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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You might think summers come easy to football writers — I actually got that from someone I was surprised to hear it from yesterday — but the reality is that from about the start of the draft to the beginning of July I am constantly writing things to preview the season for different publications. I’m in both Athlon’s Fantasy Football and regular NFL magazines, I have five chapters again in Football Outsiders Almanac 2022 (Cleveland, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Washington, Top Prospects), and have continued to schlep away at NBC Sports Edge on the blurb desk and on some of our various fantasy previews.
That leads me to a couple things: One is that I’m tired. By the time I finish the yearly 7,500-word FOA top prospects chapter I’ve probably put in about 70k words between all these little articles, snippets, sidebars, and so on. Another is that when I’m not specifically assigned to focus on the Texans in the offseason, I kind of don’t! I went back and caught up on what I missed to the extent that I could — watching old interviews, reading everybody’s stuff — but that’s not quite the same as living it live. I waive keeping up with it because my sanity can only takes so much, and as a result I’m generally quieter as a social media “presence” from May-July than I am at any other time.
But after a couple of offseasons where I was writing the Texans chapter in FOA and thus had them glued into my head anyway, I’ve come out of this year a little slow. So I want to see what they’ve been able to do to you in a period of — best I can tell from the outside — unbridled optimism. (And I hope you do put your name on that if you are optimistic!)
I’ve created a 25-question survey (click to link out to it) about the Texans as we head into 2022. Some of the questions are pretty simple: How confident are you in Nick Caserio on a scale of 1-10? Some of them are a little more complex. I’d like to see what everybody’s feelings are. I would also like to write about the results, something that I will do if 100 or more people actually answer the survey. I have nominally titled this a Texans fan survey, but if you are devoted enough to answer 25 questions about the Houston Texans, bless you, I’m counting you.
To get that result, I’m sorry, my calculations tell me I’m going to have to be a little annoying about it. So you might see this two or three times a day for the next week. And hey, here’s that link to the form yet again: https://forms.gle/3BDQKTDGs4iQQrgt8
Thank you for helping me create some dead zone content.
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The Texans destroyed my fandom when they traded away hopkins for nothing. The writing was on the wall that they would be the worst team in the league for years after giving away draft picks for years on end. But you can’t actively try to destroy your team and expect people to care about the team. We’ll always have the first half season of 2011 when we were maybe the best team in the AFC. Know of any good teams to be a fan of?