pocket, and delivered a ball that should have resulted in a touchdown. This kid is going to be special.