Posted on

Four Downs: Vikings 31, Texans 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.

***

As I argued towards the end of the preview, I thought that the game script would be wildly important in this one. I wasn’t scared of Minnesota’s passing offense, but the more they were able to run, the more dangerous it would be. The Texans snowballed a 17-3 lead behind, fittingly, a tough, smart, and dependable fumble from special teams sieve DeAndre Carter. He always seems to show up in big moments!

What a fixture. Let’s remember what Bill O’Brien said about him this offseason:

That’s the part of free agency I think is good: handicapping my team because I fell for a waiver-wire kick returner who practices hard.

Anyway, the Texans fell behind 17-3 and that was about the gist of it. The offense mounted a comeback, but they were hardwired to a system of coaching that won’t work, can’t work, and will never work in the NFL in 2020. Even as the Deshaun Watson comeback engines were rebooted away from the structure of O’Brien’s failing offense, O’Brien couldn’t help but make things worse. The run defense only had a prayer if they were put in an advantageous position and instead spent the afternoon helping Dalvin Cook create his NFL 100 highlight reel. This is, to emphasize, against a team that had such a bad COVID-19 scare that they couldn’t even practice for most of the week.

At 0-4, the Texans enter what, for most NFL franchises, would be a soul-searching mode. The team’s offseason has made things worse. The talent level on defense isn’t up to NFL caliber at this point. The offense is basically Deshaun Watson but running Madden 05’s Patriots playbook. Neither the head coach nor general manager have held up their end of the bargain. In this case, the same person has both jobs. The same person has hired two first-time coordinators, one of which got publicly thrown under the bus this week. It’s very hard for an organization to soul-search when there is just one person with any power. The soul-searching is working harder. The soul-searching is grinding tape and probably sacrificing whatever he can to turn this season around according to an outdated set of beliefs.

This is what happens when you give one person too much power.

1) Bill O’Brien was entrusted with Deshaun Watson, and that is where the vitriol comes from

From the very beginning of the game, FOX’s announcing team of Chris Myers, Brock Huard, and Greg Jennings were right up Bill O’Brien’s ass:

Just about every run to nowhere was greeted with outright condescension, barely-disguised loathing.

Now, some people are going to make this about the Texans being disrespected or something like that. I don’t think that’s the case here. What is happening is very simple: Watson is one of the NFL’s most marketable and incredible stars. The offense that O’Brien wants to run is a disservice to his talent. It is turning the golden goose into someone who hands off to David Johnson. The NFL is invested in Watson reaching that peak. If he can’t reach that peak under O’Brien, the NFL is going to clap back as hard as it can.

NFL-wide, it is not a secret that Watson has helped O’Brien’s career rather than the other way around. There’s no confusing what happened in 2017 when Watson’s offense was used to transition him into the pros with what is happening today. One of those offenses was successful. The other one wasn’t. Asked about O’Brien’s offense maybe being a little easy to read today, I think Watson delivered one of the most congenial sidesteps of his career:

The players are trying so hard to make this work. You haven’t seen Watson or J.J. Watt badmouth the coaching staff or undermine them in a material way. But I think the fact that Watson has had to dodge questions about the offense is pretty revealing all on its own.

The NFL wants Watson to be a star. Watson puts in the work to be a star. If Bill O’Brien can’t recognize that he is in the way of that, I hope this broadcast crew on replay was a wake up call to him. He’s not helping any of this happen and his offensive designs are weak. If the Texans went back to Clemson’s offense tomorrow, they will drop 35 on the Jaguars easily. (I’ve seen that defense.)

The ego attachment to what got O’Brien here, rather than what got Watson here, is holding this franchise back. I read your Tweets, you want O’Brien fired. I understand. There’s literally nothing I can do about that but let the chips fall where they may. I don’t think he’s done enough to keep his job and it’s not up to me. Texans ownership is pretty slow. I think he’s got some time to figure this out. I just don’t have any faith he will.

2) Dalvin Cook destroys the Texans run defense

After all the talk all week about how the Texans weren’t a good run defense in the fourth quarter, they set out to make sure that everyone knew the truth: they aren’t a good run defense in any quarter.

Dalvin Cook is a superstar running back having a superstar season. (For an example of a superstar running back not having a superstar season, please see Ezekiel Elliott.) The Texans coming into this game was a unit that had trouble tackling. Dalvin Cook ran right the hell over anybody he wanted. P.J. Hall, Benardrick McKinney, four guys on one play. Whatever weak tackle attempt the Texans brought, Cook wrecked it.

Most concerning of all is that the Vikings had zero problems getting to the edge. Cook had 17 carries outside of the tackle box and those gained 91 yards per Next Gen Stats. Whitney Mercilus and Brennan Scarlett left multiple plays on the field where they just couldn’t get off blocks to set it and spill the run back inside:

A frustrated Watt left pretty much everything unsaid in his press conference except the changes he would make, saying the story of the defense is that they have to stop the run:

As I said last week, there appear to be no easy answers for this. People making money have not been good at holding their gaps or getting the tacklers down. O’Brien has seemed wildly reticent to use the younger players. I don’t think I saw any Jon Greenard in his first active game of the year. I might have seen a few Ross Blacklock plays. The edge can’t hold if Mercilus and Scarlett can’t get off blocks.

The Jaguars are probably a little bit easier of a running attack to play against than Dalvin Cook, but James Robinson is just waiting to add a bunch of Texans to his highlight reel, licking his chops. And why wouldn’t he be? This unit has been awful in every game.

3) One of these teams knows how to run play-action. The other pretends they know.

The most divisive thing I posted all week was about offensive coordinator Tim Kelly’s view of play-action. Essentially, Kelly believes you must Establish The Run.

Gary Kubiak snickered and decided that was an interesting answer, and that he’d just go ahead and show the Texans what it meant to do play-action. Kirk Cousins dominated this game on play-action, I think three of Justin Jefferson’s four completions were on play-action reads, and often they were able to isolate Jefferson on the overmatched Vernon Hargreaves and that was pretty much that:

On the flipside, let’s take a look at the best play-action play in Houston’s playbook, the one where Watson stands there for a million years while nobody is ever open because everybody knows exactly how Houston runs this play.

Kirk Cousins is not as good as Deshaun Watson, but you don’t have to be as good of a dropback passer as Watson is if you are put in an offense that maximizes your strengths. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Vikings ran more play-action passes in this game than they did all season up until this point. It was a major reason why they won. Houston’s play-action passing game is execrable and, considering the talent that Watson has is tailor-made to a good play-action game, absolutely inexcusable.

4) Bill O’Brien’s belief in Houston’s ability to run fails us all again

O’Brien tried very hard to get those 100 yards. He tried extremely hard for David Johnson’s fantasy football owners first, and for his ego second.

