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2021 NFL Predictions

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.

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The business of predictions is inherently stupid. I have a lot of skepticism of my own mind’s ability to pick anything correctly, because I know all the misses. Last season I predicted the Dallas Cowboys to be very good, and it turns out I was a year ahead of schedule on that prediction. Granted the whole “Dak Prescott being hurt” thing didn’t help.

My biggest weakness as a predictor is that I absorb a lot of common knowledge, try to fight that common knowledge with whoever I think is the best logical choice that is being “ignored” according to consensus, and go big on them. This means I either swing and miss or I hit so big that I can put it on the board. That’s what I did with the Ravens in 2019, and that’s what I did with the Cowboys this year.

Without further ado…

AFC East

Bills
Patriots*
Dolphins
Jets

I will eat my metaphorical hat if (TEAM) makes the playoffs: Jets. I think they’re much more promising than they were last year and all, but a rookie quarterback and rookie head coach in a division that doesn’t look all that easy is hard for me to pick. I think you probably need nine wins to make the playoffs, the Jets have a way higher ceiling than last year but it’s still seven or eight.

AFC North

Ravens
Browns*
Steelers
Bengals

I will eat my metaphorical hat if (TEAM) makes the playoffs: Cincinnati. I just don’t trust this team’s coaching staff. I think Joe Burrow is good enough to start a playoff game. I think they’ve got a promising skill receiver corps. But between Zac Taylor and Lou Anarumo, I don’t see any reason to believe they’ll get easy yards or prevent easy yards.

AFC South

Titans
Colts
Jaguars
Texans

I will eat my metaphorical hat if (TEAM) makes the playoffs: Texans. You know why.

AFC West

Chiefs
Chargers*
Broncos
Raiders

I will eat my metaphorical hat if (TEAM) makes the playoffs: None of them. The Raiders have a decently high floor, and the reports that Jon Gruden was trying to trade for Khalil Mack make me think they will chase a playoff spot even if it’s just a seventh seed. I think they could be early buyers.

NFC East

Cowboys
Football Team
Eagles
Giants

I will eat my metaphorical hat if (TEAM) makes the playoffs: Giants. Don’t believe in the coaching staff, don’t believe in Daniel Jones as a franchise quarterback. Don’t believe in the general manager’s ability to understand the passing game. I’d be surprised if Philadelphia made it as well.

NFC North

Packers
Vikings
Bears
Lions

I will eat my metaphorical hat if (TEAM) makes the playoffs: Lions. I’m not necessarily in “Dan Campbell isn’t a good coach” camp, but I’m poking around the edges of it while I’m looking to see what happens here. I don’t think there’s much to salvaging Jared Goff. Penei Sewell has struggled at right tackle in the preseason and I’m worried about Andrew Thomas-itis.

NFC South

Buccaneers
Saints*
Panthers
Falcons

I will eat my metaphorical hat if (TEAM) makes the playoffs: Panthers. Yes, even though I’m picking the Falcons to finish last. I think there’s more upside in the coaching of Arthur Smith and Dean Pees, to the point where my major worry with the Falcons is personnel. Matt Ryan versus Sam Darnold is an easy win for Atlanta and one that I think caps the upside of Carolina by a lot. I am putting the Panthers ahead because I think Joe Brady will work some magic with Darnold. Just, you know, not enough magic for it to matter.

NFC West

Seahawks
Rams*
Cardinals*
49ers

I will eat my metaphorical hat if (TEAM) makes the playoffs: None of them. They’re all pretty good, and I wouldn’t be stunned if the 49ers won the division. I am very curious as to how the 49ers defense moves on from Robert Saleh and Richard Sherman, and my lean is that it might not be quite as good as it was in the past. It’s pretty much neck-and-neck with Arizona, who has their own coaching issues under Kingsbury.

Wild Card Round:

Ravens over Patriots
Bills over Browns
Chargers over Titans
Buccaneers over Cardinals
Saints over Seahawks
Rams over Cowboys

Divisional Round

Ravens over Bills
Chiefs over Chargers
Packers over Saints
Rams over Buccaneers

Championships

Ravens over Chiefs
Packers over Rams
Packers over Ravens

Feel free to laugh about this post at any time, including the moment you first read it, the moment you think about it in Week 5 when one of the playoff teams I’ve projected is 1-4, the moment that that COVID makes one of these teams play a 14-game schedule, or after the season when you’ve got 20-20 hindsight and I don’t. I am not going to get Mad Online at you. As I said: Predictions are inherently stupid.


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The Texans were scheduled to play some football games this year, let’s preview it

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.

***

This is being written, as always, with the caveat that Deshaun Watson doesn’t appear likely to play games this season. If for whatever reason he actually suits up, life will be a lot more interesting.

I will get this out of the way up front so that the people who read this stuff for the boost of dopamine where they can tell me how much of a non-fan jerkwad I am can get it out of their system early. I believe the Houston Texans will win somewhere in the range of 2-to-6 games this year without it surprising me. I am picking them to go 3-14. This does not mean I am not rooting for them to kick my projection around and make me look stupid.

There are many people in the media and the Twitter comments section who want to kick this team while they’re down and call them 0-17, and I get the impulse. But it takes a huge amount of negative luck to wind up with a record that bad. The worst team by DVOA ever, the 2005 49ers, actually won four(!!) games. Most sportsbooks have put the over/under on the Texans wins at four or 4.5.

But it has seemed to me for some time that this year is not going to be about creating new value for the team so much as it is about the team “creating a culture” as Nick Caserio said last week. I am an “actions equal attitudes” person — I think that without taking real and actual on-field steps to make the product better in the future, this year is a waste of time for the fans and organization. I am pulling hard for the players involved to boost their stock and get better contracts elsewhere, but otherwise, it’s hard to have a lot of investment in what is happening.

Offense

I think this will be the worst offense in the NFL this year. The amount of wins they actually wind up with will be very reliant on the games that they do produce adequately (250-300 total yards) being grouped with a special teams big play, a bushel of turnovers, or both.

To start with, losing Deshaun Watson isn’t a case where the Texans had a fine offense without him and we should expect them to just hum along now that he’s gone. There were not many easy throws in the game plan last season. (I have asked several local radio personalities to name me their favorite easy pass plays the Texans ran last year, and it usually ends with me naming the few I can remember.) There are probably three quarterbacks in the NFL who could make a passing offense function with Keke Coutee and Chad Hansen as the main targets. Will Fuller’s absence is another big blow to this team’s realistic upside, as he was easily the team’s best receiver last season. Take out Watson’s off-the-cuff ability to create on his own and his deep passing ability and essentially all the boom has been taken out of this offense.

Tyrod Taylor will attempt some deep throws and he doesn’t have a bad arm, but Taylor is a passer that has traditionally been reluctant to uncork balls that aren’t wide open. He is a quarterback that will try to live to the next down. His preseason average distance of target was 5.8, which would have been second-lowest qualified number in the NFL last year. And his completion rates aren’t good enough to keep long drives alive often without a running game. Thus, the Texans emphasis on how they must have a good running game this year and must run a lot.

What we saw of Davis Mills in training camp and the preseason was not exactly anything that made me excited to see him get an in-season sample. I’m not ruling out that he could be improving massively over the weeks that he’s sitting, but he needs to be immensely better to be passable in an NFL game right now from what I watched. You couldn’t notice anyone livetweet Texans training camp without an interception from Mills or Jeff Driskel coming in a team drill. Driskel is, ironically, the quarterback who I think looked the most like the quarterback they need to do the run-game things they’ll need to do this season. I just think he has no business ever throwing a football.

I think you can expect the Texans to run the ball well in some of this year’s games. The thing I’ve learned over the years with running games is that there are times when the schematic matchups work out, and there are times where they do not. The 2018 Texans had one of the best run defenses in NFL history from a DVOA perspective. The Colts ran over them in the playoffs because they could check D.J. Reader. The 2020 Texans finished last in the NFL in run offense DVOA. They still had four separate games where they finished with a 10% or higher rush offense DVOA. You can expect that the Texans will do a good job in the run game about 4-6 times this season without improvement. There are times where the game-plan schematics work in your favor, there are times where you will win a particular matchup decisively, and there are times where you just play a team that is remarkably bad at run defense.

Those games will — in my opinion — be lead balloons of false hope, the sort of things that people covering the team closely will say things like “If they could just run like this every game,” or “They just need Tytus Howard to dominate like he did in Week 7 every week, they have to be more consistent,” or “David Johnson’s last three games of the season were a real turning point!” That’s a misreading of what’s happening here. This team does not have above-average run game personnel and, as things stand today, I don’t think you can expect them to have above-average schematic play calling. Tim Kelly runs this offense and he could not find a way to change things in the middle of last season. Position coaches can give input but it’s not like Pep Hamilton’s Colts were a dominant run offense force — they were the team that made the Trent Richardson trade a boondoggle. I think both the talent and coaching is aspiring to be average.

The preseason had the Texans predominantly running zone. Zone is a scheme that tends to require a lot of chemistry, practice and continuity to get off the ground with. This is an offensive line that projects to return exactly one player from last season’s team at the spot he started last year: Laremy Tunsil. They project to have two starters in 2021 (Justin Britt, Marcus Cannon) who didn’t even play in 2020. Forget the idea of developing chemistry in camp, this offensive line will be lucky to have played more than two days of practice snaps together when they take the field against Jacksonville. And when Lane Taylor comes back, if he is as favored as it seemed he was early in camp, they get to make more adjustments all over again.

Now if the Texans had leaned into Tyrod Taylor’s strength in the read-option game as a base philosophy, I think that could have been interesting. But they didn’t do that. They aren’t going to use him as a runner if they can avoid it. And that’s going to lead to a lot more second-and-8s and third-and-7s than they’d like. Maybe, if we’re all lucky, that will change in the middle of the season if things look bad enough. I have my doubts based on how things went last year.

Defense

This is going to be the hardest for you to accept after watching the preseason’s first two games if you’re an optimist, but here we go: Lovie Smith’s system has generally been pretty simple, and the ability that he has to be able to create turnovers are limited with the lack of a true star pass rusher he has.

I think the question isn’t whether the Texans will improve on defense or not — last year’s defense barely appeared to have team meetings per Justin Reid. They’re going to improve, because last year’s bar is literally on the floor.

But I think the preseason has mostly masked the real flaws that Lovie’s defense has had. In a way, it’s almost a defense built for the preseason. When we talk about the idea of young quarterbacks struggling against Lovie’s scheme, that’s not exactly how things have played out. The Titans put up 35 points of offense on the Bucs with Marcus Mariota in the first game of Lovie’s last season as head coach. Blake Bortles put up four touchdowns on them in his second year. In Kirk Cousins’ first season as a full-time starter, he completed 33-of-40 for three touchdowns and 317 yards. This is all from the same season. Am I of the belief that Smith has more freedom to change things up and more time to analyze the defense than he did as a head coach? I sure am. Do I think he’d tip his hand in the preseason if he was more likely to do this? Hard to say. But I see him more as a mind that has crystallized on “the system” and the way he’s done things in the past, and I worry that he simply is what he is at this point.

