Posted on

How the Texans got their groove back in 12-personnel

Last season, the Texans ran the ball a ton out of 12 personnel (one back, two wideouts, two tight ends) — they ran from that set almost as often as they did from their more common 11 personnel (one back, three wideouts, one tight end) sets despite passing from 11 personnel about twice as often.

Houston was empirically better by a long shot in 2018 passing out of 12-personnel. Watson’s sack rate dropped from 10.7% to 9.9%, his air yards per attempt went from 7.5 to 9.5. His completion rate went from 65.7% to 73.9%. While that hasn’t been the case entirely in 2019, that is based on an extremely small sample of plays because the Texans have only run 38 total plays out of 12 in 2019. Last week was a huge boost because, for the first time all season, Houston had two tight ends with over 50 percent of the snaps:

Last season the Texans ran 57% 11 personnel and 35% 12 personnel. This year, they’re at 74% 11 personnel and 16% 12 personnel. Some of that probably is about having faith in Laremy Tunsil at left tackle, and some of that is probably about having traded for Kenny Stills and wanting to use him often. Obviously, without Stills, there was less incentive to play 11 personnel.

12 personnel on its own cannot be blamed for the Falcons having a shoddy defense that was coached roughly as well as Jon Arbuckle deals with Garfield. But, one thing that has become more and more clear to me watching NFL teams for the last few years is that teams generate play-action shots off of 12 personnel much more easily than they do out of 11. 11 personnel is where you go to get quick passes.

Will Fuller’s second touchdown was out of play-action in 12 personnel, and the entire Atlanta defense decided they would rather cover DeAndre Hopkins:

Now, yes, that looks easy. No, that won’t happen on every play. But — you know who is more likely to mess up in pass coverage between a linebacker and a defensive back? A linebacker. You know who is more likely to bite on a run fake? A linebacker. The personnel has a huge impact on how defenses react to play-action. The more linebackers you put on the field, the more space you can create.

This is an area that was mostly unutilized last year by the Texans. Partially it’s because Will Fuller wasn’t healthy all season. When Fuller was healthy, in Weeks 1-8, the Texans averaged 8.5 yards per play-action dropback, and that’s counting two sacks, out of 12 personnel. You’ll probably most memorably recall what happened when the Texans got two touchdowns out of the set against the Dolphins:

The Texans did fine on these dropbacks afterwards, but they didn’t have the deep threat Fuller provided to make the play work as well as it should. Their longest play the rest of the season was 28 yards, and most of the air yards were closer to the 14-20 yard range.

At the same time, the Texans have somehow shook Carlos Hyde off the scrapheap and found a player who can get through arm tackles and tight inside creases while maintaining burst, which is something they didn’t really have last season. Houston’s early looks with Hyde have mostly been in 11-personnel, but I think he translates well to 12-personnel. If you are able to get teams scared of him as a consistent chain-mover in 12-personnel, suddenly the linebackers are even more liable to getting sucked in. Particularly if the Texans are able to disguise their plays with the satellite action/zone reads they used the last couple of weeks. That is a lot of different things for a defense to worry about before they think about where Fuller and Hopkins are headed. Jordan Akins’ emergence as a pass catcher and Darren Fells’ pass blocking also bolster the unit from where things were last season with Ryan Griffin.

This isn’t an argument that the Texans should sit Stills, or that Stills and Duke Johnson shouldn’t be a big part of the game plan still. I just think that 12 personnel has the potential to be so effective that it needs to be more carved into the 2019 offense than it has been so far.

That’s my major takeaway from watching Atlanta get owned by it for four quarters, anyway.

Posted on

Four Downs: Houston 53, Atlanta 32

There’s a reason I am so hard on Bill O’Brien all the time, and it’s that we saw how good this offense could be in 2017 and he simply had been unable to recapture that magic. For the last 22 games of Texans football, Deshaun Watson was shackled by a structure that didn’t seem to do enough to help him out. He held the ball a long time. The offensive line wasn’t good enough to protect him.

This is what it was supposed to be like after 2017. This is that 59-point drubbing of the Tennessee Titans all over again. Because when you make things easy for Deshaun Watson, he makes them look easy.

Only Kirk Cousins had a better day than Watson as far as Next Gen Stats’ accuracy against expected completion percentage. Watson completed 14% more throws than expected to by the raw data.

To say that Watson torched Atlanta would be understating things. The Texans punted once all day — happy birthday Bryan Anger, enjoy the time off — and on every drive they took seriously they seemed a threat to score. One field-goal attempt happened when Houston ran a screen for Fuller on third-and-long, and even that screen arguably worked.

This was a master class in something I haven’t seen a lot of from O’Brien, and it’s a reason I want to circle back to his press conference to give him credit:

“He runs the show out there.” The best leaders are quick to give credit to their players. I’ve often felt that O’Brien has made his offense about what he has preferred. With the game plan he picked today, and with Watson running the show as well as he did, he recognized he didn’t need to go back. That’s a huge step.

1 — Can this offensive output be replicated on a weekly basis?

Not only were the throws that Watson took today often not happening as far downfield, they were also easier. The best offense in the world is the offense that makes eight yards on second-and-10 feel like this:

There were several examples of the offense doing this. They were 10-of-13 on third down because they kept generating shorter third downs. The fact that they kept creating X-and-short meant that play-action burned Atlanta, and Atlanta was quick to react to those fakes:

While there will, obviously, be bigger challenges than the Atlanta personnel and coverage scheme, the grander question is if this philosophy can continue. I think it can.

I think the chart is instructive here:

Notice there were only a few throws over 20 yards. One of them being the play-action pass that was wide open for a touchdown. This was a short, focused passing game. This is the sort of stuff that Tom Brady is able to pull out in most games.

It could be Houston’s thing, too.

2 — The best offensive line is throwing fast

That says it all, doesn’t it? The Falcons have a bad pass rush by sacks, but they were getting pressures coming into the game. SIS had them with a 32.8 percent pressure rate in 2019, the sixth-highest in the NFL.

Matt Weston’s counterpoint to this was that the Falcons don’t run many games or stunts, which is what Houston tends to struggle with. Fair enough. But a lot of these balls were out so fast that the Falcons didn’t have much time to pressure Watson. Again:

There will be bigger tests for the line, and I think this is going to be a week where we look at the line and everything looks great — like Week 3 — when the story is a little more complex than that.

But if the Texans continue to get the ball out as quickly as they did in this game, negative plays disappear. When negative plays disappear, and you pair them with a still-explosive offense and consistent gains, you get a top-5 offense.

3 — J.J. Watt picked a hell of a time to have his best game of the year

While the Houston offense kept looking good, the Falcons were able to move the ball pretty easily.

The Texans as a defense right now are incredibly reliant on the pass rush to make things happen. Today, they did that. Watt keyed the charge, and D.J. Reader’s sack came because of Watt pressure in a nice change of pace:

Houston found eight quarterback hits and two sacks. Watt had five of the hits. It was not a dominant performance given the 46 dropbacks, but it was enough. When your offense plays as well as it did today, this performance becomes enough.

Very quiet game from Whitney Mercilus, but he did show some good discipline on this screen pass:

Negative plays are all this defense has going for them. Anything else is going to be too much. Thankfully, between the pick-six and a couple of key third-down stops, they were able to keep Atlanta from making the game tightly contested in the fourth quarter. Romeo Crennel deserves some credit for the blitz looks he came up with to get two of those third-down stops, which generated free rushers at the quarterback:

When the offense plays like they play today, it doesn’t matter too much. But in tighter games, ones where Watson will presumably not hit all but four of his throws, the Texans are going to need every negative play they can cobble together.