The Texans ran the ball nine times before trailing 17-3. That means that with a double-digit lead stacked on them for two quarters and change, the Texans continued to run the ball 15 more times to add to the nothing that already was David Johnson straight up the damn middle for little gain:

While trailing 31-16, O’Brien ran the ball four times with 10:50 to play on a drive, until he got to first-and-20 and couldn’t do it anymore:

Managing a team to try to run for 100 yards when it’s trailing is a bad idea. David Johnson doesn’t need more reps. The team isn’t going to work harder their way into making this a good fit. It’s not a good fit! He’s an outside runner who catches the ball well. If your offense can’t fit what he does well, and you’re not willing to adjust your offense to him, maybe don’t make it a focal point of your offseason to acquire and pay a running back an exorbitant contract when Duke Johnson was already around to fail the O’Brien offense in the exact same ways.

As the Texans hit goal-to-go for the last time in this game, as time began to expire, they ran the ball three straight times with David Johnson and got three yards, including one play where Johnson should have had a one-on-one with a safety to score:

This was a botched sequence. The third play, even though Johnson doesn’t catch it, at least utilizes Deshaun Watson. But you have Watson, one of the best players in the NFL, and you give him one shot to tie the game at the goal line. That’s criminal.

The devotion to this cost the Texans a metric boatload of time. I only measured that one drive at 104 seconds. Other drives would only rack the count up further. It cost the Texans more chances to let Deshaun Watson make a play. It was, in a close loss against a bad secondary that blew several coverages, a liability.

That’s what O’Brien is right now. Call it like it is. He’s a liability.

***

I’m writing this article free of charge — this website is ad-free and non-intrusive. If you enjoy my work and want to encourage me to produce more, please feel free to leave me a PayPal tip.

Posted on

Week 4 Preview: Texans vs. Vikings

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.

***

Saddled with an 0-3 start for the second time in three seasons, the Houston Texans come home to lick their wounds against family. Former Texans head coach Gary Kubiak is Minnesota’s offensive coordinator, and former Texans head coach Dom Capers is a Vikings defensive assistant.

Remembering Some Texans Head Coaches isn’t really a brand that brings a lot to the table, but I suppose it’s better than thinking about the present. Houston’s quarterback is good enough to win games and the coaching isn’t allowing him to do it.

The Vikings, also 0-3, bring a run-heavy style, Dalvin Cook, and Kirk Cousins to the table in a year where they’re still finding their footing on both sides of the ball. That’s not to say the Vikings are pushovers or are in any way an opponent the Texans can look down on, but they’ve had their struggles this year. The Texans have actually never beaten the Vikings — they’ve played only four times since the Texans were founded. The last meetup in 2016 involved the Vikings creating a 24-0 lead with 8:46 left in the second quarter. Brock Osweiler completed 19-of-42 passes.

Houston opened as four-point favorites, yet another true Vegas zone game, and the over/under that opened at 49.5 has been bet up to 53.5 in most places, with a few 54s around. Yes, folks, bettors expect some points in this matchup. Both teams should be desperate — 0-4 teams do not make the playoffs, generally speaking — so this is essentially a playoff game for both of them.

When the Texans have the ball

The tone and tenor on the Texans side of things this week has been that they simply have to be able to run the ball better and, interestingly, that they need to scheme the run better:

I think this is probably a week that the running game gets on track if they actually focus attention on the problem. I don’t think David Johnson is a particularly good fit for the scheme, but as long as there is actually a good-faith effort into making the run game different, they should at least be able to do a little more than they’ve managed the last two weeks.

The Vikings have given up at least 134 rushing yards in each of their three games this season, but they’ve also played the VOA No. 4, No. 20, and No. 21 run offenses. They’ve also been game-scripted in a few of their games this year, trailing by at least 10 points in their first two games by the second quarter. The Vikings were a respectable DVOA rush defense in 2019 so I don’t think this is by any means a cakewalk, but they’re also missing Anthony Barr after he tore his pectoral muscle in Week 2. Special teamer Eric Wilson, who had less than 700 career defensive snaps coming into this year, is suddenly an every-down linebacker. I could easily see it becoming David Johnson with 45 rushing yards instead of 25 because a) I don’t know that the scheme getting changed is necessarily going to be done in the most forward-thinking and b) Johnson hasn’t really shown a lot of ability to break tackles yet. But even that in and of itself is a big step as far as this team’s last two games are concerned.

I have to think the Texans will want to start the game using 12-personnel sets (two tight ends) to try to get third linebacker Hardy Nickerson (not his father) on the field. How they run out of that set (they’ve averaged just 3.0 yards per carry this year to date) will probably determine a lot about how the early game goes. Minnesota has allowed 4.5 yards per carry to 12-personnel sets this year, with a 68% success rate on 34 attempts. That’s a fairly big sample for so early in the season. Todd Davis was also recently signed and could be involved in three-linebacker sets, but that’s still plugging in a street free agent even if I grant that Davis has always seemed pretty good to me.

Minnesota blitzed Ryan Tannehill on 14 of his 38 dropbacks last week and are carrying a 33.3% blitz rate on the season that puts them just out of the top 10. That’s actually much higher than they blitzed in 2019 — 24.8% — but also probably is prone to some game-scripting issues and the fact that Zimmer’s pass rush hasn’t been all that effective. The Vikings have just 23 quarterback pressures on the season per SportsRadar — that’s three more than the Texans have. Let’s not take a Deshaun Watson victory lap just yet because Baltimore hasn’t gotten much pressure in their other two games either, but on paper this doesn’t seem like an especially challenging front for the big Houston weakness so far this year.

The big key for the Texans will be staying on schedule. The Vikings improve a lot when they get to x-and-long. Minnesota’s third-and-long defensive VOA is -109.5%, third-best in the NFL. Their second-and-long defense is -35.4% — seventh-best. Minnesota’s VOA allowed on passes targeting the middle of the field is a league-worst 70.8%, and over the deep middle it’s an astonishing 262.8%. Play-action passing would probably work well against this team as per what the Titans did to them, so maybe Tim Kelly will consider calling it without establishing the run!

Welp, nevermind.

Houston’s wide receivers should be able to win their individual matchups. Minnesota’s two starting wide corners are UDFA Holton Hill and 2020 first-rounder Jeff Gladney, neither of whom have shown a ton in the early going. Mike Hughes would probably start outside but has a neck injury and did not practice on Wednesday or Thursday. There is nothing in this matchup that would scare me off using a Texans receiver in fantasy football. Now, Will Fuller did pop up on the injury report with a hamstring injury on Thursday night … so that’s not great. But Brandin Cooks and Randall Cobb shouldn’t have major road blocks to production in this game barring a real out-of-nowhere performance by someone on the Vikings defense.

