Using Oregon elements, Titans getting it right for Marcus Mariota

— -- Marcus Mariota finished his first NFL game with four touchdown passes, no interceptions, a win and a perfect 158.3 passer rating. While I wrote at PFF that his performance didn't quite live up to the fancy statistics, it did at least go a long way toward answering the question of how NFL-ready Mariota is coming out of that spread offense of Oregon.

The more interesting thing to examine is not exactly how well he played against the Bucs, but how good can he be going forward.

As well as Mariota played, the much-maligned Titans coaching staff deserves an enormous amount of credit for the system it has built around him.

The team didn't just plug him straight into a purely pro-style offense, but instead incorporated some of the packaged plays and reads that he had run at Oregon so successfully. While Tampa Bay rookie  Jameis Winston on the other side was sinking in over his head trying to execute a traditional pro-style offense despite coming from a similar system in college, it was Mariota whose transition looked so much smoother and more natural because of the college offensive traits that Tennessee folded into its new playbook.

Take the first touchdown pass to Kendall Wright (above). You can see that at the mesh point, Mariota is showing option mechanics, but his eyes are on the linebacker covering the slot. He reads how hard the LB bites on the run before pulling the ball back and delivering a strike so Wright can run after the catch.

In Mariota's first game, we saw a player who was poised, accurate, and efficient -- exactly the same player we saw at Oregon who topped the grading at PFF last season.

Mariota was our highest-graded passer by some distance in all of the FBS last season. A big part of that grade came from his rushing, which was the fourth best in the nation, but his passing grade was the highest of anybody, pushing USC's Cody Kessler into second place. This wasn't just a player taking advantage of easy passes manufactured by his offense -- though he was certainly aided by those opportunities -- this was a guy making impressive plays who was consistently grading well. Mariota earned a positive grade in all but two games last year, and to emphasize the point that it wasn't all the offense, his replacement this season, Vernon Adams Jr., has graded negatively in each of his first two games, one coming against Eastern Washington.

The Oregon offense is based off the kind of run fakes and options that we saw in the above play this weekend, and Mariota was a master at exploiting these deep shots that the play-action fakes opened up for him. His NFL passer rating using play-action was 20 points higher than when there was no fake, and it translated to notable spikes in completion percentage (up 1.9 to 68.9 percent) and yards per attempt (up 2.4 to 11.1 yards per attempt).

Oregon used play-action on 53.8 percent of all passing plays last season, which was the most of any team in the FBS, and while the Titans aren't going to move wholesale to that kind of offense, they were in the top 10 for play-action percentage in Week 1 with 27.8 percent of their pass plays employing a run fake -- a significant uptick over any of the quarterbacks the Titans used a year ago.

The point of all of this is that Tennessee is building an offense around Mariota -- one tailored to his strengths -- and that makes his pro prospects very promising. Not every quarterback in the NFL can be an Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady or Peyton Manning. Some guys have significant talent but need things bent around them just enough to put them in a good enough position to succeed over the long haul.

Think Russell Wilson.

This is a quarterback who showed immense talent and poise from day one as a rookie, but the Seahawks knew he would be markedly better if they could incorporate a read-option wrinkle into their offense without asking him to carry them as a passer. Wilson took his team to back-to-back Super Bowls, winning one and coming up one play short of a second, and though he leaned heavily on the running game and defense of his teammates, that is very much the point.

Mariota may never develop the complete and nuanced passing skills of Rodgers or some of the league's other top quarterbacks, but he has athletic gifts most of those players don't have. His potential shortcomings as a pocket passer can be augmented by a little schematic creativity from his coaches. Colin Kaepernick was immensely successful early in his 49ers career when Jim Harbaugh did similar things with the San Francisco offense -- limiting Kaepernick's reads, building in automatic checkdowns and adding in the read-option threat on the ground. The more the 49ers went away from that formula and toward a traditional offense, the worse Kaepernick played.

Mariota has the skills to take his team far, but he may not be able to do it if the Titans don't build around him. Tennessee's defense has a way to go, but the offense at least has shown that it is prepared to do what is best for the young signal-caller. As long as the Titans stick with that plan, Mariota can be their version of Wilson if they can put enough talent around him.