What we saw in the preseason was an illusion to me. One created by the fact that they saw real starters at every position for exactly three series, two of which they were shredded on. So in the game of adjustments, how far Lovie is willing to adjust from his previous comfort zone is the biggest question of the season for me as far as where the Texans wind up. If they get some exotic change-ups and play stingy run defense in 75% of their games? I could see the Texans closer to five or six wins. But that’s a big ask for a front seven that — outside of Charles Omenihu — is either coming off poor seasons, has zero good NFL years as a primary starter, or looks washed. Omenihu and Maliek Collins looked good in the preseason, and I think the Texans can build a pass rush that can target weak links on opposing offensive lines. But I think Omenihu and Collins need to take big leaps for this unit to be more than feisty. I like the secondary just fine for Lovie’s scheme, but they’re not going to be able to cover for five seconds on every play.

Special teams

This is a saving grace. The Patriots have always focused heavily on special teams, and under Caserio the Texans brought in a metric ton of guys with experience at it, to the point where they dealt Keion Crossen in the middle of training camp because they didn’t think they needed that much depth at the spot. Cameron Johnston had a ridiculous preseason and Jon Weeks still hasn’t blown a snap. No matter who the Texans pick as main coverage guys, return guys, and so on, I think they’ll contribute real value. I would be surprised if this team finished outside of the top-15 in special teams DVOA.

I’m not wild on Kai Fairbairn as a top-five kicker — what he’s paid to be — but he’s a solid-average one.

Answering common fan questions for those of you who are just coming back to this after an offseason of blissful ignorance:

Is this team tanking?

This team isn’t trying to tank. Yes, I believe that even after the Bradley Roby trade. Tanking teams embrace youth. This team barely signed any UDFAs from the 2021 class. (There are only three players on the practice squad under 25 years old.) There’s no extra layer of youth hanging out waiting for an opportunity. This team has precisely seven players they drafted from the 2019 and 2020 drafts still on the roster, period. Tanking teams would not put Lonnie Johnson into a camp battle with Eric Murray for a starting spot — they’d simply throw him out there and see what happened.

I tend to not think of tanking as good for a football organization, period. It’s bad for the fans, bad for the players, and it’s a thought experiment that does less good than you might think in a sport where many, many players start. You can tank your way to a good quarterback, but the Texans just got one and squandered it by not properly surrounding him with talent. It’s not like you just get the No. 1 pick, draft LeBron James, and it’s nothing but finals appearances for a decade. The Packers have Aaron Rodgers and have won one (1) Super Bowl. The Colts tanked to the best pre-Trevor Lawrence prospect in recent memory and had one blowout AFC Championship game loss to show for it.

There may be a point in the season where tanking makes some sense for the team, and I’ll be loud about it when we get there, but I actually would praise the organization for not embracing tanking as an ethos. It took Cleveland years to scrub off the tanking part of analytics, and it became a black cloud that haunted all coverage of the team. I think the Texans stumbled upon this idea for reasons that don’t mirror mine: which is to say I think this is more about making Jack Easterby look good. (If anyone is going to be the black cloud over this team, folks, it’s going to be Easterby!) If you gave me control of the roster I think you’d see many, many more young players that I was hoping would develop into solid-average players with snaps rather than vets that don’t have a lot of upside. But I don’t have it, and this is what they’ve got, and we’re all hopeful that it won’t be a complete waste of everybody’s time.

I think this team is too myopic to tank. That they have managed to create a roster that everyone thinks is tanking is a self-scathing indictment of Nick Caserio’s belief that he can judge character and culture better than everybody else. The results are not guaranteed to be bad! But boy, on the face of things, it sure does look like a roster full of 25-40th best guys on a great team. I am not one to root for the team to fail, but I can see the argument in hoping that a truly disastrous season will wash out the front office (Easterby in particular). I just don’t have much faith that anything anybody does this season is going to change the results that have already been put in to motion. Easterby will argue that Watson ruined the season before it began, and Cal McNair doesn’t listen to us, he listens to Easterby.

What I have seen of the draft-eligible quarterbacks does not have me excited to start throwing games, but players pop up every year (see: Zach Wilson) and perhaps that will be the case this year as well.

Why didn’t the team trade Deshaun Watson, and why do we have to keep hearing about him?

Well, the easy answer to this is that the trade value of Deshaun Watson was destroyed by the 22 lawsuits to his name. The Texans have an obligation to get the best value they can out of Watson, because he is the only player on this roster with any long-term value. They are hoping that in time, Watson’s value will rebuild itself. It is an unresolved question that means so, so much more than this season. So, yes, you will continue to hear a lot about Deshaun Watson and he will hang over this season as a distraction. Nobody will admit it is a distraction, because they have all been told to say so, but it very much is one.

In the mean time the likeliest outcome appears to be the Texans playing with a 52-man roster this season while wasting a spot on an inactive Watson. I can’t say that this is a bad move from their perspective, but, yes, it’s going to be awkward as all get out.

***

And, well, that’s what I’ve got. I watched all three preseason games intently, devoured as many camp notebooks and other beat writer reports that I could. Listened to all the interviews that the team put out. I would love to believe that there was more here that I’m just not seeing. But I don’t think the current team is very good, I don’t think there’s much of a chance that they’re going to be well-coached on offense, and the optimism about Lovie changing things up more with more focus on defense exists only as a theory at this point. David Culley largely feels like a head coach that is going to stay out of the way outside of popping up to complain about self-inflicted mistakes. (I will be honest with you, I think Culley’s a cool guy, but I have no idea what his actual job is. He seems lost in some very real ways in pressers, feels behind Caserio in the power ranking pecking order, and has little in-game value. He’s a CEO coach that is still learning how to be a CEO coach. At 65 years old.)

They’ll have a good special teams unit in my opinion, and they’ll be feisty enough to win a few games. Whether it is two or three or four or five largely depends on a) something unknown to my current radar popping up in a positive way and b) cluster luck in getting the best of this offense on the same day you’re getting the best of the defense.

I have no idea how they will define creating a culture, but the great thing about leading with that and saying things like process-oriented is that it’s almost impossible for anyone on the outside to properly critique. We’ll get the bits and pieces, and we’ll be able to snark about the team culture that got matching PED suspensions for Fuller and Bradley Roby, and talk about how ridiculous it is that Rex Burkhead saying something to Scottie Phillips before a big run was trumpeted as a sign of a winning culture. But if your goal is indefinable, then so are the results.

And, well, that’s the ultimate design for a grifter to keep power, isn’t it? That’s what we’re doing here. Nobody can attach logic to what this team is doing because there’s nothing to attach. The goal is to win five games instead of three to boost Jack Easterby’s stock three-tenths of a point, and if they don’t happen to do that, well, it’s Deshaun’s fault anyway.

We can’t be worried about the results unless they’re good. Because the process is so great. We’ll tell you so.


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How should we read the Shaq Lawson trade?

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.

***

I tread lightly on this territory because it is September, and Training Camp-September is the league-mandated Time Of Optimism where I get eight times the amount of crap I’d otherwise get for being interested in potential dysfunction. But, here we go. The Texans traded Shaq Lawson on Sunday after an extremely quiet training camp where he a) wasn’t talked about a lot in-house, b) was playing deep into the preseason games and c) wasn’t productive when he did play in those preseason games. Per PFF data, Lawson did not have a single pressure in 50 pass-rush snaps.

So I understand how true-blood fans would like to just take this as a very simple trade: Lawson was bad, and Lawson was traded because he was bad. Even though the Texans had restructured him before the season to push more of his guaranteed money into the 2022 cap year and all they received was a sixth-round pick.

However, what I come back to is this:

“It’s not going to work like that here. It just can’t. Not with all these guys putting out the effort they are,” those are the alarms of culture taking place. So, rhetorical you who is made out of people I’ve had yelling at me on Twitter the past 24 hours about this, your counter might be that the Texans are cultivating the culture that they want, but that Lawson being bad in preseason is why he didn’t make the team.

But the thing about that is: Teams can say that all their decisions are based on training camp play, but we know that’s not true. We know some people are managed and looked at a little bit differently than others. I want to specifically come to the example of Whitney Mercilus here. Mercilus finished the preseason with one hurry. He has not been a productive pass rusher in the regular season since 2017, which is a big contrast to Lawson’s regular seasons. The most productive thing Mercilus gave us in the preseason was a Papa John’s commercial.

Now, I’m a Mercilus fan. I think he’s a very good guy, and I don’t begrudge him for signing the contract that he got. But on the objective face of things, if we’re looking at who attacked training camp and was productive, I don’t think he’s much above Lawson. One of them was treated with kid gloves, and one of them was treated to fourth quarter snaps in Green Bay. I also tend to think it’s okay if a player isn’t productive in training camp — if the player is productive when the lights come on in the regular season, that’s what matters most.

But I don’t think the Texans think that way. And I think that quote from Vander Meer kind of demonstrates the culture inside the building. The competition, competition, competition mindset and ethos. That in itself is a very big cultural choice. And that’s why Shaq Lawson asked to be traded.

Something that becomes very apparent in looking at PFF’s preseason data is that Lawson has not exactly gone full-bore in any of those games. He has just seven total pressures in 157 pass rush snaps over four preseasons, compared to an average of about one in every 10 plays in the regular season. Or, as Shaq Lawson would put it:

So the Texans clearly have a vested interest in protecting their culture after it was a major focus of Deshaun Watson’s ire and the culture leader was kept, protected, and put in bubble wrap so he didn’t have to answer to anybody following Sports Illustrated’s well-sourced reports of his power seizure. Kamu Grugier-Hill will loudly tell you about how great it is any time he’s at the podium, and so of course he did that again yesterday. And the result of that culture’s impact on Lawson was: “I can finally be myself here” after he was traded to the Jets.

That sounds like Shaq Lawson wasn’t a cultural fit more than anything else. Preseason stats be damned (and there are tons of other examples of players who played bad making the team — Davis Mills and Vernon Hargreaves, come on down), not drawing from that inner reservoir of fortitude and grinding out every practice and going all-out in practices and preseason games is the negative in the eyes of the Texans. I say “sounds like” because this is circumstantial, I didn’t watch every practice or anything, but the evidence that we have publicly available sure points to that.

***

Now, when I posted this, it riled a lot of the true-bloods up:

But there’s a very clear reason I chose “weird” here and not “bad” — if I wanted to slag the Texans, trust me, I can be way clearer than I was.

Now, my supposition based on the past is that this culture is player-unfriendly and that being player-unfriendly is, to take a Steph Stradley line, the Texans making life harder for themselves than it has to be. It is the kind of culture that drove DeAndre Hopkins out of the room. (A major talking point being that they didn’t like how he didn’t practice.) It is the culture that Watson spoke up about before he became a pariah. It is, in my opinion, the unstated reason that several of this franchise’s best players have packed up and left. This doesn’t mean that hard work and practice shouldn’t be celebrated, but I think this particular overemphasis by this particular assistant vice president of football operations — who has never played the game and struts on the sideline in preseason like he’s a coach — has pretty clearly been a problem for some players. It appears to have been that way for Shaq Lawson as well.

In trying to combat that with “their type of player,” with their intangibles, ala Nick Caserio’s Sloan speech, the Texans may very well have totally changed over their locker room culture in a way that creates the exact sort of eager beavers that they were looking for:

The problem is that in creating this team, the Texans have limited their player pool by self-selecting their traits. Many teams do this in other ways. They’ll want all their tackles to be 6-foot-4 with a 36-inch wingspan (or whatever), and that’s a major reason why certain draft pick busts continue to get more chances. They were drafted highly because they have physical traits other players just don’t have.