When the Vikings have the ball

The thing that initially drew my eyes about this matchup is that the Vikings are the team with the longest average target depth in the NFL right now — 10.4 yards per attempt. Meanwhile, the Texans have not allowed a single completion targeted more than 20 yards downfield on the season and are currently sitting at a -63.3% VOA on deep balls, second-best in the NFL. A classic matchup of something has to give. I do think the Vikings will be able to break that for the Texans — Justin Jefferson looked very impressive last week in demolishing the Titans secondary and Bradley Roby has been good but not exactly flawless this year. Whoever draws Vernon Hargreaves III between Adam Thielen and Jefferson will probably get safety shades on most plays.

The Texans, of course, have had problems dealing with pressure. So have the Vikings. While the Texans rank No. 1 in pressure rate allowed as an offense, the Vikings are No. 2. Minnesota almost cut Riley Reiff before the season and that’s one of the good offensive linemen. Dru Samia at right guard has been a complete dumpster fire by almost any publicly available metric you can look at. Sports Info Solutions has him blowing 8 blocks — 7 of them pass block attempts — in 62 snaps. That’s an obscenely bad 11.5% blown block rate. To elucidate just how bad that is, there were only two NFL linemen all last year with 300 pass protection snaps that even had an 8% blown block rate: J’Marcus Webb and Cam Erving.

Dakota Dozier is no great shakes either. The interior of the line is succeptible to stunts, and what I’m really hoping we see from Anthony Weaver is quite a few snaps with J.J. Watt inside, especially on passing downs. We’ve seen handfuls here or there so far, but this is a spot where the right matchup could really get the Houston pass rush going. Hell, they might even get their first turnover of the season! The Vikings are a horrendous second-and-long or third-and-long offense. They’ve got a -64.6% VOA on second-and-long and a -120.1% VOA on third-and-long. Of course, to get them to ???-and-long, you first have to do a good job on first down. And that’s where the crux of this matchup is really laid out:

The Texans spent a lot of this week fielding questions about their run offense, but their run defense got relegated to “oh, this is only a fourth quarter concern.” Houston still let the Steelers run for 4.6 yards per carry against them last week in the first half for 79 yards and a 59% success rate. They’ve allowed more rushing yards than any other team in the NFL. And they’re going up against an offense run by Dalvin Cook, one of the best backs in the NFL, and a Gary Kubiak run game that is clicking even as the pass isn’t.

https://twitter.com/BaldyNFL/status/1311341469484097541

It’s very easy to say “Kubiak loves to run zone,” but that’s not actually true. The Vikings are pretty varied in their sets. They do power. They do pin/pulls. This team isn’t one-dimensional as a run offense and center Garrett Bradbury has shown a lot of improvement this year from the limited viewings of this offense I’ve had time to watch. They lead the NFL in yards per carry. Backup runner Alexander Mattison is no slouch at all — there’s no real dropoff. This would be a real challenge for any run defense, and the Texans have a gaping wound at linebacker that hasn’t really been solved. Nobody offered any real explanations this week other than saying they needed to play a four-quarter game. I don’t know that they have the personnel on this roster to set the edge properly as they are currently distributing playing time. I will say, after doing this for a year: I don’t like to get too fatalistic on run defense or offense one way or the other. I think that’s a lot easier to catch a good matchup on. But … I don’t think the Vikings run game is a good matchup for the Texans.

Minnesota runs less 11-personnel than most NFL teams, using it only 49% of their offensive snaps so far. They are the NFL’s fourth-most frequent user of 21-personnel (two backs), and have 17 carries with an average of 7.8 yards per carry in it. Meanwhile, in 12-personnel, they’ve run 12 times for merely 5.7 yards per attempt. This team will go big on you and that is a matchup problem for this Texans front sans D.J. Reader.

One last thing I want to focus on is how stagnant the shape of the Minnesota offense is. Kirk Cousins hasn’t actually targeted Houston’s real weakness, the short middle of the field, much this year. The Texans have allowed a 55.3% VOA on passes targeting the short middle. The Vikings really haven’t focused on this area at all as a passing unit. They have just 13 targets to the short middle all season, and eight of the 13 came in absolute garbage time in the first two weeks — fourth quarters and down by at least 17 points. With safety A.J. Moore down and Earl Thomas (checks notes) not a Texan as of the writing of this post, Houston seems likely to have someone inexperienced checking tight ends. This would be an area I would expect teams to exploit, but that just might not be a part of Minnesota’s footprint.

Special teams

In 2019, the Vikings were terrible at punt returns and kick returns, but an average or better unit on just about everything else. In 2020, they’ve been good at returns, but are bad at everything else. Interesting trade.

The Texans got gashed on a few kick returns last week, but the main source of poor special teams here continues to be Kai Fairbairn adding nothing more than the average kicker and Deandre Carter’s self-confidence.

The read

With two conservative coaches and two run defenses that have been bad on paper, I think this is a game that owes a lot to establishing the game script. If either team gets off to a 10-0 lead, I think that’s going to be tough to overcome. I would advise the Texans to receive in the first half for that reason.

I think there are absolutely paths to a Minnesota victory. This is going to be a trench battle with some downfield shots thrown in and two of Houston’s three main corners are Eric Murray and Vernon Hargreaves III. They’ve got a pass rush with some talented players and it’s not like other teams have found it hard to rush Deshaun Watson. If there’s no real change in the passing offense — and we sure didn’t hear much about that — then this team will continue to be vulnerable.

However, I like the Texans to crawl out of the hole on Sunday because I think they’re just a little bit better on pass offense and pass defense than the Vikings. Minnesota will be the first team to hit some shots, but I think the conservative nature of the Houston pass defense will work a lot better against Kirk Cousins than it did against Mssrs Jackson, Mahomes, and Roethlisberger. I will give you a Houston 27, Minnesota 25 prediction. But I want it on the record that if Minnesota wins this game, that total goes well under.

***

I’m writing this article free of charge — this website is ad-free and non-intrusive. If you enjoy my work and want to encourage me to produce more, please feel free to leave me a PayPal tip.

Posted on

A Tale of Two Offensive Lines

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 with any Texans post this year, we can’t avoid talking about what’s happening to the Arizona Cardinals. Don’t worry, not about that.

When Kliff Kingsbury took over the Arizona Cardinals, he brought his version of the Air Raid offense with him. He also brought his version of offensive line play with him: The Air Raid tends to use wide splits.