4 — The nagging concerns

Coverage continues to remain quite loose. Lonnie Johnson was playing hurt and is a rookie asked to move across the line of scrimmage on this snap, but you simply can’t let a receiver get this free of a release in this coverage:

Some of Ryan’s throws were just flat-out off, rather than well-defensed. Obviously, hard to tell entirely from the tape, but I didn’t see many throws that the Texans negatively impacted outside of the one Julio Jones slant that Johnathan Joseph and Zach Cunningham sandwiched Jones on. Take this pass on second-and-20:

I don’t know that we’re going to see a team with a good quarterback held under 250 yards this year. Pace and tempo matter a lot to that statement, but the Texans don’t have an emerging corner or defensive back that is fixing to come on and save them. They have Mike Adams. They have Keion Crossen. There’s not a lot of hope that the coverage will be able to do much but stay passive and mix in the occasional change-of-pace press play. When they do, they have to have better from Johnson than he showed on that play.

Special teams continues to be a concern. Kaimi Fairbairn has missed a season’s worth of kicks for some kickers in the last three weeks. DeAndre Carter’s fumble nearly imploded the Texans before Watson brought them back from brink with a flawless closeout drive.

The Chiefs are looming, and the Texans have picked up the pace just in time. Could we have a shootout to rival the Rams-Chiefs on Monday Night Football last year? Or, was this a one week flash-in-the-pan?

It’s going to be an interesting week.

Posted on

Media Meditations: Going Viral

In case you somehow missed this, I made a Tweet out of a Texans video of Deshaun Watson answering Aaron Reiss’ question. It went viral.

SportsCenter essentially copied the Tweet. (They didn’t use the Periscope video, so their version did not have hearts on it.) Deadspin wrote a post about the interaction. Big name media people ran with it all overnight on Monday — Ian Rapoport being the biggest domino — and when I woke up this video I made on my own, in my little computer room, was spun two million times. It only got bigger from there.

Let me tell you a little about the experience of going viral.

***

I don’t have any alerts on my phone. Texts and phone calls only. But every time I logged in to Twitter through Tuesday night, I was buried in notifications. I use web Twitter on my phone so that’s pretty much a constant 20+ popping up every five minutes — I use TweetDeck at home and pretty much every net push was a fresh batch of likes, tweets, comments, retweets.

This was oddly paralyzing as a user. Do I try to Tweet through the storm? It’s actually a little bit hard to have conversations with people on Twitter when this is happening. At the same time, I was fascinated enough by the reactions that I wanted to keep seeing them, so I didn’t mute the thing entirely. I actually put off posting all-22 clips by a day just because I knew I couldn’t have a conversation with anybody.

***

One thing I can’t recommend enough if you’re trying to go viral is to make something that can be viewed through every lens. I closely monitored the comments to this post. There were several groupings of comments, the pro- and the anti- side of each.

*The Bears fans who like Mitch Trubisky versus the ones who like Watson more. (One Trubisky comment on my original Tweet had over 3,000 likes on its own.)
*The people who were amazed by the information and what it took to play quarterback versus the ones who play Madden and were incredulous that people were amazed by this.
*The football coaches who want to use this to train their players versus the football players who already knew it all.

The Tweet itself was innocuous. I did that on purpose. “Deshaun Watson explains Carolina’s defense in 66 seconds” is vague as hell specifically because when I’m just trying to share someone else’s story, I don’t want to impose too much of my own mindset on it. It’s amazing that so much division and cynicism can come from that, but that is the world we live in today. I am literally putting things out there for you to react to and take and put your spin on. Sometimes your spin is positive. In many, many more cases, your spin is negative or angry or cynical. Or not funny. Sorry to tell you — a lot of the comments are not funny.

For the record, there was only one person who directly criticized that phrasing — they said (paraphrasing) “THAT’S NOT THE WHOLE DEFENSE.” So, in case you were wondering, yes, people can get mad at anything.

***

By far the biggest group of people, though, I had to address in an aside:

I would wager anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of the Tweets were people happy that Aaron “got dunked on” for asking the question. Let me expound on this Tweet for a minute.

I think major media is fucked, which is why I am writing here and not trying to use my time begging to freelance for bigger places. They have completely failed to address the major issues of the day because — and I say this as someone with a limited understanding of these things myself — most media people don’t know jack shit about advertising. Google and Facebook make all the money. The scraps that are left behind from most major content deals are enough to rig up skeleton crews and trap otherwise great people in jobs that will never make more than $60,000 a year.

Between major media failing to deal with how they make money properly, and major media backlashing that on the public with a sea of scammy advertisements or pop ups, I think most people do mistrust the news to some extent. My wife has negative feelings towards the Houston Chronicle because she was bilked by a salesman once and is on a mailing list that they simply won’t let go of. I can’t imagine this is an uncommon occurrence.

Media reacted to the money being gone by acting like every customer was a mark, and that made their consumers look at them with a more discerning eye. The New York Times has an entire Opinion team that could not possibly be more awful, because they use that rage for hits. We are all guilty of using your emotion against you to get your attention.

At the same time, with the freedom of social media and the self-importance that provides, you are now free to carefully build your own attuned culture of “media” however you like. Some people use that well. Some people use that to remain permanently angry. There are people who would use your anger to blind you to what they are doing to you. I don’t think I have to name names here.

Most of the reporters you interact with do not make a lot of money. Most of them are telling their truth. If their truth doesn’t resonate with you, that’s fine. But we are all so drowned in information and choices now that we’ve become a Dunning-Kruger effect society, and that — plus major social cues from certain other places I probably don’t have to name — just make us all tee off on caricatures of people we don’t know.

Aaron asked that question to get that answer. That wasn’t being dumb. That was about getting the reaction he wanted. But people wanted that Dumbass Reporter caricature to be true so bad that thousands and thousands of them — unprovoked by any kind of political anything — just went with it.

Popular Twitter is a dark, dark place. Or, as one writer I talked to this week said, it’s a “terrible but necessary place on the internet.”

***

When I take videos of the press conferences or media sessions and share them with you, I’m trying to be the editor you don’t have in your busy life. You could watch every Texans video and be drowned with a lot of stuff that doesn’t much matter to outsiders — yes, you’re all trying to win, you’re all going to improve this week, it’s a 60-minute game, etc. etc.

You could watch every Tim Kelly interview to try to understand if he is a robot or a person. One of my services is doing that for you, picking quotes I think are interesting or revealing — i.e. not Kelly quotes — and sharing them.

That’s a loss leader for me. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, think of it as a doorbuster deal on a big Black Friday sale. I post them to get you in the door, and if I get you in the door, maybe you’ll read my writing — just like an Amazon shopper realizes they’ll need batteries for this toy and they’re already on the website anyway. Once you read my writing … well, hopefully I can keep you reading, and eventually, perhaps you’ll pay for it to continue.

Watching what happened out of going viral made me appreciate the people who are positive and back what I put out often. There are tons of readers who come to something quietly now, because the internet has become more rage storm than they are comfortable dealing with in a positive way. Instead of trying to personally interact in fighting anger, they would rather shut down and just be quiet supporters, so as to not lose their own positive energy. I respect that.

So I want to thank people who have been very publicly supportive of my Texans stuff: Steph Stradley, bfd, Mike Meltser, Sean Pendergast, Seth Payne, the guys at TexansUnfiltered. And I want to shout out some of my smaller, quieter lurkers who I see surface only every once in awhile. I won’t splash your names out there.

Hopefully, if you came into the circle this week because Deshaun Watson nerding out on football is awesome, I can show you why you should keep reading.

Posted on

Week 5 Preview: Atlanta @ Houston

I don’t think it’s hyperbole to suggest this is an enormous game for this year’s Houston Texans. While I haven’t written the preview yet, I think we all know that there is an extremely high likelihood of Patrick Mahomes destroying Houston’s secondary next week. This Texans team has not proven that it can conclusively put away anybody yet — this is not a team that can afford to fall two games under .500. Yet, if they lose this game, that’s about where they are headed.

