In a career as an assistant coach that exceeded a quarter century, Terry Robiskie had a certain style. "I'd MF anybody," he said Monday.
In 2016 and '17, the people on the other end of those F-bombs were Tennessee Titans, for whom Robiskie served as the offensive coordinator. At some point, those players sensed an inequity, and they asked about it: How come you're always jumping on us, and you never curse out Marcus Mariota, the quarterback?
Robiskie gave it to those Titans straight.
"The day you start blaming the quarterback and give up on him," Robiskie said, "everybody in the building is going to follow you."
The players, Robiskie said, were surprised by the candor. Mariota stood up.
"'Coach,'" Robiskie remembered him saying. "'I've been getting MF'd all my life. If you want to MF me, if I screw something up, please do me like you do everybody else.'"
"That told me then that that's a guy that wants to be a part of a team," Robiskie said. "And he wants to be one of the guys. And he wants to be the best he's capable of being. And he don't want nothing special -- no special treatment."
It is a decade later. Mariota is no longer just a couple of years removed from winning the Heisman Trophy at Oregon, a player who became the hope for an entire franchise and fan base. He is a journeyman in his 12th NFL season with his fifth team. He has played every role, from starter who was expected to be a star, to backup who scarcely played a snap, to fill-in starter while the leading man returns to health.
Which brings us to this week in Washington, where Mariota will again be thrust into the role he prepares for and the one he doesn't really want: replacing an injured Jayden Daniels as the Commanders try to duct tape together a season so it doesn't crumble before it even gets going.
"I mean, at the end of the day, it's my job," Mariota said Sunday night in Arlington, Texas, where Daniels dislocated his left elbow on the final play of the first half of the Commanders' 37-20 loss to the Dallas Cowboys. "I just never want it to be in these types of circumstances. With as much experience that I've had, I feel comfortable. … I really like what Coach Blough's doing. I believe in this system, and we'll get this thing working."
That is an about-to-be 33-year-old saying what needs to be said in the moment, what with offensive coordinator David Blough in his first year as a play caller now without the figure around which the offense was designed. But it's also a player who has matured as he has navigated circumstances he both signed up for and would rather avoid. Mariota wants to be one of the guys, as he showed in those early days in Tennessee. But he's also capable of standing up and leading.
"I've always thought of him as maybe one of the most genuine human beings ever," said Jason Michael, who served as Mariota's quarterbacks coach with the Titans and was an offensive assistant when Mariota spent the 2023 season in Philadelphia. "A natural leader coming out. … It was always all about the team. It was all about everyone else. He was always the one to take the back seat when it came to those things, but his leadership skills, to be able to go grab a guy and talk to him one-on-one, he's always done that."
Washington coach Dan Quinn reiterated Monday that Blough's entire playbook would be available to the Commanders even as Mariota subs in. "No, like, pullback or any of that," Quinn said.
The issue: Even with all he has learned, Mariota intuitively wants to make plays for himself, for his teammates. A replacement for the dynamic Daniels might be called on to be a game manager. That's never been Mariota's approach. His gun-slinging ways showed up a year ago, when he threw seven interceptions against 10 touchdowns and fumbled six times in 11 appearances in Daniels' stead.
"Marcus wants to score the touchdown," Robiskie said. "He wants to do it himself -- which I think gives him a double personality. As bad as he wants to win the game himself -- by himself -- he don't want to do anything to lose the game. He don't want to make that throw that, you know, 'I got to fit it in that tight window.' If he's got to win it by throwing it in that tight window, and it might cause us to lose the game, he's going to take off with it and run."
In 2022, in his lone season with the Atlanta Falcons, Mariota was featured in the Netflix reality series, "Quarterback." He acknowledged then the quality Robiskie described.
"My natural instinct has always been: I'm gonna be the guy to make the play," he said in one episode. "And I think that selfish attitude kind of gets me in trouble."
He is, by now, a full-on grown-up with both successes and scars. Take how he absorbed Daniels's injury in the moment. There is almost no way to process the emotions that ran through the entire Commanders team as Daniels writhed on the field. The 25-year-old had football taken away from him a year ago. He worked for nine months to get it back, with Mariota riding shotgun. Standing on the field at AT&T Stadium as Daniels waited for a cart to take him to the locker room, Mariota dealt with the situation realistically.
"For me, early on in my career, you try to just suppress those feelings and those emotions," he said. "But I think at the end of the day, I found you just have to kind of be vulnerable and talk about how you feel.
"My first inkling is just thinking about the guy, you know what I mean? Like, you worry, you think about his mental (well-being). You think (about) what he's gone through. So, yeah, you go through all those emotions, and I wasn't afraid to go through that."
So he can't be afraid to go through what's next: the Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks in Sunday's home opener. There is so much at stake. Since the turn of the century, only two teams have started a season 0-3 and advanced to the playoffs (Houston in both 2018 and 2025). Washington is 0-2 and is almost a touchdown underdog at home.
If the Commanders are to somehow piece together this season, Mariota will have to be a significant reason. In the second half against Dallas, he performed admirably, completing 11 of 16 passes for 111 yards and a 20-yard touchdown to Stefon Diggs. He will, those who know him well said, be ready.
"You look at his personality, and maybe he's a little bit introverted, reserved," Michael said. "But he's one of the most fierce competitors I've ever been around. He wants to be a starter, and I'm sure he's so excited about this opportunity. The circumstances are what they are."
Quinn is not yet willing to give a timeline on when Daniels, who is seeing specialists this week, could return. When Daniels suffered the same injury to the same elbow a year ago, he missed four weeks. The team, for now, is Mariota's.
"There's nobody easier to rally around than him," Quinn said Monday. "When you ask anybody on our team who some of our greatest leaders are, whether it's on or off the field, Marcus is somebody that constantly comes up."
He just doesn't always make it easy on himself.
"If Dan Quinn walked into that meeting room and told Marcus Mariota, 'You've got two options to win this game Sunday,'" Robiskie said. "'You can walk across the Potomac stark naked, or you can walk through a field full of lions wearing nothing but a loincloth made of pork chops,' he'd take the lions. He'd go the hard way."
At the moment, the hard way is staring the Commanders in the face, sneering. It's Marcus Mariota's job to stare back, take coaching, fit in with the guys -- and put his finger in the dike until Daniels can somehow come back.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