Arizona’s offensive line last year, on talent, was pretty suspect. D.J. Humphries is a first-rounder, but one that had never really played a great season. Justin Pugh hadn’t been a star since 2016. They lost right tackle Justin Gilbert before the season even started and had to resort to backups. A.Q. Shipley just follows around Bruce Arians until he gets to play. J.R. Sweezy caught a nice contract but hasn’t ever really justified it. 2019’s preseason was full of people wondering aloud if Kyler Murray would get David Carr’d behind that offensive line. Here’s how Football Outsiders’ Ben Muth characterized the line in preparing to write about it last year:

The scheme will be interesting. I watched a good bit of Texas Tech the last few years because their games are typically entertaining, but I don’t have a great feel for what run schemes Kingsbury will bring with him to the NFL. In college, Kingsbury’s offensive lines would take much wider splits than you typically see at the NFL level. I’m not sure if that will come with him (it’s definitely something they’ve experimented with this offseason). Even the snap count (Kingsbury seems to prefer a clapping count as opposed to a verbal one) has been a source of confusion as they’ve been flagged often for quarterback false starts in the preseason.

We’re just about done with Arizona’s preview and we haven’t mentioned a single offensive lineman, but frankly that’s because it’s not a super interesting unit outside of the scheme. D.J. Humphries is a recent first-round pick who has been banged up and ineffective in his first three years in the league. Left guard Justin Pugh was a big free-agent acquisition and he’s a solid player when he’s healthy, but has played in just 15 games over the last two years. At center, A.Q. Shipley is a 33-year-old who has bounced around the NFL a bit and is coming off a season-ending injury last year. The other guard, J.R. Sweezy, is another offseason acquisition who happens to be on his third team in three years. Rounding out the unit is yet another new face who has dealt with recent injury issues in right tackle Marcus Gilbert, who comes over from Pittsburgh.

So I think we’d call that line mediocre — at best — if it was healthy. If you want to look at some line splits for fun, here they are as compared to what the Texans ran last week:

The major difference is more in the stance. Arizona’s guards aren’t in three-point stances. But the Cardinals do look a bit more fanned out — particularly between the center and the right guard.

Now, I can’t find anybody who will write about the Arizona Cardinals line and call it impressive or good. Muth even said in his last column about them that “It was much better than I thought it would be from an offensive line standpoint, but a little more boring than I hoped it could be.” Pro Football Focus named them the 21st-best unit in the league entering this season, centering them mostly on good pass protection. Brandon Thorn of The Athletic and Establish The Run named the Cardinals his 17th-best unit in the league coming into the year, saying this:

Here’s the thing: Arizona’s line might not be talented, but they were wildly effective in 2019 at running the ball. They finished second in the NFL in rushing DVOA. On a team advanced level, they were at 3.3 yards before contact per rush attempt, which led the entire NFL per Sports Radar stats. Through Week 3’s games, the Cardinals are second in the NFL in YBC/rush attempt this year at 3.7. They’re seventh in rushing VOA. (We don’t adjust for defenses early in the season.)

I clipped this from Brandon Thorn’s podcast where he talks to Justin Pugh:

“I think a lot of teams, I almost can guarantee this, almost every team installs the exact same run plays,” Pugh said. “Once you get into the season and see what you do well, it’s up to the coaches to keep calling those things. A lot of times … I’ve seen throughout my career that we try to fit a square peg into a round hole.”

Kingsbury came to the NFL with the Air Raid reputation, but his most successful stuff to date has actually been his work in the run game. (An offense that had almost no use for David Johnson, incidentally.) They make misdirection an art form, utilize the rules of coverage in space and pre-snap motion to dictate gaps, and that is what makes the run game successful. This is something that also has roots in Baltimore, Kansas City, and San Francisco, among other places.

***

Meanwhile, in Houston, the Texans are averaging 1.9 yards before contact per attempt — worse than they did last year — with a line that is completely healthy and supposedly full of young, talented players. Against the Steelers, David Johnson averaged 1.2 yards before contact per attempt. So of course, the offensive line is probably terr–

Well, okay, okay, but that’s just a flash. Just one game, right? I’m sure if I go pull up ESPN’s blocking rankings that the Texans will be terr–

Let’s not get too cute with our offense, Bill O’Brien told the CBS broadcasters. Instead the Texans can let the Pittsburgh Steelers tee off on Johnson runs for the entire half because they’re so predictable that everybody sees it coming:

Let’s run up the middle on 80% of our running plays! Let’s make sure to involve Jordan Akins as an arc blocker even though he can barely handle an outside assignment! Let’s use Brandin Cooks on an end around even though we’ve rarely had him be a decoy!

It’s very easy to pile on Bill O’Brien and Bill O’Brien’s Inevitably Easy First Boss Form, Tim Kelly. There is so much ammunition. I want to take this moment to note that inevitably O’Brien will figure out just enough to make things look better. He’s mentioned multiple times this week that he needs to scheme the run offense better. I promise you that he is going to figure something out for this run offense and it will look better than it did. We will praise it when it happens. And, inevitably, as the new thing gets figured out a little and leads to a few bad plays, he will revert back into the safety of the offense he has trusted all along, forgetting entirely why he had to change off of it in the first place.

I think the most telling thing about O’Brien’s first three weeks running the show this season in Houston was actually how he responded to an Aaron Wilson question about the vision of this offense:

Now some people will watch that clip and tell you he looks defeated. I think, as goes back to the Shredder post, that O’Brien has already won the battles he wanted to win, and now he’s realizing that this is what it was for and can’t believe it. The feisty O’Brien we saw in the first couple years of his tenure that would clapback at Brian T. Smith and tell John McClain about his contract never makes it through a full season with the Texans anymore. This man built up the idea of sole control of the Texans as a panacea to his problems so hard that he forgot that it means he’s running five full-time jobs at once. Fix the run game? How can he do that when he has five tryouts to arrange, COVID-19 protocol from the league to read, and an ownership fee-fees workshop? The Texans ran as many play-action fakes on the idea of Earl Thomas joining the team as they ran in last week’s game.

Ultimately, it’s hard to get away from the fact that the Texans have invested all that they have on this year’s line and still have demonstrably terrible results. This is a table we ran in Football Outsiders Almanac 2020:

Through three weeks, the adjusted sack rate for Watson is 12.4%. While FO no longer has access to Sports Info Solutions entire team-by-team database, we have SportsRadar saying that Watson has been pressured on 37.3% of his dropbacks. Both of those numbers are the worst in the NFL. They have Laremy Tunsil, one of the best tackles in the NFL. They have two young linemen they really like, and a center they paid big money to. And it just doesn’t matter! Not a single bit! Because they have no plan for what happens when a blitz comes.

Now, to be clear since a lot of fans read something like this and their big takeaway is that “rivers thinks o’brien sux, he probably h8s mah team” let me say: I hope I’m wrong and I hope O’Brien prints this post out and reads it out loud during the Super Bowl parade while I have to smile sheepishly at the monitor since I won’t be invited and don’t have a COVID-19 wish anyway. I’ll take it in stride.