If you saw last week’s Falcons 10-spot and laughed, well, the Falcons are this weird mix of snake-bit and laughable that I find utterly charming from afar. Keep in mind that they missed a field goal and had three separate fourth-and-short conversions go wrong against the Titans in Tennessee territory. 10 points understates the work that was happening — they remain a fairly dangerous offense. And, as a quarterback, Matt Ryan is accurate enough to exploit the Houston secondary to the exact same extent that Philip Rivers was.

The last time these teams met was in 2015, and Bill O’Brien got steamrolled. The Falcons won 48-21, and all 21 Texans points came in the fourth quarter. Prior to that, the TJ Yates Texans won 17-10 in 2011. Bobby Petrino’s Falcons won in 2007 in Matt Schaub’s return to Atlanta. To Joey Harrington. Are all these games embarrassing for one of these teams? You better believe it.

Vegas has the Texans as anywhere from 4.5 to five-point favorites, so we’re right back into the same danger zone that produced last week’s Panthers upset.

When the Texans have the ball

All DVOA figures courtesy Football Outsiders

The Titans were able to jump on Atlanta by taking full advantage of a major weakness: their inability to do much about play-action passes. The Falcons allow 5.8 yards per play on regular pass plays, but 9.8 yards per play against play-action. That’s one of the seven biggest swings of any team, and teams run a ton of play-action against Atlanta because they tend to be zone-heavy.

Unfortunately, the Texans aren’t really the team that is going to exploit that weakness. Houston runs a below-average amount of play-action and averages just 5.5 yards per play-action pass, one of the five lowest numbers in the NFL. The Texans have been good at play-action before, but it hasn’t really been much of an emphasis for them this season. Perhaps seeing what the Titans did last week will embolden them a bit.

I say that the Falcons are zone-heavy because most of their cornerbacks haven’t been targeted much. Desmond Trufant has been targeted just 11 times. Isaiah Oliver, at 23, has the most targets in the secondary by far. He’s been boom or bust, giving up 8.1 yards per pass and a 56 percent completion rate, but also three touchdowns.

This is a get-right game for both DeAndre Hopkins and Will Fuller. The Falcons allow a 56.9% DVOA to No. 1 wideouts and an 87.4% DVOA to No. 2 wideouts, both bottom-three numbers in the NFL. No. 1 wideouts are averaging 83 yards per game against the Falcons. The possible absence of Kenny Stills won’t hurt too bad here, as the Falcons have mostly silenced interior receivers anyway.

Atlanta’s pass rush isn’t too intimidating, with a 5.0% adjusted sack rate that is good for 26th in the NFL. Vic Beasley is going on year three of being a completely pedestrian edge rusher. Takkarist McKinney is probably the biggest threat on the outside. On the inside, Grady Jarrett is going to be the first real test for Nick Martin this season. Time to earn your money, Nick. It should be noted that the Falcons still come away with a mid-table level of quarterback hits, so don’t expect Watson to be clean in the pocket for years.

However, one area where the Falcons have gotten much better this year is run defense. Even if DVOA isn’t your cup of tea, they’re allowing just 3.7 yards per carry. They shut Derrick Henry up pretty good for most of a game that they were trailing. The return of Deion Jones has really elevated that part of the unit.

The one thing that jumps out at me about this game in a concerning way is that the Falcons are pretty solid deep. They’re allowing a 36.2% DVOA on deep passes, barely above the league-average. For reference, Jacksonville is slightly worse than that on deep passes, and Carolina is doing better in defending them than any team in the NFL right now. If O’Brien continues to build so much of the offense towards the deep ball, he simply has to hit more in this game. The Texans can’t go 0- or 2-for-8 on deep balls unless both of them are touchdowns or something.

When the Falcons have the ball

The Falcons are a weird offensive team that matches up really well with the Texans because Atlanta has understood that the concept of running the football is stupid, so they just gave up on it.

The Falcons have just 71 rushing attempts on the year — only three teams are below them, and the Dolphins and Jets barely count as football teams at this point. When they do run, Devonta Freeman has been so east-west that he’s not been getting much generally. He’s talented as far as breaking tackles, and I think he’s been a beast in the past, but I’m not sure he’s playing like one this year.

The Atlanta offensive line has not done great things this year, though Alex Mack and Jake Matthews are obviously good players in a grander sense. This is the first time all season that Whitney Mercilus will face somebody worth his time. I do like J.J. Watt’s chances of swimming past rookie Kaleb McGary on a few downs. Because the Falcons have been so depleted at guard without IR’ed first-round pick Chris Lindstrom, I think it is extremely important that D.J. Reader continue to dominate:

Charles Omenihu’s potential return from a lost week looms large as well. James Carpenter and Wes Schweitzer played most of the guard snaps for the Falcons in Week 4 and they let Jurrell Casey eat them alive. Jamon Brown was the nominal starting guard this year, but is questionable with a concussion. While Ryan has mostly been well-protected this year, the line really sprung a lot of leaks, allowing 12 quarterback hits to the Titans.

How do the Texans deal with Julio Jones, Mohamed Sanu, and Calvin Ridley? This is something that they didn’t really have to do against the Chargers, where Mike Williams was injury-limited and the rest of the receiver corps was bad. They let Keenan Allen torch them, but smothered the rest of the brushfire. The Falcons will try to get both in Cover-3 posts for easy change against this secondary, which hasn’t really proven it can cover anybody one-on-one. Lonnie Johnson will be on the spot here. Jones has been about a 50% slot player, so Bradley Roby will get some chance to contain the damage that will obviously be happening.

The Ryan Falcons have been uncharacteristically mistake-prone this year. Ryan has thrown six picks this year. He threw seven all last season. I would expect them to play safer than usual given Houston’s myriad zone coverage schemes.

Special teams

The Falcons have been held hostage by Matt Bosher, who has been on the injury report all season and has winced his way through a ton of punts. The ancient Matt Bryant has taken over on field goals. He’s been surprisingly accurate on longer field goals even at his advanced age. (17 of 19 from beyond 40 in 2017, 11-12 from beyond 40 in 2018.) His usage rate and the fact that he was released before the season may be telling you that range has decreased.

Kai Fairbairn earned the dreaded vote of confidence from O’Brien, but nobody has exactly been dialed up to take his place just yet. Otherwise, the Texans have an edge on special teams.

The read

My gut instinct, before I started breaking down this game, was that the Texans would win. I don’t think they’ll make it easy on you, and I don’t think it will always be pretty, but I think Deshaun Watson will have a major bounce-back game and play well against a defense that doesn’t have much in the way of sure things that can stop him. He might take plenty of hits in the process.

The more I dove into the research, the more I wondered if this feeling was a trap. It’s hard to see “42-0” in Atlanta, no matter who the quarterbacks were, and feel confident that the head coach can hang. Atlanta definitely is the most complete offense the Texans have faced this year to this point.

Once again, I’m back to “I picked this team to make the playoffs, and they better win this game if they’re going to make the playoffs.” I like a high-scoring affair here. Give me Texans 29, Falcons 27

In closing,

Posted on

The (Early) Returns of the Laremy Tunsil Trade

The Laremy Tunsil trade was, if not exactly stunning because rumors had been floating around for a while, a stunning amount of draft capital to see shipped out all at once right before the season started. And, particularly after the emotionally exhausting end to the Jadeveon Clowney saga earlier that day, it came right when I think most fans needed a pick-me-up to feel in on this season. Whether you think the trade was good or bad, I think you can agree that everybody knew that Matt Kalil was not going to be a starting left tackle for more than a few games before he was found wanting.