The Texans are approaching this from the standpoint of player mentality. The result they have created is a roster full of older free agents that have little upside. If they play beyond their tools, they’ll have to be re-signed and will command more money. If they play below their tools, the team will have wasted a year of snaps on someone who could have been a young, cost-controlled player. What they do have is the ability to show up for practice, bust their ass during practice, and give it their all in the eyes of Jack Easterby and Nick Caserio.

The players the Texans have wound up with are not appreciably talented at football. They aren’t terrible players, and they aren’t the most untalented roster in the history of the game. But they lack upside now and they lack upside in the future. They are knowns. Some will be average, some will be average for backups, and so on. The bet is that there’s some sort of extra benefit to filling the room with the kind of personality traits and intangibles that Caserio and Easterby value. It’s almost a science experiment.

What is that worth? We’re about to find out.

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Four Downs; Texans 16, Buccaneers 23

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.

***

It was pretty clear that the best unit on the field on Saturday was the Tampa Bay offense. Tom Brady, perturbed by a three-and-out on his first series, quickly engineered back-to-back drives full-field drives against the Texans starters. 91 and 93 yards. The Tampa running game was barely involved in them. Brady no-huddled his way through the entire second series, and he carved up the Texans defense in a way that had all of them paraphrasing the idea that, well, of course he did, he’s the greatest of all-time.

And, well, it wasn’t very surprising that the Texans defense struggled against starters and Brady. They just don’t have a lot of top-tier talent. They need to win four-man pass rush situations to be able to create the amount of negative plays for them to make an impact on the game. The open question is how many offenses and bad quarterbacks they will be able to take advantage of by playing a steady defense, because “hey, get turnovers” aside, there’s not a lot of complexity in what Lovie Smith is here to do.

I would simply run play-action against Smith’s unit on every down, if I’m being honest with you.

Other than that typical Brady stuff, this game was extremely drunk. To give a taste if you missed it:

– The Texans played without a placekicker after Kai Fairbairn pulled a muscle in warm-ups, they used safety Justin Reid on kickoffs and went 2-for-6 on fourth downs.
– The Texans actually ran the ball really, really well after two poor games. They ran better on the second unit, sure, but Mark Ingram and David Johnson showed some burst. They ran for 209 yards as a team and lost, which as far as the regular season goes, has only happened 30 times since 2011.
– Blaine Gabbert and Davis Mills gave us a second-string slap fight that saw them finish the half with 26 and 6 passing yards, respectively. Gabbert took a safety, and Mills was picked twice in the second quarter.
– There were eight total turnovers in this game, and that does not include the Texans safety, their blocked extra point (Vincent Taylor), or their blocked field-goal attempt in the fourth quarter (Tavierre Thomas).

David Culley is here to get you off his lawn and his lawn is penalties and turnovers, so as you can imagine he was not quite as thrilled with this one as he was with Week 2’s turnoverless win.

1) The run game comes alive — is it real?

Texans backs finished the first half with 21 carries for 91 yards. A lot of that was about David Johnson’s one untouched run where he showed off the speed that made him a big deal back in the day.

But the Texans also were grinding out some repeatable four-to-six yard gains, mostly with Mark Ingram, and pulling a lot of linemen. The best snap for me was the first one, because you can see how Justin Britt and Tytus Howard got some actual push:

It’s also worth noting that the Texans played their starting line into the second quarter with Ingram and Davis Mills, and the Bucs were playing second-string guys at that point.

This was necessary, because you can’t focus on running and be as bad as the Texans were at it the first two preseason games. But — not to spill too much tea on my read of where this team is going — they’re going to have games like this. Bad NFL running games don’t generally fall off the entire face of the earth. They have four or five games a year where they look pretty good, and then everyone asks why that doesn’t happen more often. That happened to the 2020 Texans, and I’d bet big cash on it being what happens to the 2021 Texans.

More to the point, you can’t pass as poorly as this team did this preseason without drawing bigger boxes. And that is a factor that won’t really be touched on much in the preseason with mostly vanilla defenses. It was good to see some push from the offensive line! I don’t know how to feel about it long-term. Particularly because we have no real understanding of what the starting line will look like together if a Marcus Cannon or Lane Taylor rejoin the lineup.

2) Davis Mills explodes, Tyrod Taylor stopgaps

I got some pushback about Mills not being ready when I posted about that last week, and this was a game that would lead to me victory lapping if I gave a crap. Mills didn’t get to 100 passing yards until the fourth quarter. He looked so utterly locked in to his No. 1 read that even Spencer Tillman had to mention it. The touchdown pass to Jordan Veasy was the one true flash of stardom — the link to his college days — but wow, outside of that drive, what we saw was the worst bits of the scouting report come to life. Some floaters were picked. He had a few floaters that his receivers had to absorb a lot of punishment on (Brevin Jordan and Alex Erickson’s catches), and he looked lost in the pocket often. Two balls were batted down.

Again, I can’t see how putting Mills into an NFL game this year based on this sample of play is going to end well for anybody. It might have to happen, because Tyrod Taylor is a stopgap who does tend to have a dark cloud of injuries following him around, ready to pounce at any moment. But barring massive improvement on the sidelines over the next couple of months, this isn’t NFL-level quarterback play.

Taylor might technically be a mobile quarterback. But when he is pressured off of his spot, or when they move the pocket, there’s not a lot of reason to believe he’s going to reset and throw well. He is, bluntly, not in Deshaun Watson’s league as a passer. The Texans need to get that through their skulls quickly. They need to make this system easy for Taylor without making it a passing game that basically focuses on curls and digs. Right now, it feels extremely horizontal. Like violently horizontal. And that’s not going to help with that whole thing about teams wanting to stack the box. Good luck.

Taylor played three preseason games and best I can remember at 2:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, he did not attempt a single deep pass. He might have some categorized as “deep” as in more than 15 yards, but no bombs, no testing anything with Brandin Cooks.

3) The other rookies — Nico Collins’ first touchdown pass comes, but the rookie left some yards on the field

Collins played a lot in this game — he was on the field on snap one — but he was less impressive on a consistency basis than he was on a highlight basis. It was, admittedly, a beautiful touchdown catch because he bowled over the safety:

Collins was about 18 inches on two plays from having a game that would have Fantasy Football Twitter gushing. Here’s one of the other two:

The thing is, Collins very well may play right away, but the training camp raves haven’t matched the actuality of what is happening on the field. He’s going to flash and he’s very impressive when he does flash because he’s impossibly tall and long, so much so that when he does catch a ball it looks natural that he’d just beat everyone up on the field for their lunch money. But he finishes the preseason with three catches on seven targets, and there is inconsistency here right now.

The good news for fantasy players: They just get to target volume. There should be plenty of volume! And I’m not saying Collins can’t be a long-term fixture for the team either, he just hasn’t really shown a lot of the upside in games yet.

Roy Lopez wound up with a credited sack, finishing the preseason with three. I don’t think he really deserved the sack he was awarded, but a) nobody asked me and b) they didn’t show him salsa dancing so why did the sack even exist? Lopez played from the second quarter on and seems like he’ll be part of the defensive line rotation. I didn’t see Garret Wallow on any non-special teams plays before the final drive of the game, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. As I noted in the Mills section, Jordan caught one ball:

I think Lopez and Collins are probably surer bets at playing time/roster spots at this point than Wallow and Jordan. Jordan I’m about 90 percent sure makes the roster. I have no clue what to think about Wallow, who has pretty much always been with the threes. One of the major bits of the Easterby experience has been a devaluation of the young players on the roster. Has Nick Caserio joining changed that so far? Not judging by the number of UDFAs. But! Has Nick Caserio changed that for players he actually drafted? That’s a question we’re all awaiting some data on.

4) Playing-time observations

Bradley Roby, Zach Cunningham and Lonnie Johnson didn’t play. Jeremy Fowler reported that the Texans were shopping Johnson, so some dots got connected there for some people. I kind of think the Texans just had so much to figure out at these positions that they needed the run for their other players. Can I be optimistic enough to hope it means Johnson starts? I can delude myself for a few more weeks, sure, what else am I doing with my life?

Vernon Hargreaves played with the first team. He’s not very good! I’m sorry, I also hope for things to go better. But he’s not! Terrence Mitchell, Desmond King, Eric Murray, and Justin Reid also started. Brady picked on the zone coverage of Mitchell and King mostly, as well as the natural Cover-2 seams. Kamu Grugier-Hill played with Christian Kirksey in Cunningham’s place. Whitney Mercilus and Shaq Lawson were the edge players on that abysmal second series. Jaleel Johnson got a surprise start, while Maliek Collins appears locked in at three-tech.

The Texans continued to play mostly 12-personnel (two tight ends, two wideouts) with their early offense. Pharaoh Brown and Jordan Akins did most of the tight end work, Chris Conley was the third wideout. With Laremy Tunsil out, Gerod Christian was starting at left tackle with Justin Britt at center, Max Scharping and Tytus Howard at guard, and Charlie Heck at right tackle. Howard has played almost all of his preseason snaps at guard, but I’m sure we’ll get to hear more about how he “hasn’t moved yet.” Chris Moore took over for Brandin Cooks in a hurry.

Cole Toner played with the first string offensive line on the first series of the third quarter. Jonathan Owens took over for Justin Reid in the third quarter. Terrence Brooks played for Eric Murray after Murray left with an injury, which is why he was on to pick Blaine Gabbert and avoid Jack Easterby high-fives.

Second team line (second series of third quarter) was: Jordan Steckler, Danny Isadora, Ryan McCollum, Hjalte Froholdt, and Carson Green. Second-team defense had Kevin Pierre-Louis, Derek Rivers, Neville Hewitt, DeMarcus Walker (star), Rasul Douglas, Tae Davis, Jordan Jenkins, Tremon Smith, with Brooks still playing. Tavierre Thomas played nickel. Vincent Taylor played well into the fourth quarter which was prety interesting. I kind of figured he was ahead of Jaleel Johnson, maybe that’s not so. Or maybe they just wanted to see how Johnson played with the firsts. The defensive line otherwise just rotated all over the place as usual.

Buddy Howell played only late in the third quarter, he’s been the last guy off the running back bench the whole preseason. 🙁

Ex-Packers trade acquisition Ka’dar Hollman got in on the last two drives of the game. He was clearly behind Douglas.

Players that had the most special teams snaps that I think are competing for a rsoter spot: Tavierre Thomas, Brooks, Joe Thomas, Jonathan Owens, Hardy Nickerson, Garret Wallow, Tae Davis, Chris Moore. I think the main question out of that group is probably how much (Joe) Thomas’ and Nickerson’s special teams play moves the needle for the Texans as far as a backup linebacker spot. And remember, the Texans have already brought in more linebackers for workouts in the last couple of weeks, so those guys don’t necessarily have to be the answer. The Tae Davis/Neville Hewitt grouping was pillaged by Kyle Trask.


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Four Downs: Texans 20, Cowboys 14

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 one thing that I think reasonable minds could agree on as an area of optimism for the 2021 Houston Texans is the defense. What they have done in the preseason deserves a huge caveat: The best quarterback they’ve faced is Jordan Love, who has not started an actual NFL game yet. I do believe that throws like this completion over Christian Kirksey will remain a bugaboo as we cull the weak quarterbacks out of the games.