But the flashes of O’Brien scooting the offense forward that are good aren’t flashes in good coaches. They’re philosophies. They’re game plans. They’re ideas that settle in and become what the team is about. Other coaches study the best teams in the NFL to see what they want to steal, pick the brains of the people they want to emulate. The Buffalo Bills suddenly have an offense with all the bells and whistles that has Josh Allen playing like a superstar, because they spent all offseason adding new things to the playbook.

Here’s what O’Brien did:

By his own choice, O’Brien has chosen to be the guy that Pugh talked about who tries to fit square pegs into round holes. My charitable read of the situation is that O’Brien loves the idea of being Texans head coach, but has instead created a job persona for himself that is so far removed from actually thinking about ways to coach the team that he doesn’t even know where to begin. And since there are exactly zero football people in the building that aren’t beholden to him for a job at some point, let alone a playcaller on either side of the ball with experience, he’s created a situation that requires a hands-on version of Bill O’Brien for every single face of the organization.

The non-charitable read? Bill O’Brien is bored. He’s got everything he wants. He’s in no danger of being fired. He’s assumed a life where he has to be the singular point of failure because he thought it would make him feel important. Instead, it turns out, everybody dislikes him and everybody’s yelling and fine, fine, he’ll do an RPO play this week just please stop asking questions about trades.

It is very evident that one of these offensive lines is more talented than the other. It’s just not evident that it will ever matter as long as the coaching of it is handled as a chore rather than a calling.

***

I’m writing this article free of charge — this website is ad-free and non-intrusive. If you enjoy my work and want to encourage me to produce more, please feel free to leave me a PayPal tip.

Posted on

Four Downs: Steelers 28, Texans 21

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.

***

You’ve probably gathered that I’m a bit of a King of the Hill fan, as I have a King of the Hill Twitter avatar. It’s one of my favorite shows on television. When thinking about this Texans loss today, here is a scene I came back to:

Hank is asked to a focus group about a new lawn mower, and spends the entire episode pointing out the flaws that are wrong with it. I have spent this entire offseason harping on flaws in the process of creating the 2020 Houston Texans.

Well…

There’s your $12 million running back!
There’s your new playcallers!
There’s your high-flying pass offense!

Three games in against the AFC royalty and the Texans have sputtered wildly in every way to provide a workable infrastructure around winning games with one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL. Some of it is a lack of talent. Some of it is because the coaching staff steadfastly refuses to do what it takes to win games.

The Texans aren’t dead yet. The season isn’t over. There’s a lot of ballgame left. But there is little question that they have gotten worse as everyone else has gotten better this offseason. I know the trade you’re thinking of first, and it was bad — but even beyond that, the team just spent too much of its tough, smart, and dependable hours chasing their player type instead of talent. They don’t have the impact defensive players they need in the front seven right now despite four major contracts handed out to front seven players, including two over the last 12 months! They have invested three firsts, three seconds, and real money to a former second-round pick in Nick Martin and a solid chunk of change to Zach Fulton. They have allowed 33 quarterback hits in three games!

There’s your football czar!

1) The run defense is going to be a problem all season

The Steelers came into the game with the 30th-ranked rushing DVOA in the NFL. They proceeded to gash the Texans to the tune of 38 carries, 169 yards, and 4.4 a tote. I think that even understates how bad things were, because some of the stops the Texans made were third-and-short stacks on the line. The Steelers eventually adjusted off of that and started throwing screens in the second half.

I don’t buy the crap that’s being shoveled about the defense being forced on the field too much. They allowed 4.6 yards per carry in the first half. I was willing to give a pass to these guys against the Ravens, a historically good run offense. I was even willing to give a pass to these guys against a Chiefs team with a historically great quarterback — letting the Chiefs run on you is a choice. Ben Roethlisberger is certainly still a good quarterback, but if you can’t stop the run against the Steelers, let’s call it how it is: It’s a bad run defense.

This is something that, to use an O’Brien-ism, they have to get corrected quickly. The Vikings are coming to town next week for an 0-3 desperation bowl. The Vikings have Dalvin Cook and are here to run the ball. There’s no secret about that. If the Texans can’t stop the run, things will go from dire to … well, I’d say Dead Coach Walking if I seriously believed O’Brien answered to anybody. There’s a very real chance with how this run defense is playing that they lose to the Vikings. I can say in strict confidence that I always expected the Texans to struggle to begin the season against this schedule … but they can’t go 0-4 and have realistic playoff hopes, even in a seven-team playoff system.

Realistically speaking: Nothing would be off the table for me this week. Nobody is sacred on this run defense. If the Texans think someone is underperforming, they need to make a move to fix it. I don’t care what the contract amounts are. I know they won’t bench Zach Cunningham. I know they won’t bench J.J. But other than that, you know, solutions to problems like this require actual change.

2) Tim Kelly and Bill O’Brien stop Deshaun Watson

The Texans entered the third quarter up 21-17, they gave up a field-goal to get to 21-20. The last thing the Texans coaching staff had seen before they began the second half was this surgical drive from Deshaun Watson:

The Texans saw that, and immediately chose to run the ball instead with David Johnson. Johnson, over the course of the second half, would rack up four carries for three yards, all but one of those carries on first down. They helped set the script for the pass offense to not get going. Three three-and-outs on four first half drives, and those three-and-outs did the following: third-and-seven, third-and-four, third-and-26. The third-and-four was greeted by Zach Fulton:

Watson’s only checkdown on this throw was a flat outside route by David Johnson that was deep in the progression.

The other drive, Watson bailed them out of third-and-10 with a hellacious throw on the run out of empty:

He then threw a pick on third-and-15 that was set up by this play call:

It was so predictable that the Texans would try to hunker down and conservaball their lead that I said as much on Twitter. They dominated in the first half out of empty formations, all the offensive success in this game came from spreading out wide and asking the Steelers to defend it. They even got David Johnson involved deep:

So did the Texans operate like the successful thing would work? No! No they did not. They saw what they wanted to see, which was what O’Brien said earlier in the week on his radio show: They have a really good record when they get to 100 yards.

They did not get 100 yards rushing. They didn’t even get close. But they did run the ball 15 times in an attempt to stay balanced against DVOA’s No. 1 run defense. They gained 24 yards on 14 carries. Almost all of them predictable.

Post-game, Deshaun Watson dropped a line about getting more alert and involved with play calling that caught my eye:

That’s … not usually the kind of thing someone says if they are happy with what’s happening. I don’t want to put words in his mouth. I will let the quote stand as it does. But umprompted when talking about the consistency of the unit, that was a moment where we might have seen a little glimpse of frustration.