Because of the amount of capital shipped out, there was instantly a lot of pressure on Tunsil. Bets as bold as the one O’Brien put on him don’t come around often. What it also did was it set people on trying to figure out the deeper meaning of why the Texans gave up two first-round picks and a second-round pick for him. There is a lot of justification necessary, not only among journalists and the media, but among fans, in properly creating the narrative of why Tunsil was worth the ransom that he was worth. As someone who is more focused from an outside perspective, and saw the trade as a massive overpay the second it happened, it’s always fun to listen to the other points of view out there. Let’s go through these one-by-one, and hopefully I at least capture the spirit of the arguments if not capture them word-for-word. If you’ve got other arguments you want me to respond to, I’d love to hear them.

“Laremy Tunsil is worth it because Andrew Luck retired after he got hurt, and you can’t risk your young quarterback’s health in today’s NFL.“

This one seemed to be the most prevalent explanation for the overpay. Andrew Luck had just retired in the middle of the preseason, and the Texans were supposed to look at the beating that Luck took and realize that they couldn’t let their franchise quarterback take the same beating.

That argument falls apart in a few different ways, but the most important reason it falls apart is because study after study shows the two people who have the biggest say in a quarterback’s sack rate are the quarterback and the head coach. Just this week, Watson took six sacks, I would argue the offensive line played fairly well outside of Greg Mancz. It didn’t matter:

All of Watson’s sack/hit numbers are essentially within the realm of what he did last season, especially if you believe the Chargers game was an outlier caused by an overly passive defense. Houston’s adjusted sack rate of 11.9% is the second-worst in the league. Last year it was 11.6%. Watson’s quarterback hit rate has gone down only slightly, and in going down slightly it has still not come close to the 2017 numbers:

via airyards.com

The real interesting thing about Watson’s hit rate is when you compare it to Andrew Luck. See, Luck floundered about with what was perceived to be a bad line for a long time too. Then they hired Frank Reich, and Reich completely torched the system that Chuck Pagano had put in place, then made some in-house adjustments. Luck’s adjusted sack rate dropped from 7.6% in 2016 to 4.1% in 2018.

Airyards did not keep Andrew Luck in their system after he retired, so I went and counted out the hit numbers manually.

Andrew Luck’s 2016 season: 8.3 quarterback hits per start
Andrew Luck’s 2018 season: 5.3 quarterback hits per start
Andrew Luck’s last 10 games + playoff games of the 2018 season: 3.9 quarterback hits per start

The problem was: It was too late. Luck had already been broken.

We’ve seen Bill O’Brien run an offense with more concepts that keep Watson doing what he was comfortable in college in 2017. That was the year that Watson had his lowest quarterback hit rate. The head coach can have a huge impact on the quarterback hits by his scheme and the areas of the field he wants to target. O’Brien’s scheme is more conducive to getting Watson hit than Watson’s college scheme was.

Tunsil has not solved this problem because no offensive lineman could. The two people who can solve it are above his pay grade, which is a weird-but-true thing you can say about a guy who will probably get $60 million in guaranteed money at some point.

“Laremy Tunsil will raise all tides along the offensive line by putting players into positions they are better equipped to play.”

I think this is the second-truest argument put out about what Tunsil has done, because all you need to do is look at what the Texans would have done without him. Matt Kalil would almost undoubtedly have led to Tytus Howard at left tackle, when Tytus Howard’s first four games have shown us uneven play at lesser positions.

That said, it hasn’t really changed a whole lot. If you look at Houston’s line as a whole, Nick Martin has been solid, but he was going to man center anyway. Zach Fulton has been … okay? But he was going to man that position anyway.

The player who has lost snaps as a result of trading for Tunsil is Roderick Johnson, who I would argue actually deserves to be starting at right tackle on pure merit. That’s no slam on Howard, he just was always going to be year-one project coming out of Alabama State. Howard definitely has higher upside.

But, I have to admit that Howard at left tackle would likely be a disaster, and Johnson and Howard outside probably gets you to mediocre-to-average at best. Tunsil has definitely put less pressure as a whole on the offensive line to perform, and that is an objectively great thing about the trade.

“Laremy Tunsil will open up Houston’s deep passing game.”

There are definitely a handful of plays every game where Tunsil out-and-out locks a lineman down.

I think the best argument to make here is not that Tunsil himself is doing enough to make the Texans throw deep, but that he has given O’Brien more comfortability with longer dropbacks. In 2018, Watson took the fourth-most time to make his throws, with an average of 3.01 seconds per throw. But, Watson’s intended air yards of 8.8 was tied for eighth. He has cut that time to 2.92 seconds per throw in 2019, but with an intended air yardage that is tied for seventh at 9.8. That’s almost a full yard of increase, and that includes a game against Carolina where he often did not feel comfortable pushing the ball deep based on what he saw.

The interesting thing about the intended air yards in 2018 is that the number decreased as the season went along not because the offensive line was bad, but because the Texans didn’t have an easy deep-ball target. After Will Fuller’s injury, the Texans had a single-game average above 8.8 air yards twice: against Philadelphia in Week 16, and against the Jets in Week 15. Seven of the eight games where Watson threw less for less than eight intended air yards per attempt came after Fuller was hurt.

Obviously, we have to see where the Kenny Stills injury changes things for the Texans, but they were at 8.3 with him mostly incapacitated in Week 4. Will Fuller is still here. I think they’ll be able to go deep if they feel up to it.

It’s almost impossible to sit here as an outsider and tell you Bill O’Brien’s intent, but I believe that the Tunsil trade was about throwing it deep more than anything, and I think they’ve mostly accomplished that.

“Laremy Tunsil is a leader who will help Houston’s young offensive linemen grow.”

Uh, I guess? I don’t know a whole lot about Laremy Tunsil the person, but what I can tell you that has come out of press conferences is

1) Bill O’Brien says he “leads by example.”
2) He’s sick of talking about his own leadership:

I don’t know how to quantify the effect that having a good left tackle who has learned how to play in the league has on the young linemen. We haven’t really had any good stories leak out yet. There are no interesting anecdotes about him helping Tytus Howard fix Problem X. (At least none that I’ve seen.)

I leave this up to the reader to score, but I personally don’t believe there’s much of a leadership effect. Or, at least, not as much of one as people want to believe that there is.

“Laremy Tunsil will be a dominant left tackle.”

Ehhh.

Per Sports Info Solutions, Tunsil has blown three pass blocks. That 1.7 blown block percentage is very good, but about on par with what he’d done in Miami. (Public SIS numbers are through Week 3.) Tunsil leads the team in penalties with four, all of them false starts.

Pro Football Focus has him graded as their 18th-best tackle this year, with a top-10 pass protection grade and a middling run grade. That’s a ranking I think feels pretty right. While the Texans in general have run blocked better than they did in 2018, they haven’t seen a lot of improvement at left end from Tunsil. They average 1.16 adjusted line yards to left end per Football Outsiders, and 3.49 to left tackle. Those are both bottom-eight rates in the NFL.

I will say that Brandon Thorn does this stuff for a living and believes Tunsil has played better than this snapshot sells him, putting him on the short list of honorable mentions for All-Pro.

My own evaluation of Tunsil is that he’s so physically talented that you feel like, watching him, he’s capable of doing anything he wants. On some plays, he does! He’s the guy who can get out on screens and get somebody from an awkward angle. He’s able to stymie good pass rushers out of position. He’s eventually going to be one of the best tackles in the NFL.

But I don’t think he’s played up to it just yet. I’m sure some of that comes from the sudden change, and the fact that through Acts of O’Brien, he hasn’t even played next to the same left guard for three consecutive games yet. Teamwork is important for a line and the Texans have been asked to learn it on the fly.

I’ve seen solid games, and I’ve seen good games. I feel like I’m still waiting for the dominant game.

***

Through one month, you can absolutely see why the Texans were so keen to acquire Tunsil.

But, I think the most important thing going forward isn’t Tunsil, but how O’Brien and Watson combine to fix the pressure in this passing game. That’s a nagging problem that the Texans hoped would go away just by acquiring good linemen. So far, that hasn’t borne out.