However, I think one area that I may have underestimated in a way that can help in the regular season: the ability to get a pass rush with four solid-average players on the line. The 2020 Houston Texans did many poor things as a defense, but one of the ones that they did the most often was “let poor pass rushers eat snaps.” Whitney Mercilus, Carlos Watkins, and Brandon Dunn were among their top six pass rushers last year. This year, Mercilus would probably be an easy release if he were not in the protective veteran cocoon. The interior line in particular has a lot more juice and even though he didn’t join in the sack brigade that Jacob Martin and Charles Omenihu did, Maliek Collins was dazzling from a pressure-created standpoint.

I think if you’re looking for one rock-solid, Rivers-approved optimistic thing to take away from the 2-0 preseason start, it’s that they have a variety of pass rushers that are not going to embarrass themselves one-on-one. Obviously that carries a lot of weight in the preseason, but there are weak links along most offensive lines when the regular season starts as well. The cap has forced this team to have a bad right tackle, and this one to start a rookie center, and Next Man Up has placed a bad guard here or there. The Texans won’t get five sacks, like they did tonight, often. But they could get three. If they can generate the kind of havoc that Lovie Smith has established his brand around — particularly with inexperienced or bad quarterbacks — I think that is a rallying point of optimism.

Now, on to the things that are not quite as optimistic

1) The starters have been abysmal as a run offense in both preseason games

The Texans ran 28 times for 89 yards in their victory, and even that number oversells the amount of damage their proper run game did. If you take out Davis Mills’ seven-yard scramble and Jeff Driskel’s rampant Driskeling in true garbage time, Texans backs ran 22 times for 59 yards. 2.6 yards per attempt. They were able to score a touchdown when Mark Ingram busted off an eight-yard gain in Cowboys territory, and they set that up by actually running the ball on fourth-and-1 to the chagrin of everyone who crucified David Culley’s “analythics” playbook:

Great seal by Antony Auclair on that one. Anyway, the Texans ran another fourth-and-1 in Cowboys territory later in the game with Mills, and again tried to show a quarterback run threat. Both Taylor and Mills were ignored on those. The play was not quite so successful that time.

The Texans ended the first half of the game against Green Bay last week with 14 carries for 33 yards, before they ran roughshod over the Packers’ end-of-roster youth with their older, vet-heavy second and third teams. It’s worth noting that this is the preseason and that the plays may be more vanilla than usual, but this team has shown no aptitude for zone blocking so far and that’s not really something that gets spiced up. Tim Kelly has no history of success running the ball. They can want to run all they want, but if this is the running game they get from go, they’re going to need to win the turnover battle by four every week. You could win games with 2.9 yards per carry when you ran the ball 30 percent of the time and have Deshaun Watson. It’s exponentially harder when it’s Tyrod Taylor, Will Fuller is a Dolphin, and you want to run to stay balanced at all times.

2) Davis Mills looked nowhere near ready to play this season

On the surface level, you look at Davis Mills’ stats and they tell a fairly pleasant story. 10-of-16 for 115 yards and one sack would be a solid enough half for most starting quarterbacks. But when you break down what happened on those dropbacks, it’s a little more murky.

Mills hit Keke Coutee in the middle of a zone in the fourth quarter for 25 yards. Outside of that, his other two big plays were off of play-action, going for 30 more yards. So that’s 55 yards on three passes, all of which were not particularly hard. That means on his other dropbacks, he went 7-of-13 for 50 yards and a sack. Several of the throws were either easy dumpoffs or not particularly impressive. And, I think in the biggest vote that you can possibly show in the preseason, the Texans ran the ball twice while trailing to start the two-minute drill, while ultimately Mills attempted no deep passes on the drive. The play above on third-and-4 may have developed into one if he had better sniffed out the blitz, but he very much did not do that. 0-of-10 on third downs, not all of that was Mills, but most of it was.

Listen, I’m not saying Mills is a lost cause. I’m not saying that he can’t play in the NFL. But this current version of Mills that we saw tonight, if he were dropped into play in Week 10? He would put up a Ryan Finley box score. He’d take sacks by the bushel, he’d make bad throws, and he’d sink whatever chance the team actually has to win a game.

What that means is: He’s got about two or three months to get much, much better than this. This won’t cut it as an NFL starter. He’s very new, improvement shouldn’t be considered out of the question. But if he remains this guy, I don’t see how the Texans can start him in a real NFL game this season.

3) Just serve the youth, please/playing time observations

I am not going to be extremely mad about playing Tytus Howard at guard in this post. I think it is stupid, but at least the idea of putting Charlie Heck on to the field — barring a very predictable Marcus Cannon recovery and seizure of the job — leads to a younger offensive line. I think Mills is a special case in some ways because terrible quarterback play can tank evaluations up and down a roster, and I’m not advocating for say, John Reid to start if the team has clearly better players. But if there’s any question about whether a young player can still be a full-time starter, just start the young player. That’s all I ask.

The major gripe

Starting Eric Murray over Lonnie Johnson is something that seems idiotic on paper. Johnson has been electric in the first two preseason games and shown a ton of range. Murray very well may be more competent as a safety than he was when the previous defensive corps made him a mismatched nickel corner, but that’s not reason enough to start him in my book. Johnson may make more mistakes than Murray, but ultimately the goal of this Texans team is to develop some core players, and Eric Murray will never be a core player.

The rotations

As I go over the major playing time eye-openers for me, I think we saw most of the surprises last week. David Johnson was rarely on the field at all. (Eight total snaps in two preseason games.) Shaq Lawson was playing in the fourth quarter. The Texans brought on Scottie Phillips earlier than Rex Burkhead, but Burkhead was also used during the two-minute drill.

Geron Christian got the start for COVID-listed Laremy Tunsil and played into the third quarter, where he was joined by Justin McCray, Carson Green, Danny Isidora, and Cole Toner. McCray and Toner got some play with Max Scharping and Heck in the second quarter. Slot receivers, defensive linemen, and tight ends continued to alternate in different patterns relative to the rest of the team because of personnel groupings and rotations. (So I’m not necessarily dying that Keke Coutee was playing in the fourth quarter again, although yes, he was playing in the fourth quarter again.)

Tremon Smith got time earlier in the game because of the trade of Keion Crossen, and he drew 2 DPIs for his trouble. Terrence Brooks also played earlier than he did last week, as AJ Moore did not play at all. Neville Hewitt appeared to join as the main second-team linebacker next to Kamu Grugier-Hill in the second quarter. Cornell Armstrong and Tavierre Thomas were the corners after halftime, with Joe Thomas taking snaps next to Hewitt and Grugier-Hill on run downs.

Post Lonnie Johnson’s pick-six third teamers started getting run. Garrett Wallow and Tae Davis were on at linebacker with Hardy Nickerson Jr., John Reid got in the series before, then was replaced with Shyheim Carter in the fourth quarter. Fourth quarter also gave us: Ryan McCollum at center, Buddy Howell and Darius Jackson at running back, Hjalte Froholdt at guard, and Jordan Steckler at left tackle.

Interestingly, after getting 134 and 124 snaps on specials in the last two years, Zach Cunningham did not get a single special teams snap. Leaders there were Kevin Pierre-Louis, Tavierre Thomas, Joe Thomas, Jonathan Owens, Terrence Brooks, and Cornell Armstrong.

I don’t remember seeing a single Kahale Warring non-victory formation snap. (He wound up with four total.) Sorry Matt Weston. Drake Jackson also got in only as the game was clearing out.

4) Our new Texans theatre

I’ve been trying to understand why I am so captivated by David Culley’s head coach demeanor on the sideline over the course of the preseason. Of course, the easy headline is “I’ve never seen a head coach attack their own tongue like David Culley does.”

But trying to dial down on it, it’s not that he doesn’t seem to be communicating much with the rest of the staff, though that is also kind of part of it in a way. Where I finally wound up was: I think David Culley coaches like a living embodiment of impostor syndrome. He believes he’s going to be found out after this play, and someone’s going to tell him he can’t have the job anymore. There’s a nervousness to his energy, but there’s also a resignation.

Anyway, in other very normal news, we managed to viral a post where Spencer Tillman said of Nick Caserio: “I don’t think I’ve seen a better job by a GM in the last decade, or more.” There’s a level of hyperbole I’ve come to expect from Spencer, and I can understand why optimistic fans don’t share my level of disinterest in some of what he’s done, but that was a wild heat check.

I think what actually deserved to go viral is this:

Have you seen a lot of executive vice presidents of football operations roaming the sideline of a preseason game, dapping players up? How about when the guy with two sacks who everyone wants to talk about goes up to the podium to speak about getting the game ball, which name comes out first?

Jack, and Nick, and Culley, eh? In that order?

There’s nothing normal about this team, and in some ways that might wind up being a good thing. You all seem to enjoy rubbernecking, so maybe this will get some reads even though the team isn’t all that great. There’s still some potential for a good defense, and for it to blossom in whatever this environment can be called is fascinating. But then there’s also the reasons that this team remains so weird, and they just hit you smack dab in the face when you least expect it.

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Four Downs: Texans 26, Packers 7

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 David Culley era started with football-like sustenance for fans hungry for optimism Saturday in Lambeau field, as the Texans crushed a Packers team resting almost all of their starters 26-7 in a game that showcased that Houston’s prized competition mindset is a winning preseason strategy over the Green Bay UDFA/young player machine.

While Jordan Love’s final stat line looked good, his 22-yard touchdown pass to Kylin Hill was a screen that busted a team that looks to read quickly, and the only throw that really seemed difficult that was completed was a 34-yard Cover-2 gap over Neville Hewitt. The Texans held the Packers to 15 offensive yards or less in every other drive that Love played in, and once it got to halftime, Houston was able to really exploit the experience edge with their backups versus the Packers. DeMarcus Walker had to have been salivating for the entirety of Kurt Benkert’s shift, and the Texans were able to force two turnovers on horrific Packers plays to go along with the one that Jon Greenard popped out of Love’s hands:

And, well, yeah, when you put grown men who have played in NFL games against young UDFAs who will mostly be selling real estate, considering coaching, or going on to other careers in a few years — this can happen, yeah.

My main broad picture takeaway from this game was pretty simple: I think this coaching staff is going to be extremely conservative. Davis Mills had two deep tosses the entire game, they ran the ball 37 times and, more importantly, even had 14 carries in the first half despite not having any real success with it. They came up with just 33 yards and a touchdown.

When asked why the offense didn’t go for it on fourth-and-2 in Green Bay territory, David Culley said all the right things, but didn’t exactly paint the picture of a guy who was confident in gos:

If you don’t trust it enough to go for it on fourth-and-2 relative to the merits of going for it on fourth-and-1, that’s a very telling statement about your offense and how you view them. Maybe trying to read too much of this is preseason fool’s gold, and the Texans will be aggressive once they have a trust and read of who their most important five up front actually are (and healthy tackles), but it especially stood out as the Packers went for it on fourth down twice while the Texans had to settle for a myriad of Ka’imi Fairbairn field goals.