3) “Let’s not get cute.”

I don’t blame David Johnson for the run game not working. He’s just the latest back to try to confirm the fact that what O’Brien does as a base isn’t very successful. Bill O’Brien has this habit of saying very useful things to the game broadcasters and to absolutely nobody else. Here’s what he told the crew working this game about David Johnson:

This run offense only ever works when it’s “cute,” BOB. You literally have a gift that most playcallers would kill for: a golden goose at quarterback who run defenses have to account for! (I acknowledge that Tim Kelly is the Texans offensive play caller. It doesn’t matter, this is mostly the same stuff BOB has always done, and Kelly is beholden to him.) Almost all the success the Texans have had so far this year in the run game relies on Watson holding defenders and the splits working in their favor, as Matt Weston brought up the other day on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/Matt__Weston/status/1309218840803409921

The problem is, well, even that is better than the alternative of plowing into the line of scrimmage one yard at a time. Whether its basic inside zone or basic outside zone, nothing the Texans offensive line has shown you so far should make you confident in the fact that they are going to grab more than three yards a tote. David Johnson has two broken tackles this year per SIS, a number that is well on par with what we should expect from his last two seasons of runs.

There are many, many playcallers who would generate a dominant short scheme out of the gifts of Watson. That the Texans continue to struggle to do literally anything in the run game, to the point where they are getting blown out of the water by James Conner — by 140 yards! — should embarrass this coaching staff into finding different solutions.

It probably won’t, because hubris has a way of being the defining trait of what I’ve come to expect from the Texans under O’Brien. But it should.

4) When the line works, this offense works

I already posted the Fulton sack, it was one of five that Watson took today. He’s now at 33 quarterback hits on the season. The Texans have just 11 of their own. When the Steelers were kept off-balance, it was mostly because empty formations had Watson only seeing four rushers as would-be-blitzers were forced out wide to keep things honest:

The line has, well, outside of Laremy Tunsil, not been very good this year. I know that there’s a lot of time left on the Tytus Howard and Max Scharping trains so I am not going to destroy them for it, but it is striking to me that this team performed as well as it did the second it simplified everything for its offensive line. Two of the sacks were on Fulton and Howard via a chip from Darren Fells that T.J. Watt talked about here:

A couple of other sacks came as Watson struggled to deal with covered initial reads. Another on this broken play-action pass with zero easy underneath targets:

And, well, I figured empty would be great for the Texans because Watson is good at it. I also figured he’d take some sacks in this game, but I guess where I’m at is that it was so striking how much better the line played out of empty. It goes beyond the sort of typical “they can tee off on him as a pass rusher” thing and plays back into both quarterback comfort and defense comfort. Every defense the Texans have played this year is way too comfortable dealing with what Houston’s coaching staff thinks are the base plays because the base plays don’t tie any hands. Put this Watson-in-empty stuff out there, and all of the sudden you get 21 points in short order.

The scary thing is that I think the empty set could be much, much better than it was in this game. Use David Johnson on drag routes. Bring Johnson back into the formation when you see something exploitable in the front. Let Deshaun Watson run. Like, this was only scratching the surface of what is there.

Maybe that’s the kind of stuff the base offense should be made out of. I guess we’ll never know!

***

I’m writing this article free of charge — this website is ad-free and non-intrusive. If you enjoy my work and want to encourage me to produce more, please feel free to leave me a PayPal tip.

Posted on

Week 3 Preview: Texans @ Steelers

If you actually read this post, and you’re going to respond to me on Twitter about it in good faith, please use the hashtag #ReadThePiece. I know this sounds silly, but it’s an easy way for me to separate responses that I want to honor with a real answer from people who just want to be mad about everything they read online.

***

The Texans look to avoid falling into the same 0-3 hole they fell into in 2018 on Sunday in Pittsburgh. Just in case you’re looking at how that turned out for the 2018 Texans and feeling like that could turn out alright, let me jog your memory real quick: The 2018 Texans played the third-easiest schedule in the NFL. After saving the season in Indianapolis against the Colts, the Texans did not play another top-10 DVOA offense until Week 14, where they lost to the Colts. The list of quarterbacks remaining on the Houston schedule this year is a lot more concerning, and this is probably the toughest the AFC South has looked top-to-bottom since the early-Kubiak era Texans finished 8-8 behind the Manning Colts, the Garrard Jags, and the Vince Young Titans in 2007. There have been good teams since then, but rarely have all the teams in the division looked like game opponents all at once. That could be happening here. (Yes, I know the Jaguars lost to the Dolphins. Can’t ignore those first two games.)

Pittsburgh is coming into this game 2-0 and riding high. They’re third in total DVOA, and Ben Roethlisberger’s return has, so far, worked out without a hitch. There are cryptic shots of him wearing heating packs on his elbow on the sideline, but he’s played all the snaps so far. The only real struggle the Steelers have faced so far has been on the offensive line, where David DeCastro has missed the first two games and right tackle Zach Banner was lot to a season-ending injury in Week 1. DeCastro may or may not return for this game, though, and Banner isn’t a long-entrenched starter.

The brief history of Steelers-Texans football is full of asskickings in favor of the Steelers, but let’s not forget for a moment that Aaron Glenn made Pittsburgh suffer in 2002 and single-handedly won them a game. Houston also beat Pittsburgh in 2011, pre-Matt Schaub injury.

Surprisingly, the Steelers opened at minus-6 but that has been bet down into True Vegas Zone territory as the Steelers are favored by 4 at most places. When you consider that homefield advantage generally is worth three points, they are saying that the Texans should be considered about a point worse than the Steelers. Purely on play so far, I think that’s a stretch. However, I’m finding myself having to stop from getting sucked into a negative vortex with the Texans so far — they did just play the Chiefs and Ravens in back-to-back weeks.

Let’s dig in

When the Texans have the ball

All statistics courtesy Football Outsiders

Pretty much nothing changed last week outside of Will Fuller’s sudden disappearance from the offense under weird hamstring circumstances. Fuller isn’t on the injury report. Most of Fuller’s targets last week were redistributed to Brandin Cooks and Randall Cobb, as the offense continued to be predominantly focused on the middle of the field:

What did not change last week was the offensive strategy, which again appeared to have no answers for blitzers. Deshaun Watson was blitzed 18 times, pressured 10 times, and held to just 4.5 yards per completion. We’ve been through two weeks of hellaciously bad offense. On first downs, the Texans have a -45.5% DVOA, which ranks 30th in the NFL. So before we even get into things like “they can tee off on Watson on third down!” the offense is just not functioning the way it should be.