Posted on

Four Downs: Panthers 16, Texans 10

I had a feeling the Texans would lay a bit of an egg against Carolina’s defense. Remember the Buffalo game last season? Ron Rivera and Sean McDermott use very similar concepts, as McDermott joined Buffalo from the Panthers. I didn’t think they’d be as bad as they were on Sunday, because I expected individual talent to shine through. But it wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility. I thought the Panthers offense would eat in this game, and instead they were abysmal.

Yes friends, this Texans loss was a meltdown. Kyle Allen’s start was honestly pretty bad, but the Panthers were able to overcome his three lost fumbles and make an entire offense out of Christian McCaffrey that was able to capitalize on some key errors and mistakes by Deshaun Watson and Bill O’Brien.

The Texans had a golden opportunity to take a lead in the division thanks to a similarly stunning Colts loss, but are now instead held up in the morass of the AFC South. Let’s dive deep:

1 — Bill O’Brien hasn’t gotten it corrected

I have watched Bill O’Brien’s five years as a head coach of the Houston Texans intently. In year six, he believed that calling this trick play was a good idea:

There is something of a political tinge to coverage of the O’Brien era at this point. I don’t mean that in the sense that there is a greater good or evil to O’Brien — I mean that the stakes have all been decided at this point, and minds don’t really change. We all know what we have, because we’re living it over and over again every Sunday and yelling at each other about it. The improvement O’Brien promises never happens, so we’re left with the question of “Is this enough?”

No, no it is not. It wasn’t today. It will not be at least a couple of other times this season. Inevitably, the Texans will always come back to Bill O’Brien not being a good enough head coach. The goalposts have moved several times over the last four seasons. He’s a good conservative coach. He’s calling the plays now. Puff stories appear here and there about him taking better control of games. I get that it is a very human reaction, as a fan, to want your team to do well. Part of being a fan is finding hope in situations that feel quite hopeless. I’m not upset with you as a fan if you like O’Brien — I find him likable in some situations too — but there is no reason to ever believe that he will improve.

Perhaps the capability of self-improvement is possible within O’Brien, and he discovers it when he gets to disconnect from this pesky “being a football coach” thing. But in this current set of situations, O’Brien has learned helplessness. The Texans desperately need him to be the brains of an entire franchise, and he desperately wants to be the brains of the entire franchise. But he doesn’t have an organized-enough plan for that, and he fires everybody who would come with a take that isn’t organically, at its core, an O’Brien Take. The thing he needs the most — help to cover his weaknesses — is exactly the thing he pushes away.

Let’s leave aside the Hopkins interception. Even without that, this was a horrific game from O’Brien. As he admitted in his post-game presser, the play calls were generally bad. The offense struggled to do anything but check the ball down. The Texans blew two timeouts in the second half on busted calls from the huddle. They blew a third to challenge a catch that was never going to be overturned:

So okay, let’s push all that aside. They get the ball back with 7:03 left, with one timeout. The Panthers have a three-point lead. The Texans call six plays, they gain 26 yards. They run the ball twice. In the span of those six plays, nearly three minutes burns off the block, then they use their last timeout because they’ve messed up something about the play call.

Where was the urgency? At this point, the Texans are almost committed to going for it on any fourth down. The second that they turn the ball over, they have nothing but the two-minute warning to stop the clock. If Carolina gets one first down, the game is all but over. It was made worse by Watson’s sack-fumble the play after the timeout, but even if they’d driven downfield, there was a high likelihood that they’d be forced to kick a field goal because all the time had bled off the clock.

Bill O’Brien is going to get this corrected. He’s going to win some other games, and then this game will not be fresh in your mind anymore. That is the entirety of the correction.

2 — Deshaun Watson also did not play well

Watson had two deep throws that were basically the game, and he missed them both. He was close on both of them — both this and the bomb to DeAndre Hopkins in the third quarter were within an arm’s length of each receiver. But, ultimately, they were short.

It did feel like there was some emotional quarterbacking from the young star today.

There were times in the second half where I think the game got away from him a bit, where he was trying to force a throw that wasn’t there. Where he was trying to just make something happen. A lot of credit goes to Carolina’s defense for bottling up Houston’s downfield plays and making them check it down underneath, but I think a more mature Watson in three or four years will be able to get past some of the issues the Texans had in the fourth quarter.

Watson was not helped by the game plan. There were a couple of times where two receivers were running in the same area of the throw point. In a game where blitzers should have created open throws to underneath receivers, Duke Johnson had three targets. Jordan Akins had four. Kenny Stills’ injury had an impact, but the Texans simply have to be better than this in all phases as an offense. The running game superficially looked good behind the big Duke Johnson carry and a Hyde “run” that was actually a backwards checkdown. Take those away and the running backs got three yards per carry.

And yet, it Watson hits those throws, the Texans probably win the game. That is the tough part to swallow.

3 — D.J. Reader is the best Texans defender

Whitney Mercilus got another sack and another forced fumble today, his fifth and fourth of the year, respectively.

I noted that the quarterback did not step up, but instead stepped back. A big reason for that was that Matt Paradis got pushed right into Kyle Allen’s face by D.J. Reader.

Reader again was a menace in this game, racking up multiple run stuffs and contributing to the overall pass rush by wrecking the pocket in a game where his teammates had three sacks and five hits.

It is true that Mercilus is having a big year, and when I posted that I thought Reader had been the best Texans defender this year, I got some pushback. But if you look back at Mercilus’ sacks on this season, I think a majority of them actually come because of Reader getting enough push that the quarterback can’t step up in the pocket.

Do you want to credit the guy who made the quarterback go backwards, or the one who wound up with the sack? What about if the one who made the quarterback go backwards was also a big part of the reason that the Panthers ran it 28 times and only got 94 yards?

4 — The offensive line … was fine.

Deshaun Watson was sacked six times and picked up 10 more quarterback hits. Don’t necessarily buy that a lot of that was on the offensive line.

The one player who I think clearly hurt the Texans was fill-in starter Greg Mancz, who only started because Zack Fulton appeared to be a last-minute scratch with a back injury.

Watson’s other sacks (outside of this and a later one where Mancz was also not up for the task) were mostly about him trying to buy time. This is not to say that the offensive line was flawless — Two Drafts Tunsil false started twice in key situations, Tytus Howard gave up some pressure here or there — but they generally played pretty well.

Watson’s sack issues, as I said at the time of the trade, are endemic to who he is as a quarterback. The Texans definitely needed a better left tackle, because there were several plays where Julien Davenport allowed a quick pressure that wrecked a play last year. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Houston traded two first-round picks and a second-round pick and have not yet made a dent in the problem of how you protect Watson. That is to take nothing away from Tunsil’s play — he’s obviously better than Davenport was last year and would have been this year.

If the Texans want to do a better job of protecting Watson, my belief is that they need to take two steps back from what they’re doing now and go back to more concepts from 2017’s offense. Watson still took quarterback hits at that point, but his rate of quarterback hits was at 9.4% instead of 13+%, where I suspect it will land after stats update this week and where it was in 2018.

The only game that Watson came out of with good hits numbers in — granted, with a rotating cast of linemen — was in Week 3, when the Chargers barely blitzed at all. I believe he will always be a quarterback who takes plenty of hits in every game. But that doesn’t mean that the Texans can’t scheme more to get him easier throws that don’t ask him to take the four or five extra hits a game that he’s taking now.

Posted on

Week 4 Preview: Carolina @ Houston

Coming off a win that has a lot of good vibes going in Houston — taking out an elite quarterback, seeing visible improvement from a bad offensive line, and so on — Houston comes home to face a quarterback with two career starts.