But when Culley fusses about the offense needing to be mistake-free, turnover-free, penalty-free — he was most furious about the mistakes in scrimmages, he harps on missed opportunities — he is creating a very narrow box for the team to play in. This offense might deserve that box! The only game-breaker that they can for sure count on right now is Brandin Cooks’ speed, and there’s no telling just how useful that’s going to be when it’s riding on Tyrod Taylor’s deep frequencies. They don’t really have space to settle for field goals on fourth-and-2 in close games if this is how they are going to play. Especially if they are running like that against a defense that isn’t even playing its starters…

1) Davis Mills takeaways

Somewhat surprisingly, Mills was the first quarterback off the bench on Saturday. I made a thread on Twitter of most of Mills’ throws (I excluded a Brevin Jordan drop and a couple other throws that just seemed safe/dull/weren’t interesting from an evaluation standpoint) — you can find that here:

My general takeaways are — I’m very happy that Mills has a “next-play mentality,” as the Texans keep promoting, but that mentality is kind of a prerequisite for anybody to be a starting NFL quarterback, so shouting that from the rooftops doesn’t do a lot for me. What he needs to do to play in the style of offense that the Texans rolled out yesterday is cut the easy mistakes. Other than his interception and the ball thrown on third-and-goal that could have led to a pick-six had the Packers had a more established defensive back reading it, Mills didn’t have many turnover-adjacent throws. What he had was the same thing holding him back in college — throws that seem like they should be wildly easy to make, yet ones that he could not complete:

He followed that screen pass up with whatever the hell this was on the goal line:

I’ve been pretty open about the pros and cons of the Mills pick, and I don’t have a lot of pre-conceived notions about how it’s going to play out. But if there’s a future in which he is the starting quarterback of the team, he can’t be blowing easy throws like those. They were hardly the only ones he put on the reel.

Tim Kelly reference Mills as a guy who hasn’t been making the same mistake twice when he talked about him earlier in camp. Well, he made the screen pass accuracy mistake about three times yesterday. The boom throws looked really good — a deep ball off Anthony Miller’s hands on his second dropback, a couple of nice third-and-long completions under pressure. I think this performance is about what I have expected from him based on what I watched of him in college.

But it is time to grow, and the easiest way for him to grow right now is very simple: You can’t miss the layups.

2) Other offensive takeaways

This was the first-team offense that rolled out on the field sans Laremy Tunsil, Tytus Howard, Brandin Cooks, Jordan Akins, and Marcus Cannon if you count him as a starter:

Anthony Auclair, Ryan Izzo, and Paul Quessenberry seemed like they were on a less fixed substitution pattern, and rotated in throughout the game as blockers when needed. Houston’s first-team offense started with Phillip Lindsay getting the bulk of the snaps over David Johnson, who played a total of three and, crucially, only appeared on third downs. That is one expensive third-down back! Joking aside, I don’t think we should be reading too much into this, particularly with Mark Ingram not playing, but it would not surprise me if coaches watched a bunch of Lindsay and a bunch of Johnson and figured out that Lindsay was a better back than Johnson.

I thought Scottie Phillips acquitted himself well in his tenure with the second team, made the most of his carries even though he wasn’t getting a ton of help from the offensive line and had to make some yards after contact:

https://twitter.com/riversmccown/status/1426943099260084224

Imagine if he actually got snaps last year! Wow! If only someone had been calling for that the entire months of November and December! Guess we’ll never know how good he could be now that he’s buried behind 800 other running backs. Buddy Howell started rotating in about the end of the first half, and then Darius Jackson took over running in the middle of the fourth quarter.

Keke Coutee played in the first quarter but was also in through the fourth quarter, I’m wondering if that was a pure “slot receiver” thing with Anthony Miller injured in the middle of the third quarter, or if that was a negative vote that we should be eyeing. Chris Conley made more plays than any other Texans receiver and was the de facto No. 1 option. I would guess that Alex Erickson is viewed pretty highly in the building because I didn’t see him in the last couple of quarters, while Chris Moore continued to get a lot of playing time over them. Kahale Warring got on at tight end at the very end of the second half and was the target on Mills’ interception. Jordan Veasy and Isaiah Coulter were exclusively second half players.

The offensive line rotations were pretty clear — Max Scharping and Justin Britt were off fairly early for Cole Toner and Jordan Steckler. And then around the end of the half/start of the third quarter the third-team line that came in was Ryan McCollum at center, Hjalte Froholdt and Danny Isidora at guard, and Carson Green at tackle joining Steckler. New waiver claim Drake Jackson came on towards the middle of the fourth quarter along with Darius Jackson.

3) Defensive takeaways

Here’s who I had the Texans running out on the first snap sans Zach Cunningham, Bradley Roby, Christian Kirksey, Kevin Pierre-Louis, Justin Reid, Whitney Mercilus, Charles Omenihu, Brandon Dunn, and Maliek Collins:

The biggest surprise there from an outside perspective has to be Shaq Lawson not making it into the lineup. In fact, he played well into the third quarter. I haven’t heard a lot about him in training camp from the Texans themselves, and what I’ve heard from people who attend camp regularly is that he hasn’t looked great. Still, that’s a stunning fall from grace for a guy that a) they traded Benardrick McKinney for and b) restructured his contract this offseason to make himself a $5.4 million cap hit to cut in 2022. It’s hard to say that the Texans “committed” to anyone this offseason, but if they did, Lawson was on the front line of that. And he’s out there playing in the third quarter of a preseason game that’s well in-hand? That’s kind of astonishing.

The defensive line rotation continued for the majority of the game, with DeMarcus Walker, Jaleel Johnson, and Derek Rivers playing in the second quarter and the fourth quarter. I don’t recall seeing Ross Blacklock in the fourth quarter but he was definitely still out there in the third. Greenard sprained an ankle at some point so we didn’t get much of a look at him, and other than Auzoyah Alufohai, the Texans didn’t really bring in anyone fresh for the second half.

The linebackers were more of a set rotation, starting with Neville Hewitt and Kamu Grugier-Hill. Joe Thomas was the third linebacker in heavy sets. At halftime they seamlessly changed to Garret Wallow, Tae Davis, and Hardy Nickerson Jr.

Defensive back suffered from just having more active players than anyone else, but the team iced Vernon Hargreaves (ugh), Terrance Mitchell, Desmond King, and Eric Murray pretty quickly. Lonnie Johnson started and played well into the second quarter, delivering a nice hit on the first drive:

Tavierre Thomas, Keion Crossen, Tremon Smith, and AJ Moore came on during the fourth series to play with Johnson. Then at the start of the third quarter Jonathan Owens (Simone Biles’ boyfriend, just to put that shoe on the other foot) came on. John Reid, Shyheim Carter, and Terrence Brooks joined the party in the middle of the third quarter. Smith actually played more snaps than any other defender and picked off Benkert on an absolutely idiotic throw made under pressure.

4) So, the other rookies?

Nico Collins had a pretty quiet debut, with just one catch:

To be fair, he did play a lot of the first half, so he’s probably still in some form of major plan for the team this year. But I was surprised how he was paired with a quarterback who likes to throw receivers open and just wasn’t a focal point of the offense in any real way. At least, based on the camp hype.

Brevin Jordan drew three targets after coming on towards the end of the second quarter. He dropped one of them. It wasn’t exactly a dominant debut, but I was surprised how little I noticed him as a blocker considering what we heard about him coming out. Maybe that’s a good thing, or maybe they aren’t concerned about his blocking.

Roy Lopez played in the first half and played towards the end of the game as well — he got to clean up for Walker’s pressure for a Benkert sack. The Packers didn’t have much success in the run game and Lopez didn’t look out of sync with the other vets in the group, which is a good sign for him.

Garret Wallow had two solo tackles and, importantly for him, 10 special teams snaps. I think the last linebacker spot on the roster is going to be pretty special-teams dependent.

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Texans Training Camp Notebook — Week 2: Death of Curiosity

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.

***

Death of curiosity

As someone who tends to traffic in analysis, the dog days of training camp are a bit of a slog for me. They are an endless parade of optimism, everybody is excited that football is back, there are no real results to check against as far as that optimism, and one-play analysis thrives. I’m not saying that to note that if you’re engaging with any of that it’s a bad thing, I think we all hope Nico Collins is a big deal. But the hype gets a little out of hand sometimes and when he’s the obvious eye-catcher and literally every other player gets asked about him in camp because we’re trying to find The Next Rebuilding Piece, well, it’s a burden of optimism that I hope doesn’t get met with backlash later. I keep the same basic heuristic on the positive side with Davis Mills, who seems to throw a pick every time a reporter shows up to the facility. There’s a lot of growing still to be done, and while you’d rather he be stand-out right away, it’s not necessarily a disqualifier towards his prospects that he hasn’t been.

After roughly five months in the wilderness without much news, training camp is drinking from the fire hose. The Texans themselves are putting up as many as four or five short interviews with players per day, there are pressers, and the in-house team goes from a short hour-long show to two hours live, plus a live training camp look on YouTube, plus all the other stuff they were already doing. Lean into it too far, as I have this year, and you just get to hear the same talking points over and over again. David Johnson was good in his last three games last year. Tyrod Taylor is a veteran presence. We shouldn’t judge the team before they’ve played a game. And so on. It’s saccharine to the point of just mainlining pixie sticks, and the most negative thing you’ll get is John Harris writing in his camp notebook that he wishes defensive linemen would do more than just a basic bullrush. To cover anything with the zeal of a fan these days is to realize that the content sausage is repurposed over and over again — rightfully, because most fans do not consume everything — and at the heart of the matter, there’s really not all that much new to say.

Phillip Lindsay feels slighted by the media. The remaining whole-hearted fans of this team feel they are slighted by the media. The team themselves feels slighted by the media. Optimism flows through the locker room because — much like any decision on House Hunters — once you’ve made a choice, you try to make the best of it. The story won’t change until September or October. The eye in the sky, as they say, won’t lie. And the way that leadership has really shown a lack of interest in answering any questions that are curious has jaded me to a mode along the lines of “okay just show me the games.”

Let’s leave the Deshaun Watson thing alone. They can’t tell you anything. They can’t tell you about the goddamn long snapper competition:

Just nothing but buzzwords up and down. I’ve heard from many fans who say “what do you expect?” Well, you can tell us many things about a situation without tipping your entire hand. Bradley Roby hinted at some discord in the 2020 Texans without really specifying what it was. Brandin Cooks has talked about how poor the practices were on that team publicly. The in-house media radio, John Harris and Marc Vandermeer, rave about Flying Coach, which is a podcast where Rams head coach Sean McVay lets down his guard and talks to other coaches who are doing the same. No Texans coach has ever been on it. Joe Judge is on it, and he has sent three separate dudes to retirement this week!

They are trying to sell you feelings — something I’ll get to in a second — and while I don’t think contempt is the right word, I think they approach every media session as a chance to do their gospel bits rather than with a real interest in answering any of these questions. Here’s Nick Caserio on the air on Friday:

Ha ha! It’s a little joke! But the best jokes have a bit of truth to them. It’s exhausting to listen to the CasEasterby troupe do media. It’s especially trying on the heels of the fact that everyone just sat through a seven-year Patriots administration that had twinges of this messaging in it. You don’t want to answer questions and sate the curiosity people have about your football team? Fine. But the calls about the national media not giving the team a fair shake ring hollow when the team isn’t interested in providing a look at why it should be given a fair shake. As Cal McNair said in the Caserio presser, they want your implicit trust. They just aren’t willing to give any assurances about why they should have it.

Left with no reason to not believe the results on the field, the media will fixate on the results on the field. Barring a Watson comeback, we all know how unlikely those are to look good. The perception is not something that comes out in every session, but the internal focus is a must for this team because they know how they are viewed:

We are in a spot where we are hoping against hope that the team can be good this year, and the team’s messaging around this has all been extremely process-oriented, dry, and dismissive. Of course fans are going to elect Nico Collins to the training camp Hall of Fame! Of course Roy Lopez getting some run against starters is going to start a second hype train! What else do they have to look forward to? What other reasons were they actually sold to believe in management? But it didn’t have to be this way, and you catch more flies with honey.