Well, horrible news about that: Pittsburgh is the NFL defense that sends more blitzers than any other team in the league. They blitz on 61.7% of opponent’s dropbacks, they are second in the league in sacks, and they blitz with impunity via slot corner Mike Hilton, which is an area that gave the Texans a ton of trouble in 2018. As much as Baltimore and Kansas City are solid units in their own right, the Steelers have as much individual secondary and rush talent as anybody in the NFL. Cameron Heyward, T.J. Watt, Minkah Fitzpatrick, Joe Haden, Steven Nelson, Stephon Tuitt, Devin Bush — this defense nearly single-handedly propped a Mason Rudolph disaster into the playoffs last year. Now they’re coming after a quarterback, offensive line, and offensive rhythm that has basically been destroyed via the blitz.

The Steelers thus far have pass-defense funneled to being a team you throw on over the short middle. Through Week 2, they allowed 29 attempts to that area, one behind league leader Chicago, and those attempts had a -17.7% DVOA.

There are two hopes for the Texans offense in this game in my estimation. One of them — the funny one — is that they can run the ball. The Steelers have immovable objects in their 3-4 defense in Tuitt and Heyward next to nose tackle Tyson Alualu. Alualu was the replacement for big Eagles signing Javon Hargrave. It hasn’t seemed to make a lot of difference: The Steelers are No. 1 in rush defense DVOA through two weeks. Alualu is PFF’s No. 1 graded nose tackle(!!) through two weeks. Some of that, to be fair, was generated because the Giants were playing such a dinosaur brand of offense that they gave away a lot of the game in advance. But if the Texans had a problem moving the ball on the Ravens interior, I’m guessing this won’t be a much different adventure unless Alualu gets destroyed.

The other potential plan of attack is to have Watson in empty with two tight ends and try to exploit how the Steelers would have their base defense out on the field. This is something that historically has been exploited by many offenses, perhaps most memorably by Keenan Allen.

A vast majority of Keenan Allen’s catches in that game were on linebackers, and while the Steelers did eventually adjust (and did much better in 2019), I think there are some holes to exploit with emptying out the formation. It helps Watson read things faster, and the Texans are less loathe to mess up a blocking assignment when it involves just five players. Unfortunately, nothing we’ve seen from Tim Kelly’s first two games indicates that he has any more than the occasional O’Brien change-up in him.

The Texans don’t really figure to have big advantages in any individual WR/corner matchups in this game. All three Steelers corners have a recent history of success. Pittsburgh’s biggest allowed plays so far this year have appeared to be coverage busts, including a big one to Noah Fant last week where DC Keith Butler noted that someone did not blitz. Perhaps the biggest advantage would be Jordan Akins on Bush, who has not yet become a plus-plus man coverage linebacker. Even that feels like it’s stretching. I don’t know how the offense we saw the last two weeks is going to produce more than three scoring drives on paper without turnovers or big special teams plays. Change is necessary and if it doesn’t start now, it might be too late.

When the Steelers have the ball

The biggest thing going in Houston’s favor in this game is that they can put all the fancy advanced concepts of football that Baltimore and Kansas City used the last two weeks away. The Steelers have run two RPOs all season, and historically are not a big play-action team. Pittsburgh prefers to win pre-snap in the passing game, and since Bruce Arians left they’ve used a lot of wideout screens, rub plays, and other short-yardage concepts with the occasional heavy-hitter mixed in.

Where I think this is most beneficial for the Texans is … run defense. A major bugaboo for five of the eight quarters the Texans have played in this year, both Zach Cunningham and Benardrick McKinney have shown themselves to be better when there’s less read-and-react and more gap shooting. If DeCastro plays, I am not sure what kind of run offense we’re going to get from the Steelers. He’s their best offensive lineman, and should help boost the effectiveness of the run game in general. At the same time, the entire team struggled blocking the run in 2019 … but that was also because the line was often stacked as teams dared Mason Rudolph or Duck Hodges to beat them deep. I think there’s some potential for the Texans to keep this unit bottled up. James Conner has not been able to replicate his 2018 success and seems to be a bell cow until injured every game. If the Texans allow this outfit to rush for 150 on them, then personnel changes are probably something that needs to be considered in the front seven.

The Texans have been incredible this season on deep passes, allowing a -48.5% DVOA that ranks fourth in the NFL — against Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes, no less. They’ve allowed a league-low eight targets of 15 yards or deeper, and only two of the throws have become first downs. The rate of success is a little fluky to me, but the fact that so few of them have happened feels like an intentionally cultured approach by new defensive coordinator Anthony Weaver.

However, against short passes over the middle — a bugaboo in 2019 as well — the numbers remain scary. 66.8% DVOA allowed on those passes last year was the worst in the NFL. This year’s number is 60.2%, 27th only because it is early. The Texans seem to have spread around the short passing this year, with a 27.9% DVOA against all short passes. They have 38 short passes allowed to the left or right compared to 11 in the middle.

Now, the question sort of becomes: Is this Weaver deep pass protection lean something he strives for as an operating philosophy, or is it a game plan? Because if it’s a game plan, you would think you’d change it up against a Steelers team that is still getting Roethlisberger’s arm strength back up to full power from the offseason injuries/rust and has a heavy focus on short passing.

I don’t have a reliable in-season source for WR screen numbers, but the Texans allowed a 38.0% DVOA against them in 2019 (average -2.0%) and a 24.0% DVOA against them in 2018 (average 9.6%). This could be the first real test of that coverage out wide as that wasn’t a big part of either Baltimore or Kansas City’s game plan. The Steelers are a 71% 11-personnel base team so, despite all the hoopla about the Watt family gathering, don’t expect to see Derek on the field much outside of the red zone.

Ultimately this is a big swing point in this game to me. I think the Texans are too conservative to get wildly game-scripted without turnovers. I’ve been enjoying parts of the Anthony Weaver defense so far and could see it having a game where, without one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL on the other sideline, everything comes together. I could also see a unit that looked clueless against short passes for most of the last two seasons struggle to deal with them. That I am willing to entertain that the game plan might change in a significant and effective way is a vote of confidence for the defensive coordinator. I do not have that same confidence in other coaches on the team. We’ll see if it was misplaced soon.

Special teams

The Steelers had pretty stellar special teams in 2019 except for their punting, which killed them. So it remains in 2020 with Dustin Colquitt taking over after a ton of time in Kansas City. Diontae Johnson is capable of breaking any tackler’s ankles.

Note that winds in Pittsburgh do tend to have a lot of effect on field goals. I remain not very confident about Kai’imi Fairbairn. Also note that kickoff return rating: Someone should probably let BOB binky DeAndre Carter know that it’s okay to kneel.