You don’t need Admiral Akbar to tell you what kind of game this is. The Panthers were favored to make a lot of noise in the NFC South, and actually have played pretty well in most phases of the game. Week 2’s loss to the Bucs happened to coincide with their clearly-injured quarterback missing open throw after open throw. They also lost a nailbiter to a 3-0 team where their defense completely silenced an offense with good field position for most of the game. While this isn’t quite the game it looked like when the schedule was released, this isn’t exactly your average 1-2 team with a backup quarterback.

The last time these teams met was in 2015 — the famous Ryan Mallett start before he stopped checking his alarm clock. Houston’s last win against Carolina came in 2007, Steve Smith had 153 yards and three touchdowns. Andre Johnson had 120 and two.

Vegas agreed with the trap game and has placed the game anywhere from minus-4 to minus-4.5 for the Texans, entering the clearly established territory of throwing their hands up. Let’s dig a little deeper.

When the Texans have the ball

All DVOA numbers courtesy Football Outsiders

A very interesting side note to this game popped up on Wednesday during Bill O’Brien’s media interview, when he seemed to cast some aspersions on his team’s ability to run the ball against Carolina’s front.

“We definitely have to run it better, it was tough sledding. The Chargers did a good job with their game plan. I think in this game again it’s going to be tough sledding … it’s hard to run the ball in the NFL, it really is. …We got to get it more balanced than it was last week.”

That is the clear area of weakness the Panthers have created this year with their move for Gerald McCoy and utilizing their first-round selection on outside EDGE player Brian Burns. The Rams, Cardinals, and Bucs have all run for 100 yards on this Panthers front seven. They are overaggressive and that aggressiveness can be taken advantage of.

Houston’s running game has shown some competence this year, and I believe they need to do a lot more lifting in this game because as nice as that offensive line looked in Week 3, this game is a matchup against a more aggressive defense that can win one-on-one against any member of the offensive line. If the Texans get too pass-heavy, this will be another game where Deshaun Watson gets teed off on. Watson has the ability to play like he did in Week 3 and render all those concerns null. He also has the ability to play like he did in Week 2. The Panthers, for what it is worth, blitzed on 31.7% of their 2018 opponent dropbacks as compared to Los Angeles’ 14.3%. This is going to be a game where Watson and O’Brien are tested in handling the blitz.

Carolina’s most likely path to disrupting the pass is over right tackle Tytus Howard, who is going through ups and downs this season as he plays all over the offensive line. Lining over him will be Burns, who has set the league on fire to the tune of 10 pressures in his first three weeks. Howard is going to need to stalemate him — or get more help than he had last week — for the Texans to unlock the deep passing game.

The cornerback matchups will not lock on to DeAndre Hopkins like they have the last two games, so moving him around will create some easier matchups. Both Panthers cornerbacks are having pretty stellar years to this point. Sports Info Solutions lists Donte Jackson with an average of 7.2 yards per target, and James Bradberry with an average of 6.0. For comparison: Johnathan Joseph is at 9.4. I don’t think the Texans are afraid of Carolina’s corners or anything, but they’ll break up a few plays.

The only thing I can find that’s roundly in Houston’s favor is that Kawaan Short was a DNP on both Wednesday and Thursday and seems unlikely to play this week. That will at least make Dontari Poe play more on passing downs. Jackson also was down on Thursday.

Same as it ever was, this will be a week where the Texans are extremely reliant on Watson’s playmaking and (gulp) O’Brien’s ability to scheme them out of blitz problems.

When the Panthers have the ball

All DVOA numbers courtesy of Football Outsiders

As alluded to earlier this week, Houston’s defensive line came back in a big way in Week 3. They’ll have to do it again here, and they will likely get some help with Panthers guard Trai Turner missing the first two days of practice and appearing unlikely to play in Week 4. The plan appears to be to move left tackle and Shaq Barrett beat-em-up Darryl Williams to guard to take Turner’s spot, then give the tackle job to one of Houston’s draft crushes, Greg Little. Williams had nine blown blocks at left tackle over three weeks, so Little may not be a downgrade at all. It is (checks notes) yet another game where Whitney Mercilus is put into the best possible position. Aaron Reiss wrote him up this week as being deserving of a contract extension. Mercilus continues to find himself in plum spot after plum spot early in the season.

Willams and Taylor Moton will do most of the work on J.J. Watt. Matt Paradis has been somewhat of a turnstile in pass protection early this season, and D.J. Reader has to be licking his chops on that potential matchup. While Moton and Paradis have careers that say they’ll play better than they have this year, both of them haven’t played up to their high standards.

The Texans will need the pass rush, because the Panthers have a number of different things that can harm them. Kyle Allen’s first start this year was heavy on Norv Turner’s play-action and read-option style, and created a lot of open passes downfield.

Allen had a fairly quick trigger on most of his throws — his 2.84 average time to throw was dragged up by his scrambling when Carolina allowed pressure. While he hasn’t exactly had an extended trial yet, both of Allen’s starts have been successes to some extent. (He led the Panthers to a 33-14 win over the Saints in Week 17 last year.) One thing that I wonder about coming into play in this game will be Allen’s deep ball — his couple against New Orleans looked quite good, but the Panthers barely utilized it in Week 3. The Texans are a downhill defense, so a lot of how aggressive they can be will be dictated by how Allen is able to punish them. The best bet otherwise with Allen is to Gardner Minshew him — sack and fumble. He fumbled twice last week, losing one.

Across the board, Allen has mismatches. DJ Moore and Curtis Samuel have both engaged in breakout campaigns to some extent. A healthy Greg Olsen is more than a mismatch for anybody in man coverage. Christian McCaffrey is probably the preeminent pass-catching back in the NFL. The Texans are going to want to stay in zone coverage because I don’t know if they can check a single one of these receivers man-to-man — maybe whoever Bradley Roby has. From what I have seen Allen won’t have problems releasing into holes in zones, and in fact does so with some anticipation.

In addition, Houston’s run defense is a little bit vulnerable right now as well. 14th in run defense DVOA oversells it a bit — Justin Jackson had a touchdown run called back for holding, but the Chargers rushed for about four yards a carry. Still, on the aggregate, Texans opponents have rushed for 5.4 yards per carry this season and that’s not all in the New Orleans game. McCaffrey had a 73-yard touchdown run last week. That belies the fact that they haven’t run the ball all that well this year, but they were second in rush offense DVOA in 2018 and could just be having problems making the new offensive line parts fit.

Special Teams

All DVOA courtesy Football Outsiders

Joey Slye has hit 7-of-8 field goals, including three from 50+ yards. The Panthers have not shown much hesitance with him. Most of the poor punt return ratings for the Panthers are a lost fumble by Ray Ray McCloud.

Last week’s poor showing by Fairbairn dipped him into negative numbers. It’s probably not a huge concern long-term as he has missed extra points and long field goals before. The changeover to a new holder might affect him in the short-term.

The read

I would dearly like to tell you that the Texans will get to 3-1, and I don’t think I would be surprised if they did. The clearly established formula at this point is Watson greatness + defensive turnovers. That can definitely happen in this game, with a quarterback making his third career start.

However, the more I reviewed this game, the more I found myself thinking that Carolina had matchup edges that the Texans just don’t. The Texans haven’t lost ugly in the O’Brien era while Watson was healthy — with the notable exception of the Colts playoff game — but I do think this is primed for a shocker. Give me Carolina 29, Houston 27. If I felt at all confident that Houston’s running game was going to work, I might choose differently. Either way, this team likes close games and they may be due to get bit for that again.

Posted on

Houston’s 2018 defense re-appeared in Week 3

Through the first two games of the season, the Texans dabbled in impactful defense, but didn’t erase many plays.

Houston barely even harassed Drew Brees, leaving that game with three quarterback hits and one sack. They went all out on Gardner Minshew, sacking him four times and creating three fumbles, but doing it mainly via the blitz. The Jaguars had a run-focused game plan, so the fact that the Texans came at Minshew 15 times meant that it was a very high percentage of Minshew’s dropbacks.

