If you actually read this post, and you’re going to respond to me on Twitter about it in good faith, please use the hashtag #ReadThePiece. I know this sounds silly, but it’s an easy way for me to separate responses that I want to honor with a real answer from people who just want to be mad about everything they read online.
***
The Texans are who we thought they were. They never pretended otherwise, and only the blind faith of fandom could drag anyone to think any differently.
Let’s put aside the talk about “good football,” which isn’t played with penalties and turnovers, and let’s talk about what David Culley did as the Colts grabbed a 14-point lead: fourth-and-2 at your own 45 yard-line and the answer was “punt,” the Colts followed up with Jonathan Taylor’s 83-yard foot stomp.
If you’re a sixty-six year old head coach, you cannot get made to look like a rookie as much as Culley has this year. In each of the last two games — here on this fourth-and-2, New England on the 56-yard field goal attempt — the game situation asked for a call to bold action to stop a run. Houston’s head coach might be apologetic about it on Monday, or he might just say that winning football is about field position. The problem is that this team needs to be managed aggressively to win games, and while he hasn’t shown that he’ll never do that, the reins are so inconsistent that it’s impossible to feel like there’s a plan. He had no problems doing it in the first half against the Patriots! Then, he gave it away.
To follow that up with a disgusting, nearly seven-minute drive that was turned over on downs and that featured six runs in 14 plays? That was deeply unserious football. That was culture ball. This team is devoted to the running game even though it a) has blown for most of the season and b) has almost zero explosiveness. I preface with almost because Phillip Lindsay finally hit a 35-yard run with about four minutes left in the game:
That finally cracked 100 yards for the team! Major kudos are in order, lads. The Texans have established the run. Davis Mills would later be picked to end the drive. Good stuff for the PR team to tweet out next week as the Cardinals send the team into oblivion.
1) Did you miss Laremy Tunsil?
Sent to IR after last week’s thumb injury prevented him from punching, Tunsil’s absence forced the Texans to start Geron Christian at left tackle. They were already starting Charlie Heck at right tackle after Marcus Cannon went on IR last week. And … Davis Mills took two sacks and only five quarterback hits. The two sacks were through 1) David Johnson and 2) Tytus Howard at left guard:
Meanwhile, the rag-tag group of starters helped spring Mark Ingram on his longest run of the season:
I hate bagging on the trade itself at this point because it is spilled milk under the bridge, and I have been slow to critique Laremy Tunsil this year because a) I enjoy his vibe and b) he had COVID and seemed to me at times to clearly have problems speaking without coughing in press availabilities. I don’t want to pretend I know what that dude was going through.
But with the Texans anchored to a regressive screen-and-short-balls passing game based on their overall dumb team concept, a star left tackle just isn’t making a material difference. You can argue that Tunsil never made a real difference in any of his three Texans seasons, even when he played well. That’s not a statement on how well he does his job, he’s obviously on talent an elite pass protector — but it does take all five, and he’s never been a good run blocker. It should not surprise us if the Texans punch a little above their established weight in that phase of the game without Tunsil. They did it last year with Roderick Johnson, and two big carries against a good Colts run defense isn’t something to sneeze off even if I hate how the second one went down.
2) Jon Greenard made an impact on pass defense, but that was about it
Carson Wentz only had to drop back 22 times all game, meaning Jon Greenard downed him on around 10 percent of his total dropbacks.
Greenard ran over Mo Alie-Cox on his first sack, and on his second picked up a coverage sack as Wentz drifted into his area as it appeared Wentz missed multiple open receivers. The most impressive thing was actually not a sack, but a tripping call that Greenard drew late in the game against Eric Fisher when he spun him:
Greenard had three of the Texans five quarterback hits and added two tackles for loss. The Texans were largely reliant on him to do something, anything, against a Colts offense with an immobile quarterback that schemed Cover-2 to death and torched it twice for big plays in the first half.
I know that the major Texans Twitter war at this point is that Charles Omenihu is inactive again and Lonnie Johnson didn’t start before Terrence Brooks got injured. I understand that what each of them have done this year have been inconsistent. My thing is: If Greenard can be put in a position and left alone and flourish, that means it is possible. I don’t think Lonnie is a deep safety this year because Justin Reid is better at the job — I think he fits better as a big nickel linebacker long-term as well, as he was covering Travis Kelce in the playoffs basically. I think Omenihu belongs inside in passing downs. The Texans seem to put them into roles where they can focus on what they can’t do, then discard them. It’s a shitty way to deal with your youth.