When you remove curiosity from the proceedings, you don’t have much to focus on outside of results. And whenever the Texans have tried to do anything that invites curiosity, they’ve revealed no inkling of a grand plan. Building The Texans is barely even about the players, let alone what they liked about them that would be of any interest to a fan. It’s just mythmaking arguments from a position of authority. Hope the results validate that stance.

***

It sure would be cool if Deshaun Watson spoke some words, but there’s not a lot of upside in it

With Watson no longer even appearing at practice once the pads went on, we have almost filled up the bingo card of events he can do that are “newsworthy.” I think the most interesting thing said about him this week was not about him at all, but this question and answer with Tim Kelly:

Notice how in that answer about “your quarterbacks,” Watson was not mentioned. They kept bringing Watson up to Kelly, and eventually he complimented Watson in helping the other quarterbacks as if he were a coach. But I think that’s a very telling paragraph by omission of where Watson is.

Many fans have pelted me with some sort of call for Watson to speak publicly — I think the best way this could be done is probably through a heavily choreographed interview with a major network. The problem with Watson speaking publicly at this point actually isn’t about the Texans, but about the lawsuits. There is no answer he can give that calls for the process to continue that looks “good,” be it a brief “no comment” or even something like “I won’t speak about pending litigation but I do believe that women should be heard,” ala his agent’s statement when this was all kicking off. It’s enough of a big deal that no network is going to let the question get away unasked. But it’s also a no-win question for Watson to answer. The best-case scenario is that he’s met with derisive snark, a fairly innocent no-comment twisted into something that isn’t good for his public persona.

(Brief aside: The people who point out that he thanked Easterby (and many other people) at his contract extension presser? I would like to see how many people they would thank if they were handed life-changing money forever. I’m not a fan of the Texas State government, but if they ran a vaccine lottery (haha!) that I won (hahaha!), I would probably thank Dan Patrick. I hate Dan Patrick.)

Now, would I love it if Watson would take some ownership of the situation? Sure. It is quite the clusterfuck, and I think the sentiment I’ve seen presented by Texans Unfiltered and other places that he is the reason he can’t be traded carries a lot of truth to it. His own actions are the reason he’s untradeable at this exact moment.

But if Watson hired me, and asked me how to solve the problem from a PR-standpoint, about the only thing I’d have for him is “go play football for the Texans, do what people loved you for, give one quick statement on the allegations and say that you won’t be taking questions on them beyond that, give one quick statement on the trade request and how you still want to leave but don’t want to be a distraction and say that you won’t be taking questions on it beyond that, then bury that with as many games of great football as you’re allowed.” My sense is that this is not something he wants to hear right now. It’s an odd situation where both sides are leaking to the press, and both sides have enough ego to think they have an upper hand on this.

I still think the best outcome for both sides is to pretend they’re with each other for a season while the lawsuits play out, but we’re into enough emotion that I can’t tell you with any confidence I believe that either side wants that outcome. At this point, I’m not totally unconvinced that the Texans will make Watson a healthy inactive in Week 1. A lot can change in a very short time and a lot of the season is riding on how this plays out. I wish I could tell you I had more confidence in an outcome one way or another here.

***

Desperate pandering

I don’t always speak my mind on the things that this team says out loud. Part of that is because I’m aware of my own skepticism and how it’s perceived to the point where I realize there are some battles I just don’t need to fight, some things that certain subsets of people willfully don’t want to see. So I try to straddle the line between straight news and my own feelings in a way that makes it not a total pain-in-the-ass to follow me on the Twitter, but also still gets enough of the sentiment out that I don’t feel like a robot. Tough line to toe.

Something I’ve drawn more of a line about over the past couple of years is the in-house team, because PR is PR. While I think the David Johnson last three games talk is tedious and misinformed, I get what they’re trying to do there and how it fits in the grand game of the discourse.

But this thing. Good God, this thing:

That Football Feeling is gross and sappy in a cynical sort of way that happens when a marketing team looks at their remaining options and shrugs. It’s less about the Texans than a general sense of what football is supposed to be. An appeal to the fact that the Texans are a Houston institution and a place where you can tailgate and literally nothing else. It’s the kind of video I’d expect to have foisted on me if I were in workplace training for the Texans rather than the kind of video you release for the sake of public relations. That the Texans released it speaks volumes about what they think about their fanbase.

This comes on the heels of (ugh) TexansPup

Listen, it’s blatantly obvious that there’s a segment of our society that loves dogs. It’s blatantly obvious there’s a segment of our society that wants to cheer veterans at games — it’s a cottage industry that goes beyond the Texans — and combining the two is the cheapest of cheap created impressions.

There’s a lot about society in the social media world that feels nakedly transactional. I insert one Twitter thought and get 20 likes, which do not feed me, while Twitter makes a lot of money, and I hope people are inspired enough that eventually it trickles down to me. When you’re a multi-billion dollar business, though, you generally don’t need to stoop to this kind of stuff to try to create positive emotions around things. The Texans were doing just fine around that when professional sourpuss Bill O’Brien was around telling everyone he needed to do a better job.

The desperation is popping off the screen here. It really would have been incredibly easy to fire Easterby, hire a Ravens or Steelers cohort as GM, hire Eric Bieniemy or Joe Brady or Brandon Staley, and print free positive publicity. But that was beyond this team. So here we are with TexansPup, Football Feelings, and a lifetime supply of indignation from people who don’t want to understand why anyone wouldn’t believe in them.

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Texans Training Camp Notebook — Week One: The Start Up

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.

***

As I said on Twitter the day it looked like it was all coming to a head, it was a 99th percentile outcome for the Randall Cobb signing to have someone else come in and offer anything of value for that contract after the first year. The Texans were able to take advantage of the Aaron Rodgers situation to the extent of a sixth-round pick. There’s not a whole lot of value in the pick itself, but the freeing up of snaps for someone who could presumably be a long-term factor for the Texans in and of itself is a win. Cobb’s still a solid slot receiver, but no game-changer at this stage of his career.

I’ve read a few Invented Enemy Tweets that gravitate around the general idea that trading for Anthony Miller in the context of the Cobb trade is a win. (For what it’s worth, Nick Caserio denied that the trades were related when directly asked by Seth Payne and Sean Pendergast.) I don’t know that I see it that way so much as I see it as a non-loss. A fifth-round pick doesn’t have a metric ton of value, but the Texans were able to use one to “pilfer” Brevin Jordan last draft, and a seventh-rounder is a big dropoff. Miller is, like most players on this team, on the final year of his contract, coming off a season where he was mostly invisible. Miller was targeted just eight times in Chicago’s last four games of the year., and finished precisely four games all season with more than 50 receiving yards. He’s got some good traits to build on despite this — he was a very popular sleeper pick of Matt Harmon’s in 2019, and Harmon knows receiving talent — and I could absolutely see him as a major target hog in this offense, perhaps taking a step forward from his 2019 production.

He’s also turning 27 in October — he’s one year younger than Brandin Cooks despite being drafted four years later — and the Texans are going to have to immediately pay him if he’s good or he’s gone. Could it work out? Sure! Is a fifth-round pick a staggering ransom? Not really! Does it really change life from how things would have been with Keke Coutee in the slot? I can’t say I see it. But the team has its preferences, and it acts on them, and hopefully they’re right that Miller is a better bet than Coutee.

The Cobb signing was every bit the disaster the national media predicted it would be. When I covered it here I noted that it had more than a whiff of panic. While I think Cobb performed pretty well relative to the expectations (other than getting hurt) the team should have had for him last year, the contract was well outsized in comparison to those expectations and the team didn’t have enough slot wideout targets to go around. Comforting to know that Jack Easterby, a main cog behind getting rid of DeAndre Hopkins and replacing him with Cobb at this price, still has a lot of power and influence in the organization!

***

The most interesting thing about the Cobb trade was the post-mortem as offered by Cobb:

Cobb coyly walked back the initial comments with some positivity at the end, but “see[ing] the other side” and using :ThinkingFace: at the comparison to prison was certainly not what you’d like to hear as a Texans fan. The most interesting part of it to me was the choice of words as a “start-up” because that is also exactly the comparison Nick Caserio gave at the Sloan conference this year.

I think that’s a wildly interesting choice of words for both of these guys to land on. Start-ups tend to be almost lionized by veterans of the dot com boom and they get wrapped in that same sort of entrepreneurial spirit blanket that makes their mistakes worth overlooking. Of course, you know, 90% of start-ups fail. Many of those that don’t fail, like Uber, are privately subsidized because the real cost of doing business is so high that there’s no way they can be profitable without becoming a monopoly. Then you have to think about what makes the Texans different from other football teams — what is the thing that they’re disrupting?

If you think about the Texans philosophically, they don’t really have a deep and acknowledged analytics department. They have two former Belichick Patriots in the front office — a thing many people do or have done. I would argue that they have put Nick Caserio front-and-center as general manager in a way that other teams don’t — I can remember years going by where we’d hear from Rick Smith less than five times total all season. Caserio was the first interview at training camp and between 610 and Texans Radio, he might hit five appearances before we’re done with the second week of camp.

David Culley isn’t in the same position of power that Caserio is. Remember haughty Bill O’Brien? Haughty Bill O’Brien would have loved the Deshaun Watson situation in this camp, and would have come to play every day with any reporter who asked about it. Haughty O’Brien would have told you that he only has to release so much information, and he would have done it with a defiant look on his face. David Culley? Company line guy. Who makes the company line if not David Culley? Why is 610 promoting it as Camp Caserio rather than Camp Culley? The power dynamics are pretty clear.

But the idea of someone having more power than someone else in a roster-building/coaching dynamic? Not new. What is new about this team?

That, I’m pretty sure, is the real answer here. The premium on player personality and drive. It squares with Caserio’s years of experiences interviewing prospects on the road. It squares with Jack Easterby’s real in towards a major job despite no experience in the area — and his reported desire to have certain players trailed — because Easterby’s sale is that he is a connector. This major focus on competition (in theory) brings out the best in this select group of individuals, but not everyone. This isn’t to say that player personality isn’t important, by the way. But if you try to envision this as a start-up company, the personality and the culture is what the Texans are doing that makes them different.

***

One major epihphany hit me while I was listening to Sean and Seth’s interview with Caserio on Thursday morning. Here’s the clip that jogged me:

That answer, in and of itself, wasn’t particularly noteworthy. Caserio has held his cards towards his vest, and he has a few verbal tics that he goes to over and over again when he doesn’t really want to answer a question. (The guy who knows which reporter compared him to Dodgeball and singles her out on a call is obviously tuned in enough to not be dismissed as an idiot, right? Right.) But that got me to thinking about the short-termness of all of this, reminded me of Caserio not being willing to comment on Justin Reid as a foundational piece, reminded me that a core mantra for this team has become “we’re trying to get better one day at a time.”

When I hit this team with my critiques about its lack of long-term planning, its inability to put rookies or young players in major roles to succeed, and so on — I am thinking about tomorrow. I am thinking about the 2023 Texans, who are as important to me as the 2021 Texans already because I have little belief the 2021 Texans are going anywhere. (And so do they, in my opinion, if they’re trading Randall Cobb for a sixth-round pick before a game is played?) This team has been a treasure trove of reactionary thinking with their roster, and has invented a churn that is so all-encompassing that trying to remember every last transaction they’ve done over the past eight months will be an undefeated Sporcle in three years.