Against Los Angeles, the Texans blitzed 12 times, but with Rivers dropping back 51 times. Rivers actually shredded Houston’s blitz schemes. By my count, he went 8-of-11 for 116 yards, a touchdown, six first downs, and one sack when Houston blitzed. A lot of his actual completions against the blitz look like witchcraft on tape:

But where the Texans won this game was their ability to go four-on-five with the Chargers’ offensive line and get pressure on Rivers from it. Rivers was constantly harassed by J.J. Watt (you expect this), Whitney Mercilus (you’re growing to expect this), as well as two relatively new sources of pressure: D.J. Reader and Charles Omenihu.

Reader, in particular, has taken his game to the next level this season. He’s always been an excellent nose tackle, but he’s been the one constant in getting pressure for the Texans in every game. He created a couple of Mercilus sacks by pushing the pocket back, he’s at 1.5 sacks of his own in three games, which means he’s a half-sack from reaching his career high after three (3) games.

If we look at Reader’s first three years, we get a very consistent rate of pressure. He finished 2016 with 11 Sports Info Solutions’ pass pressures. 2017: 12. 2018: 13. This year he is on pace for 26!

I don’t find what Reader is doing particularly unsustainable. He’s done it every game this season. He’s done it against tough interior lines and bad interior lines. His play passes the smell test and it’s clear that he’s winning often with handplay rather than just pure size and speed. That is actually a big step for the Texans, because they have not had to miss Jadeveon Clowney as much as perhaps they should.

(Quick aside: the idea of lining Mercilus, Reader, Watt, Clowney up as your defensive line every down this season and just letting them destroy offensive lines makes me real sad until I remember that their defensive coordinator would never put this on the field as more than a sub package to begin with. Moving on!)

I hemmed and hawed about Charles Omenihu’s PFF grade last week, but I thought he showed a lot more being lined up inside more this week:

One thing I think we were all treated to in Week 3 was the power of a position change. Omenihu has sub-optimal speed around the edge but good power and good pass rush moves. It always made sense that he would be better as an interior disruptor, but after a whole preseason of asking him to win on the edge, I needed to see the Texans use him like this to believe it.

So … what do we make of this going forward? Is Houston’s defensive front that we saw get dominated against the Saints fixed? One thing that football has taught me very clearly over the years is to not get too worked up by small samples of anything. At the same time, this is a ceiling I wasn’t sure the Texans would have as a defense this season, so it is extremely encouraging for their playoff chances to see their defensive line come in and dominate a game like they did on Sunday.

I still think there’s a lot of matchup issues baked in to what happened on Sunday. I don’t think Los Angeles’ offensive line is at all good, and I think Omenihu is going to have rougher games than he has over his last two at some point this season. A lot of early-season NFL analysis comes down to “hurry up and wait for more data.”

Still, it was good to see this gear out of the Texans. The Chargers are not the last team on their schedule with a bad offensive line. It will be downright imperative for the line to play this well for them to win their tougher matchups of the season. Now we know that it can happen.

Posted on

Four Downs: Texans 27, Chargers 20

The Houston Texans survived a battle on the pitch, holding off the Chargers 27-20 after a barrage of Philip Rivers throws were negated by a holding penalty and a dropped Travis Benjamin throw into the end zone:

It is quite tempting to read this game as a big stepping stone for the Texans. It’s something I had already seen starting to go around on live postgame shows. To be certain, it’s awesome that they were able to hold up on Philip Rivers. But, as I noted in the preview, the Chargers were not playing well. Their offensive line was weak. They are dealing with an obscene amount of injuries. Could it be a step to them playing better against good teams? Maybe! Do I think there’s a chance we look back on this season and think the Chargers underwhelmed for a lot of reasons that will make this win less impressive in retrospect? I do.

It’s hard to understate how big of a win it is for Houston’s playoff chances. It’s a conference game, it’s a road game in a tough spot. This is a big win. I just don’t necessarily think it’s changing the direction of the franchise.

1 — Texans coverage continues to be soft and easily frazzled

Houston may have won the game, but the pass defense looked anything but solid. Keenan Allen got free releases all over the place and was able to go pretty much anywhere he wanted. Dontrelle Inman nearly was picked on a quick out that Johnathan Joseph read well, but other than that, there was practically no resistance from the secondary.

Allen wound up with 13 catches for 183 yards and two scores. His second score came on a blitz by Romeo Crennel, who played this game a little more aggressively than I thought he would as far as the heat:

While I won’t spend too much time lamenting Romeo on a down-to-down basis, I think one area that remains scary is how willing he was to just drop back the defensive backs and linebackers all the way into Siberia on fourth-and-13 for the game:

The Texans were able to get off the field in this game solely because of the negative plays they were able to create. Those plays happened against an immobile quarterback with a bad offensive line. Lonnie Johnson did not play well against Mike Williams. Johnathan Joseph was roasted multiple times. Even Bradley Roby gave up quite a few yards.

This is going to remain a problem unless the Texans make a move.

2 — The tight ends were actually involved

I died on the Jordan Akins hill last season down the stretch, totally perplexed as to how the Texans could not get him involved in the passing game when they were down to DeAndre Hopkins and practice squadders out wide. So it was nice to see the tight ends eat today against a depleted Chargers’ linebacker corps:

Per pro-football-reference, there’ve been only seven times where the Texans have targeted a tight end more than six times in a game since 2017. The major explosion there, Stephen Anderson’s 12-target day, happened in Tom Savage time as the Texans were winding down the 2017 season.

Darren Fells joined the guys at six targets (two other Anderson games, a Ryan Griffin game), adding a touchdown as well. Akins had five targets of his own, including being the recipient of a miracle Deshaun Watson play:

When I talk about setting up the middle of the field with options for Watson on blitzes, I think primarily of Akins and Duke Johnson. They can make things happen after the catch.

3 — D.J. Reader had himself a day

In this, the contract season of all contract seasons, D.J. Reader has been dominant. It was the exterior of the Chargers line that was playing poorly, remember. But it was the interior that got walloped by Reader. Reader finished with 1.5 sacks, pushed the pocket on a few other plays, and who has been a load for defenses all seasons. One of Whitney Mercilus’ sacks last week came only because Reader pushed the pocket back far enough that Mercilus’ bend ran right into Gardner Minshew.

The Texans finished with 12 quarterback hits and nine tackles for loss. Mercilus has obviously been good. Watt had a great game against the Chargers, including a final drive sack. Everyone’s talking about those guys.

I think Reader has been just as good as any of the Texans’ edge rushing stars this year. He looks noticeably quicker. He came to play in New Orleans when Watt was bottled up — nobody else can say that.

It’s nice to not have to confine our talk of how good he is to hushed whispers and run fits. Reader is in line to make himself a big payday in 2020, or, possibly, get traded off the franchise tag.

4 — Blitz pickups, Watson sacks, and the offensive line

Watson took only two sacks and six quarterback hits. It was a big improvement. It also was more about the defense than the offense in my opinion:

Gus Bradley just refused to blitz as much as the situation called for. He definitely upped his blitz rate overall on the season, but it was clear that he was not comfortable bringing the pain. As such, Watson finished the week with an average of 3.02 seconds per throw in the pocket, a top-5 rate through Sunday’s games.

It’s easy to say that the impromptu offensive line move that brought Max Scharping into the starting lineup and moved Tytus Howard over to right tackle worked because, initially, it did work!

I would hold off just a little bit before we get too deep into the weeds on the line playing like this every week. I think it was more about the amount of blitzing. I don’t think they were given much of a task on a down-to-down basis. The amount of three-man rushes they faced was pretty high, and as I remember pointing out against Detroit in the preseason, that doesn’t necessarily correlate when the heat is on.

