NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Tennessee Titans assistant head coach/ defense Dick LeBeau rated the play where Tennessee left Brandon Marshall uncovered and watched him take a short pass for a 69-yard touchdown as a perfect storm.
The Jets receiver made it 27-0 1:35 before the half. The Jets won 30-8.
A lot had to go wrong for Marshall's score to happen, sure.
The Jets managed to surprise everybody and Brandon Marshall was left all alone for a 69-yard score.
But with these Titans it was an unsurprising development and one that served to illustrate the sort of mistakes they are capable of making and how they can compound.
It was the first play of a new series, but the Titans needed to know what personnel the Jets had on the field before countering it.
The Jets went right to the line of scrimmage and the Titans got surprised.
“They had the play call and the formation all set,” interim coach Mike Mularkey said. “As we went to make the call, the headsets went down, right in the middle of it. …What we were doing based on their personnel and our personnel was trying to match, whether its zone or man, match our guys with their guys.
"They caught us with it, they caught us uncovered.”
The Titans do have a fail-safe call if they don’t get something in fast enough.
“But it happened so quickly that only a couple of guys got the call, unfortunately,” Mularkey said.
Mularkey pointed out that CBS was surprised as well. The network broadcast was showing an aerial shot of MetLife Stadium coming out of commercial when the play started, and cut to a field level view only after Marshall was already running with the ball.
Defensive end Jurrell Casey was one of only a few players who recognized what was going on. While he got to show off impressive speed for a man his size, he wasn’t catching Marshall. Safety Michael Griffin got to the receiver but failed to shove him out of bounds before he scored.
Mularkey was turning from being told the headsets were down to facing the play, but didn’t have time to call a timeout as the ball had been snapped. A player could have. Mularkey said they didn’t realize the ball was about to be snapped.
That isn’t much of an endorsement of the team’s preparedness -- everyone was looking to the sideline waiting on a call to the point where no one was watching what the offense was doing closely enough to know trouble was afoot?
The Titans 3-9 record tells us what to expect of them given such a hard-to-predict scenario.