So the question that leaves me with is: What is the churn accomplishing? it’s not accumulating great contracts for the team. It’s not accumulating youth. On the surface there’s not a real difference between Ryan Finley and Jeff Driskel — you don’t want either of them to start and neither of them are young. But when you talk about “getting better one day at a time” and view it from a fit and personality standpoint, suddenly I think you’re getting somewhere interesting. They bring in these guys, get to see them up close and see if they live up to the personality profile they’ve idealized, and let them go if they don’t. They’re invested in this thought for this year, but they aren’t approaching it in a way where they’re locked into the thought. I know it sounds silly to say this out loud — it sounds like a Secret Base video that plays out in Football Manager or OOTP — but maybe this is a science experiment about just how far the value of Desired Off-Field Traits and Habits can go.

That’s how far I have to go to try to attach a sense of logic to the constant roster moves. Yup.

***

That backdrop is important when we discuss what’s actually happening at training camp. What is happening at training camp that actually matters? Per Culley, not much:

(via Texans.com Transcripts)

So when we talk about who is starting where in certain areas of camp, not only are we fighting against the fact that there’s a lot of depth on this team, we’re also fighting against the fact that the thing that the coaching staff feels is most important — padded practices — hasn’t happened yet. And the way these things have tended to change quickly, I’m not all that invested in who starts where, because that might not last all that long.

So, sure, Justin McCray is starting right now with both Lane Taylor and Marcus Cannon on the sideline. Does that mean a lot? For his chances of making the team, sure. For his chances of starting? Probably not. I’m coming at this anticipating the Texans are going to make a lot of changes in the next few weeks, as they have tended to do. Austin Reiter could agree to terms here and everything could change tomorrow. You have to measure that in to the prognostications of how much “having a spot” matters right now.

Does Davis Mills struggling in the red zone in practice against air matter? Maybe a bit, but it’s not something I’m going to breathlessly remember in a few years. It’s easy to think of examples like Russell Wilson taking control of the Seahawks job during his rookie season, and you’d certainly rather have that happening than not. But, you know, Aaron Rodgers didn’t light it up either in his early training camps.

Likewise, does the defense being better in early camp matter a lot? Probably not. I think we’re all anticipating a bump of some sort from him as compared to last year’s awful defense. I’m very happy to read about Justin Reid flying around, to see Ross Blacklock seem to be catching eyes. But both Lovie Smith and Romeo Crennel never had problems dealing with pedestrian quarterbacks, guys with real flaws, and the Texans don’t have a quarterback who’d give them problems in a seven-on-seven situation. To be clear: If there’s one area to be optimistic about, it’s the defense as compared to last year’s defense. But, you know, no pads, Deshaun Watson isn’t throwing on them, I’m more wait-and-see than crown-em after four training camp days.

I’m also going to be curious to see how Laremy Tunsil’s words here hold up. He is not the first person to mention Kelly’s return as a step towards last year — David Johnson did in an interview with Drew Dougherty in April. There’s an assumption of rational coaching over the past few months that tends to say that the Texans are going to do some Ravens run game stuff because of Culley, Mark Ingram, and Andy Bischoff. What if they aren’t? It’s unpadded practices and all, but we don’t exactly get a lot of read-option talk from anything that the team reporters post.

***

Deshaun Watson is here, though spiritually absent. He’s protecting his money, and after four days of training camp has mostly been uninvolved with anything happening beyond the workouts. He’s withdrawn, hasn’t spoken to media, and whatever the Texans currently have worked out with him, they aren’t talking about it publicly and deflecting any attempt to have it out in the open.

Caserio’s definition of his responsibility is a short-sighted one in my opinion, and one that further fuels the fire. A clear plan laid out to media with expectations would have made what happened less of a spectacle because the raw video of one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL playing scout team safety is a rubbernecker. But it fueled the fire for a few days, and three days later the questions about Watson seem to have mostly dissipated. The attention span comes and goes rather quickly these days for most people, and stories require some motion. If Watson isn’t going to work out on a day with an excused Tyrod Taylor absence, he probably isn’t going to be involved deeply in anything the Texans do for the entirety of camp.

I found Lance Zierlein’s take on this fascinating and something that I would’ve thought might be more appealing to the team more when I wrote about Watson a few weeks ago. Despite my very real misgivings about the front office right now, they have tended to accede to player wishes and that is honorable in its own way, even as the Texans sit here with a departed J.J. Watt and no draft pick compensation.

Watson has been steadfast that he won’t play for the Texans again. The Texans literally can’t trade him for good value until the legal process plays out. Even if the Texans wanted to trade him before the season, nobody has any idea how that would be perceived by the Arbitrary Punishment d20 that the NFL keeps under lock and key.

I guess if I had to handicap this today, I still think there’s more of a chance of Watson playing with the Texans in 2021 than playing elsewhere just because of the firestorm that a bad Watson trade would create with a franchise that is already falling out of the minds of everyone gearing up for another Astros playoff run. The other players certainly seem to have his back, as Brandon Scott chronicled. If this were 1995, I don’t think you’d hear that kind of reaction to the quarterback holding out for a trade.

Watson blinked by showing up. As I laid out in the piece I wrote a few weeks ago and linked above, there’s not much actual downside to him playing, and the checks can either clear or disappear. And hey, with Carson Wentz down for a bit, who is to say he couldn’t torch the rest of the league for not being willing to part with a real asking price? Why couldn’t he lead the Texans on a surprise run that flips the script on all that negative energy this franchise has been subjected to since the Hopkins trade was consummated? I don’t personally ascribe a “revenge” narrative to this sort of thing because I don’t pretend I know what happened between Watson and his accusers. But I have to think if I’m in his shoes, and believe I did nothing wrong and I’m being punished for it, it’s not a narrative that I would have to reach far for. The AFC South is not a hard division to win games in with a star quarterback.

What I’m more curious about at this point, and what I think is more of an open question given what they’ve done with him so far, is: Do the Texans want that future to happen? Is it in the best interests of their organization to let a maligned quarterback win games for them? That’s a deep question, and one that we’re not privy to any real public thoughts on beyond the two company lines: They’ll do what’s in the best interest of the team, and they’ll take it one day at a time.


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The Lost Generation of 2018

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.

***

From 2019-2021, the Texans selected one player in the first round and three players in the second round. Of those high picks, we don’t know where Tytus Howard will be playing in 2021, Lonnie Johnson already moved from cornerback to safety, Ross Blacklock’s first year was essentially a write-off, and we have no idea if Max Scharping will ever emerge from the scrapheap he was placed under in 2020. The team’s commitment to its youth and, I’ll even take this a step further, its plan for developing that youth, seems like it is made up on the spot every day.

Howard was supposedly drafted to be the long-term left tackle, then they played him at guard during training camp and traded for Laremy Tunsil, then they decided he was a right tackle during the third game of the season. Now they don’t know if he’s playing right tackle or if Marcus Cannon is. Since Jack Easterby became part of the organization in 2019, this team has consistently preached the virtues of versatility and delivered on that by never actually taking a stand on what they believe in with their young players. It’ll all get settled on the field, except who gets the opportunity to be on the field is in and of itself a value judgement. And the second there’s a weakness or something a young player needs to work on, he’s expelled from the conversation in favor of the veteran.

The 2018 NFL Draft, the last one the Texans had in the Bill O’Brien era with a real general manager in the building, was a little bit different. Brian Gaine snagged Justin Reid, Martinas Rankin, and Jordan Akins in the third round, along with Keke Coutee in the fourth round, then Jordan Thomas, Duke Ejiofor, and Peter Kalambayi in the sixth round. Every single one of the players picked in the first four rounds were instantly brought into the fold. Reid was a Day 1 player who was a 100% starter when healthy by Week 6. Rankin started three of his first four games as the Texans looked (desperately) for tackle solutions in a post-Duane Brown world. Akins was a rotational receiver right away. Coutee was playing in the slot as soon as he was healthy. Thomas actually played more in the middle of the season than Akins did. Ejiofor flashed some promise until he got on the injury train. Kalambayi was a decent special teams player. Note that not only did these players have instant roles on the team, but that they were not all instant successes, and that the team continued to use them in spite of that.

As we continue to assess blame for the downturn of the team, It catches my eye that O’Brien was able to conduct plans with all these rookies when there was a competent general manager in the building.

***

I ran a poll on the Twitter about a month ago about this class, and it was an utter vote of non-confidence for the non-Justin Reid 2018 class:

While I can understand that, I think both Akins and Coutee can be part of a good team. Akins has plenty of great snags over the past few years, and he can cut a rug in the open field that few tight ends can. Coutee has had big fumbles and mistakes but creates separation underneath in a way that is unique among current Texans receivers — the way that Randall Cobb would have five years ago. When I think about these two players, I think of them as guys who could be option 3 or option 4 in a good passing game by emphasizing their best attributes.

But the story of these two players is the story of an organization that didn’t believe in them, so I can’t blame the fans for not believing in them. Akins was buried behind Darren Fells and Pharaoh Brown because he’s not a blocker, limiting his snap counts. (Of course, Fells was also a terrible blocker the way the Texans used him.) They never managed to integrate Akins into the offense in an organic way on passing downs, even towards the end of last season when he was probably the best non-Cooks receiving threat on the active roster. They lost Thomas on waivers for no real reason. This is a position that, based on the 2018 promise, you could argue was on pace to be settled in 2020. Instead — listen, I’m rooting for these guys as I rooted for Fells — but you have to call them journeymen. We’re hoping that Brevin Jordan is up to becoming something, but if Kahale Warring becomes something he’s bucking immense odds to do so. The rest of the non-Akins players on this depth chart are journeymen. That’s what they are.

Coutee was buried behind DeAndre Carter because, according to coaches, the latter practiced better. That sounds just as idiotic now as it did then. And I get that Coutee’s been dinged up, and I get that he hasn’t always presented himself in the way that O’Brien would have wished in public, but the carrot-and-sticking he received was eternally stupid. Then to sign Cobb — one of the most underrated free-agent boondoggles in Texans history — to push Coutee out of even making something out of his career. It’s just bad business.

Were these guys ever going to be franchise stars? I kind of doubt it for one reason or another. But the conversation around them could be much more different if the team had just emphasized youth on the roster instead of all this tough, smart, dependable Easterbese nonsense. Good teams create value from their draft picks and realize that the job is to work with what those players can do and try to develop them further. They get the ball to Akins and avoid his blocking being an issue schematically. Bad teams do what the Texans did and pigeonhole them without really giving them a chance to blossom.

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Justin Reid is in a fascinating place as he heads into the final year of his rookie deal. He’s been dinged up in the last two seasons and played through his injuries as long as the team’s been in contention. The Texans moved him to more of an in-the-box safety role in 2020 and it resulted in a pretty uneven year. He finished with 16 broken tackles per Sports Info Solutions, a number that tied him for the eleventh-most in the NFL. Frankly, it seemed like a waste to not use his coverage ability as a deep safety, but you have to admit that when they used Reid as a blitzer it worked pretty well.

I think of Reid as a third-round success story. At the same time, even though he’s gotten nearly 100% of the snaps for the last two years as long as he’s been healthy, you have to think that as someone who is clearly cerebral and was here for the 2018 Texans, he understands the difference in the culture then versus the culture now. He’s been moved around a bit. He’s seen what has happened from the inside.