But, it is the culture at this point. Thank goodness Greenard has played culture-proof ball so far. I think he’ll have some slower games than this, but it’s been nice to see some real impact.
3) Davis Mills wasn’t bad, but didn’t take a step forward either
The one thing I’ve worried about the most with Mills is his inability to deal with blitzes in a timely manner. He has a sneaky way of avoiding the sack sometimes, so I wouldn’t exactly call him immobile. But it’s funny just how awkward he can look before suddenly he is all alone on the outside and he can dial up a ball drifting to his right:
His two interceptions were a) an attempt to imagine a ball past Darius Leonard in the middle and b) a overzealous deep ball to Cooks when Jordan Akins would have broken open in a zone hole:
On the balance of things, I don’t think Mills played particularly bad football for what he was asked to do. He had a couple of drift-out completions, they just weren’t as impactful as they were in Week 5 against the Patriots. Deep balls are going to be infrequent with this combination of offense and quarterback, and so it relies a lot on improvisation on the move and, well, missed tackles and luck.
The question remains: How are the Texans going to stop teams from blitzing Mills other than hoping to catch them with a good wideout screen? Because that’s the big weak point of this offense, and when the Texans really needed points, that was what the Colts brought to snuff out a drive:
And that area is what I’ve got my eye on for the next couple of weeks (at least) with Mills under center. I think he’s shown a little better than I expected from him after the early exposures, but he needs to keep taking steps. Every game he doesn’t take one is a week closer to Tyrod getting his job back and Mills being a long-term backup. It’s not particularly fair compared to how some quarterbacks get to live, but that’s the third-round rookie life.
4) The culture was established in 2020
This reminded me a lot of the loss to the Packers last year, a game which sent Houston to 1-6. It’s very easy for the players to hold the company line when it’s early, or when things are going well, but you can’t expect a 1-5 team to do the same. We had a rip-roaring press session where Mark Ingram ran the same four or five things in each answer he gave. Brandin Cooks called people out while trying to not call people out by name but also, yeah, he called people out.
The thing is: the culture has been established here since 2020, the first full year where the culture leader got to run an offseason. The culture isn’t interested in talent, it’s interested in gritty players like Ingram who are going to do what they can to overcome the next hurdle and play by the culture rules:
In that way, the culture becomes a weight of frustration, because the culture is built around growing through adversity and how that Has Meaning. But none of that actually matters for NFL teams that don’t employ great players. The Texans have one of the weakest rosters on the star level in the NFL — I would say they had the weakest period if Deshaun Watson wasn’t technically on the roster. Mark Ingram isn’t going to find anything that he can do better at this point. He’s a seasoned veteran. A lot of these guys are. They were set up to fail from the start. No roster this weak was ever going to contend, and they need to play almost flawless football. What this takes me back to is a quote Jacob Martin gave almost a year ago today:
The culture may have changed as far as players in and players out, but you can’t build a real culture around competition anymore than you can build a foundation with toothpicks on a blank slab. I feel bad for each and every player in the locker room. It doesn’t matter if Chris Moore unlocks his latent potential and becomes a palatable third receiver, because it changes nothing for the Texans’ long-term future. The only players that have any real upside here are the youth, who mostly don’t get to play outside of Mills, Greenard, Nico Collins, and Roy Lopez. And who knows how long they’ll play before they don’t eat the right brand of chips at lunch or they undersleep and get caught by the performance lab and get red flagged by a bunch of people who are trying to Frankenstein a team of loose parts together because they think they’ve got all the answers. You can’t aspire this into an NFL team with wishful thinking and one-percent-a-day-ism any more than you can aspire to make Frankenstein a real human being.
There’s a Great Gatsby quote for this circumstance: “It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people- with the single mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.” There aren’t quite fifty million Texans fans — there may not be fifty hundred Texans fans at Week 8’s Rams game — but this has been so brazen and so obvious for so long that you almost lose sight of how amazing it is that this team has been put together. If it were any other team but the one that I support, I would regard it like Leonard Nimoy talking about the cosmic ballet in The Simpsons.
It’s yes, a miracle that anyone would be dumb enough to do this and think that it would work, let alone to have leadership aligned around the concepts. The culture of this team is needless suffering and a forced smile through it, with accountability for everyone except those who built it.
***
I’m writing this article free of charge — this website is ad-free and non-intrusive. If you enjoy my work and want to encourage me to produce more, please feel free to leave me a PayPal tip.