Scharping did get beat by Joey Bosa on a stunt once. Tytus Howard has a runthrough or two. But, yes, they looked fairly clean.

What was more encouraging to me? This play:

What Watson can control is his ability to play better while blitzed, but sometimes that’s about the playcall giving him easy options. This is exactly what I want to see the Texans set up going forward for Watson when they smell blitz. Get Duke Johnson or Akins into space and let them go to work. It is encouraging to see it on the tape. Now, let’s all say a prayer it doesn’t disappear again next week.

Posted on

Week 3 Preview: Texans @ Chargers

With a win in the bank in a sloggy game against the Jacksonville Jaguars, the Texans travel to Los Angeles to play football in a futbol stadium against the Los Angeles Chargers. This game looked quite intimidating when the schedule came out — the Chargers were coming off a 12-4 season where they finished third in DVOA. It looks a bit less so now, as Los Angeles has lost Derwin James, Russell Okung, and Hunter Henry to injury already. They haven’t played particularly well in their first two games, and also have had major special teams issues.

The line currently stands anywhere from LAC -3 to -4, it’s possible Vegas thinks the Chargers are a better team than that line implies and just gives them no homefield advantage. Which, fair.

The last time these two teams met, the Chargers steamrolled a limp Brock Osweiler team 21-13, allowing almost no offensive output. In 2013, they opened up the season together on Monday Night Football — one of two games the Texans won that year. And in 2010, Seyi Ajirotutu made Kareem Jackson look like a fool. History hurts!

When the Texans have the ball

All DVOA figures courtesy Football Outsiders

The Chargers seem like they should have a threatening defense, but they don’t play that way most of the time. A lot of the reasoning is that, behind defensive coordinator Gus Bradley, the Chargers play an extremely conservative brand of defense. They are primarily a zone defense. More importantly, with James sidelined, they are not quite as versatile as they were last season, when they played more dime than any team in the NFL because James could hack it as a linebacker.

Last year the Chargers blitzed on a league-low 14.3% of passes. (Yes, Texans fans, there is someone more conservative than Romeo Crennel.) They have Joey Bosa and Melvin Ingram — but they ask them to win and live with the results when they don’t. That means that this is a spotlight game for Laremy Tunsil. These are the scenarios the Texans wanted him for. Roderick Johnson is going to need help on Melvin Ingram. Ingram also gets stunted inside often. Tunsil will mostly be engaged with Joey Bosa on passing downs. If the Texans can do what other teams do to J.J. Watt with Ingram and have Tunsil battle Bosa to a standstill, it will make for a very small down payment against the obscene amount of draft capital it cost to bring Tunsil here.

It’s three shadow cornerbacks in three weeks for DeAndre Hopkins, who will match up against Casey Hayward this week. Despite shadowing last year, Hayward was often avoided altogether, with just 58 targets in his direction. It’s hard to call any matchup a worse matchup for Hopkins than Jalen Ramsey, but this is definitely right up there with Ramsey. Expect another stalemate game for Hopkins where he doesn’t blow up for 150 yards but is, obviously, no slouch.

With Trevor Williams on IR and Desmond King playing inside, the Texans will likely want to pick on Brandon Facyson, a 2018 UDFA with zero history of playing well. Facyson just got torched by Kenny Golladay last week for a score of catches and the game-winning touchdown. That means it could be a big game for Will Fuller outside, who will likely draw most of the snaps against Facyson and was one drop from 100 receiving yards last week:

Houston’s running attack has looked pretty good to start the season, and this is a nice spot for them as well. Denzel Perryman has still yet to play for the Chargers coming off offseason surgery, and that means a lot of snaps for Thomas Davis who, as great as he was in his prime, has looked quite washed so far this season.

The Chargers dropped to a 1.9% run defense DVOA in 2018 on runs up the middle — any positive rushing DVOA allowed on runs is real bad. Jerry Tillery may eventually be good, but he’s still learning the ropes and is a rotational guy at best on this line. Brandon Mebane (I can’t believe this guy is still in the NFL) is 35 years old and hasn’t been an impact player since 2016. The Colts and Lions both ran on this team with aplomb. This is not a particularly threatening matchup for the Texans interior line.

The name of the game for the Texans here will be avoiding costly mistakes. The Chargers have some great field-readers in their zone coverage. They have Bosa and Ingram. Those are the only ways at this point they have to make you pay.

When the Chargers have the ball

All DVOA courtesy Football Outsiders

Los Angeles is one of the few teams that still runs a fullback out fairly often. Derek Watt — name rings a bell, but I’m not sure why — has 21 snaps and should see plenty of time in a game where both coaches will be heavy on establishing the run. This’ll be a big game for Brandon Dunn and Angelo Blackson up front, because the Chargers are one of the few teams that’ll ask Houston to get heavy.

Romeo Crennel’s game plan looms large here. I am anticipating that we are going to see less pressure than he brought against Gardner Minshew last week on the idea that Philip Rivers is no rookie. Another reason I expect a heavy dose of zone coverage is that I don’t think the Texans have a linebacker that can check Austin Ekeler one-on-one, and Ekeler is absolutely the kind of back that needs to be covered.

Yeah, they really have not missed Melvin Gordon at all. Good luck on that contract, Melvin.

Even with Henry hurt, both Keenan Allen and Mike Williams are major mismatches for the Houston secondary. Allen lines up in the slot about half the time, and figures to get checked by Bradley Roby after he moved inside to clean up the Aaron Colvin mess. This is a spotlight game for Roby. He doesn’t have to shut Allen down, but he does have to break up a couple of big passes.

Williams on Johnathan Joseph is a physicality mismatch. Williams on Lonnie Johnson is a technique mismatch. Either way, I expect that the Chargers won’t have much problem moving the ball through the air.

The best hope for the Texans will be exploiting a suspect offensive line. Dan Feeney has taken a step forward in the early going this year, and Mike Pouncey is solid. But the Chargers’ tackles are Sam Tevi and Trent Scott with Russell Okung on the non-football injury list. Scott is a second-year UDFA who Sports Info Solution has already charged with three blown blocks in pass protection. Whitney Mercilus’ renaissance season will continue as the Chargers will probably join the Jaguars and Saints in rolling extra linemen at J.J. Watt.

Virgil Green is a total non-factor, so you can expect to see a lot of three wideout sets with Travis Benjamin. I’ve always liked Benjamin, and I see this as kind of a sneaky spot for him. Particularly if he gets matched on Johnson, who I think he can successfully bait.

Special Teams

All DVOA courtesy Football Outsiders

With Michael Badgley sidelined by injury, the Chargers missed two field-goal attempts to the Lions in a game they lost by three points. Badgley was limited in practice on Wednesday, but was upgraded to full on Thursday. Still, a kicker with a groin injury is not a gimme.

The Texans released Trevor Daniel for Bryan Anger. Even I can’t muster an opinion on that.

The read

Forecasting this game is weird because, in a lot of ways, these are the same team.

The Chargers and Texans both have overly conservative coaches, star wideouts, good quarterbacks, offensive lines with clear holes, and defenses that rely on star rushers to make everyone else look better. There are little nitpicks with the comparison here or there — the Chargers have two defensive backs better than what the Texans have, and the Texans have a faster receiving corps and a more dynamic quarterback. But by and large, they feel like very similar style teams.

This is the kind of game where I think game script winds up mattering a lot. 14 points will be a lot. Ultimately, because of how conservative Anthony Lynn is, and how often he is likely to settle for kicking a field goal even with their kicking situation, I’m thinking that will play a big factor in the final score.

I’ve hemmed and hawed on who to pick this game for. Ultimately, if I’m going to pick the Texans to make the playoffs in the preseason, I feel I’ve got to stick with that conviction in a close game. Give me Texans 22, Chargers 20. I don’t feel great about it and you could not get me to gamble on this game under any circumstances.