If I’m Justin Reid, knowing what I know about this organization, there is no home-town discount. At the same time, because he’s been so dinged up, that might create a little opportunity for a deal because there’s a very real downside to Reid hitting the market as the guy who has been injured three years in a row. That kind of guy gets a prove-it deal. I largely expect that it doesn’t make sense for the Texans to offer that kind of deal though, because a healthy Justin Reid season probably doesn’t move the bottom line much for where they are right now. This team as things stand right now simply has much bigger problems than whether their safety play is good or mediocre.

Now, Tyrann Mathieu started a trend with his exodus from Houston where he reeled in $14 million a year. I think Reid probably comes in closer to $9-12 million a season, with something like $13-$25 million guaranteed, if he has a healthy, good year and hits free agency. Youth is very much on Reid’s side as he entered the NFL at 21 and will be a free agent at 25. And I think you also will have teams that say that the poor numbers last year were reflective of the Texans not using him properly and the fact that the 2020 scheme was disastrous. John Johnson got three years, $33.7 million, and $20 million in guarantees in a year where the salary cap lowered. I would consider Reid and Johnson to be fairly close in talent if not results.

It would certainly be a welcome sign of good faith for the Texans to lock up a good player early or try to give Reid so much guaranteed that he couldn’t gamble on himself this year, but my read of the situation is that it doesn’t make a lot of sense for either side to take care of this early. Reid knows he can increase his value, and the Texans know that one more injury will radically change the perception of Reid around the league.

In a year that doesn’t seem to have a lot at stake for the Texans, their players, or their fans, Reid might be a storyline we keep coming back to because there’s a lot on the line for him.

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The 2018 draft was the last draft I can remember feeling good about from a value perspective halfway through the season. But I think more importantly than that, the players that have carved out a non-trivial career tell a story about the Texans that they would not want broadcasted.

Because Coutee and Akins should have always been a bigger part of the offense, and that means that there was never a need to sign Randall Cobb. Thomas and Kalambayi were pushed off the roster by veteran special teamer types, but they’re both hanging around the league still. If you count Eric Murray as a 2020 starter, Reid has played with a different presumed starter at safety in every single year of his career.

It’s probably not fair to say the 2018 class were canaries in the coal mine for the dysfunction of the Texans, but that’s mostly because the air raid sirens were already blaring on that the second Gaine was fired. What I take away from them — and a big reason I think Easterby has more power than some people would like to give him credit for — is that the 2018 class is unique in recent Texans history because there was a plan for them.

And then, without a general manager, suddenly there wasn’t.

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Do the emotions in Deshaun Watson’s holdout outweigh the incentives?

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.

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What was supposed to be a standoff this offseason between Deshaun Watson and Texans management instead was quickly drowned by several lawsuits alleging assault by Watson. At first it appeared that the Texans would dig in and pretend that Watson was going to be a part of the club long-term.

Not only were the Texans saying stuff like this publicly, but they flat-out refused to engage any of the trade talk that hit them from other teams.

Later, as the reverberations of Watson’s many lawsuits began to compile, the Texans backpedaled pretty fiercely on this stance. The Houston Chronicle’s John McClain has put out there to all who are willing to listen that Watson’s request will be granted when a real return can be had, and would have been moved by the draft if that was plausible. Cal McNair put out a lengthy statement on the Watson situation:

It is evident that both sides are tired of each other to some extent. Watson’s been done with the Texans mentally since the hiring of Nick Caserio, and the Texans now treat every inquiry about the status of Watson like saying his name out loud is illegal:

However, what I’m here to do today is posit an idea around this obvious mess: The incentives speak louder than the emotions of the situation. I’m not saying I’ve cracked the code, and I’m in no way reporting that Watson is showing up. However, if you explore the situation a little more thoroughly, it becomes clear that the two sides might need each other more than they have let on. Let’s start by laying out the situation as a whole:

As long as the lawsuits remain unsettled, Watson will not be traded for what he is worth

This sounds obvious, mostly because it is obvious. The Texans can trade Watson today for a bad return, but that is going to be an extremely poor look for a front office that has been deservedly pillaged the last few offseasons. If they get ripped off for one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL, this team may not ever recover. Watson is the only real chip this team has at the moment to buy into a better future, one way or another.

And yes, I know that typing this is just a free license to get a bunch of “hurr hurr have you seen their last few trades,” yeah, I get it. I’m not saying there’s no chance. But this is so high-profile that the scrutiny on the Texans if they bungled a return on this trade would be unbearable and might be the breaking point between the fans and the organization.

The lawsuits themselves seem unlikely to settle any time soon

The court systems are backed up even worse than they usually would be because of COVID, the date we have right now is February. A June posting from Tony Buzbee posited that there will be no settlement any time soon. Rusty Hardin, Watson’s attorney, has downplayed the possibility of a settlement from the start. They seem very intent on proving Watson’s innocence in the court of law unless there are certain public provisions provided in a settlement that paint Watson in a good light.

Barring a major change of heart from either side, it seems almost impossible that this will be cleared up this offseason. If you consider how easily court dates can get thrown further down the docket, and how long these things can drag out, that February date in no way seems to lay out a clean path to Watson’s legal status getting cleared next offseason. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t, maybe it will clear up just enough to make teams feel more comfortable with the public perception of trading for him. I’m not a fortune teller. What we can glean from right now, though, is that it’s unlikely that any movement will happen before February.

Watson going on a commissioner-exempt list or getting suspended might be a good way for the sides to not have to deal with each other, but it’s not good for Watson’s legacy

Try to remember the old Deshaun Watson, the one we knew before these lawsuits took over all public perception of him. He spoke willingly and freely about the greatness that he was trying to pursue, from talking about bringing championships to Houston to improving every day on the football field.

This Watson is going to have to carry whatever happens to him as part of his legacy forever. Does he have time to re-write the perceptions that come out of this? Assuming that what turns up isn’t just sadistic, probably. America loves a good redemption story and — let’s be honest — hasn’t met a wildly successful person who they won’t downplay allegations against. But losing this season, losing the statistical compilation, losing the money … none of those things are good for him. His whole brand up until this offseason was clean. Being placed on a list and codifying that he did something bad isn’t something that he’ll look back on and be happy about either.

Because the truth about these lists in the NFL’s arbitrary justice system is that they’re not easy to get off of. They move just as glacially slow as the court system. As of June 20th, they hadn’t even interviewed Watson. That was more than three months after the actual allegations started to surface. A major tenor of the Watson coverage has been about how the NFL has done a disservice to the Texans by not tipping their hand on how this will play out, and it’s one I would mostly agree with. But at the same time, do we really expect anything different from the NFL at this point? This has been an issue time and time again. It was an issue during Ray Rice’s case. The NFL also can’t just magically understand the facts of the situation without due process. When they pretend to assume they can, bad things usually happen.

The Texans may not have a lot of kind words to say about the situation Watson has created, but without him they are entirely pointless in 2021

They don’t have many young players. They don’t have many stars without Watson. I wrote about how bad the situation is for season tickets and how little faith this team’s fanbase has with it. They are not favored to win a single one of their games by Vegas. This is obviously anecdotal — and the people who do this do not cover themselves in glory in my experience — but Watson gets defended a lot harder by fans than the leadership of this team does.

Let’s imagine a scenario where Watson plays 17 games for the Texans in 2021. It sounds incredibly unlikely, but follow me for a second. The Colts are anchored to Carson Wentz. The Jaguars were worse than the Texans in 2020. The Titans spent a lot to try to overhaul their bad defense and have put a ton of tread on Derrick Henry’s tires over the past two years. You can absolutely make an argument that a better defense than the Texans played in 2021 and Watson gives them a puncher’s chance at a playoff spot. The media perception appears to be that the Titans are the easy No. 1 team in the division — and maybe that winds up being true, I’m not totally off-board on that — but there are seven playoff spots. Just having the 2020 version of Deshaun Watson is a big enough step towards one that it doesn’t matter how bad the rest of the roster is.

And this team desperately needs that kind of goodwill right now. You think if they don’t go 9-8 there won’t be some spillover benefits for the McNair/Easterby/Caserio club? Think again. There will absolutely be people willing to re-write Caserio’s offseason as something along the lines of “we knew we had Deshaun all along.” Fans will show up for games with playoff odds and all of the sudden there will be truthers coming out of the woodwork to yell at people for being “reactionary” or “negative” for assuming the worst of the team after last year. That is the great cycle of fandom. There’ll be some people who are out on the Texans for associating with somebody who allegedly did what Watson did, but a) allegedly does not mean “it happened” and b) they very much do not speak for the rank and file.

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Now, is this me saying or reporting that Watson is coming to training camp? Again, and in bold because I don’t want to read a bunch of aggregator accounts telling me what I’m reporting: No.

I can’t tell you that I believe that’s happening. But if you examine not what the sides actually want but the situation that has been dealt to both of them, I think there’s a certain method to the madness of the two of them coming to an uneasy compromise. The Texans would probably like to trade Watson, and Watson would like to leave. But until the cases are settled or resolved, he has no trade value. In talking to people to put together an idea for how bad the return would have to be for him to get dealt now, I think we might be talking about a single first-round pick, or maybe a 1 and a 2. That’s a non-starter for the Texans.

So would Watson playing for the Texans this year be weird? Would it be awkward in pressers and as he rolled his eyes at David Culley? Would it be awkward for him to be interviewed? Probably a little bit. But this entire year is going to be forcibly awkward either way. Watson’s only direct way of raising his trade value is by balling out, and while it may not logically matter, the recency bias of him rolling over some defenses would be a welcome emotional change to the current news cycle around him. I think he absolutely has the bigger emotional block here, and to be fair I would understand and not blame him if he didn’t show up. But, simply put, I think you look at this situation from a 30,000-foot view, there’s more upside in him playing than him sitting. Statistics, money, trade value potentially intersecting with emotion. Maybe he gets suspended and maybe he doesn’t — really hard to say how the d20 from the NFL Arbitrary Punishment Council will go — but either way it would seem he has more to gain than to lose. If he gets hurt, barring something catastrophic, it’s really no different than sitting out the year anyway. Dak Prescott just got a massive contract following a devastating injury, and Watson is in that stratosphere of player.

For the Texans, any sort of trade to a place Watson would actually want to go before camp would create a situation where those draft picks would automatically become less valuable by virtue of that team having Watson. They could try to sell Watson on their culture face-to-face, which is something they’ve wanted since January anyway. And, well, would their draft picks become less valuable with Watson games? Sure. Does that matter to them? I don’t think so. The emphasis they’ve put on youth on the roster is non-existent. I think they’d be thrilled to not have to think about that.

Emotions overrule logic often in today’s world. The language that reports of Watson’s thinking have showcased — him not ever wanting to set foot in the building again, etc. — is extremely emotionally charged. But the way the stasis has settled in, his options at this point may be to lose a year of his career or play nice until the circumstances resolve. Maybe the distrust of Easterby and McNair is simply too deep to be overcome, and again, there is no judgment from me if that’s the case. But assuming nothing is changing on the settlement front, and if it was Watson would probably know it before we would, it would be idiotic for the Texans to trade him right now and no amount of rabble-rousing, leaks, or holdout is going to change that.

In the absence of the viability of a trade, what’s the best lemonade that can be made out of the situation that Watson has created? That’s the question that the Texans and Watson’s camp have to be asking themselves. And I think there’s a pretty strong argument for both sides that the answer is to patch this up, maybe with a good-faith guarantee that Watson will be traded once all this is over if he still wants to be traded, and get back to the table in 2022 after Watson’s legal status is on solid ground.

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