The read

For the last two days I have been in a cycle where I look at the Vegas line, look at what the Texans appear to be bad at, and look at what the Steelers appear to be good at. I think minus-4 is ridiculous. However, the number scares me. I would not want anything to do with betting this game.

This is a very bad time to run into a team with this much blitz prowess, and I think this is the exact sort of quarterback that gives the Texans fits by picking on the easy stuff he sees.

I will, as always, note that Deshaun Watson magic makes any game winnable. But I think I have more reasons to believe that the Texans are broken than I do to believe they are fixed right now. The Steelers may not be the Ravens or the Chiefs, but they are to me a clear third-best team in the AFC on paper. I will show some confidence in Weaver’s crew to keep this game tight, but I am envisioning a low-offense game from both sides. I will take Pittsburgh 23, Houston 16.

***

I’m writing this article free of charge — this website is ad-free and non-intrusive. If you enjoy my work and want to encourage me to produce more, please feel free to leave me a PayPal tip.

Posted on

Four Downs: Ravens 33, Texans 16

Well, it isn’t necessarily a surprise that the Texans are 0-2. The defending Super Bowl champs and the AFC’s 14-2 No. 1 seed were the first two teams on their schedule this year. The problem with these two losses is that the Texans faded quickly into the distance in both games. Here, a fumble-six by Keke Coutee and a failed aggressive fourth-and-1 go at the Houston 34 set the Ravens up with 14 points. What was once an impressive answer by the Texans had to get it to 10-7 was immediately turned into a two possession game.

While there are parts of this team functioning well, as two units, they just haven’t gelled enough yet. I think the offense is having major identity struggles — which isn’t that out-of-line considering their identity last year was “DeAndre Hopkins is good and here are some run plays for you” — and I think the defense just lacks top-of-the-line talent. But let’s start with the defense because I think that is a more optimistic place to come from today and, well, I need some optimism:

1) Anthony Weaver’s unit provided a game for three quarters

They certainly weren’t helped by the offense much with short fields, but the Texans defense came out with a game plan that seemed to limit Baltimore’s rushing attack. The first half bell rung with the Ravens at 10 carries for 44 yards. There are plays that jump out at you where they attack the read-option quite well:

After the game, John Harbaugh praised Anthony Weaver’s game plan:

And I think they were 90th-percentile successful as far as what I would’ve expected coming into this game holding down Lamar Jackson. They sacked Lamar Jackson four times! He threw for only 204 yards, and seemed a little more uncomfortable in the pocket than usual. He missed Hollywood Brown in the end zone on a target where a better throw absolutely gets it done:

And yeah, they didn’t get a turnover. OK, do you know how hard it is to get a Lamar Jackson turnover? He fumbled nine times last year in about 600 dropbacks and runs. He threw six interceptions all season. The guy is just … amazingly good at football. Turnovers are random to some extent, but Jackson limits them as well as anybody in the game. I don’t think that’s a demerit on the Houston defense. I think they were somewhat lucky on the Brown throw, which Jackson mentioned as a self-mistake twice in his post-game presser, but otherwise they did a hell of a job.

Anyway, I said a lot of nice things so let’s get back on brand. They melted down at the end of the fourth quarter and ended the game with 230 rushing yards allowed.

I am not a football coach, but when I see a line that has eight guys on it, five of them to the left of the center. And the fullback is to the left of the center … I dunno, that might be the side of the ball I want more than six players on. Might be the play! Maybe! Just thinkin here.

The quit was strong after that, and this defense fell apart as the run chewed them up and spat them out.

2) The hot reads and blitz protections continued to be a humongous problem.

Deshaun Watson did not hit every throw tonight, but the degree of difficulty on some of the throws that he was asked to hit was insane. Post-game when asked about not converting on third down he went directly to this throw to Brandin Cooks:

So, okay, it’s a throw we know Watson can make. But at the same time, it has a looping blitzer coming free that forces a step-up. It has a short-area linebacker waiting for that step-up. So as Watson is coming up, his angle is poor. He could have hit the throw, and he did put the blame on himself on that throw. But a perfect strike as a linebacker steps into your lane is a big ask.

Likewise, the offense continually struggled dealing with Baltimore’s pressure looks. Watson was also sacked four times. He was hit eleven times. And some of the sacks he didn’t take looked like this:

The bottom line is that the Ravens teed off on Watson, as we knew they would. Bill O’Brien/Tim Kelly’s only real answer to this kind of pressure-based approach that Watson has struggled with has been to bench guys. Max Scharping, who in my eyes is one of the two best players on the line, got benched after some rough pressures allowed. The Ravens that only pressured Baker Mayfield seven times on their big blitzes got to Watson on … we don’t know the number yet but I’m assuming it’ll be right in line with the Chiefs games.

This is killing the offense. I’m not sure if it’s something that can be audibled out of or what, but the complete lack of a real checkdown game for blitzes is destroying this offense. The offensive line — which, I think if we’re being honest with ourselves, hasn’t played well this year — is put in an awful position. Deshaun is put in an awful position. The receivers are forced to win quickly. The third-and-11 that led directly to the quitting field goal from O’Brien was a play that was almost unbelievable:

So it’s third-and-11, they run a variant of a mesh concept with a lot of intersecting underneath routes. The Ravens not only have a lineman jump it, but they get a rusher completely untouched. So … you’re throwing short on third-and-11 … and Watson STILL gets crushed … and STILL nobody is open. Maddening.

I think this is a situation that calls for a lot of urgency, and it’s about something that we’ll talk about in our third section as well. Other teams have had a full offseason to prepare for this stuff. It’s not that surprising anymore! They are going to come after Deshaun Watson. They are going to ask Bill O’Brien to counter that. Houston just has no game plan for this. I wouldn’t be surprised if it stays a festering wound this offense wears until they come up with real plans. They barely run screens, they barely throw over the middle. It felt like a miracle that Randall Cobb got involved in the third quarter, then he immediately disappeared. They need to put something different on film or this is going to be a “same shit, different day” situation every Sunday. And hey, the Steelers? They’re going to blitz Deshaun. FYI. All that offensive line talent doesn’t mean a lick if Watson is still getting his ass beat every Sunday. You’ve protected nothing.

3) I liked the fourth-and-1 go. I think it showed some awareness. I don’t think O’Brien followed through with what that actually meant.

So in a 3-0 game near the end of the first quarter, the Texans come out on fourth-and-1 at their own 34 and went for it. Let me tell you what I liked about that: It was a) aggressive and b) showed that Bill O’Brien knew his opponent well enough to know that he needed to be aggressive. Game script matters a lot to the Texans the way they are currently set up on offense. It was an acknowledgement that the Texans needed to play this game with some risk.

The play itself, was terrible. It was a variation of the same play they’d just run on third down to set up the fourth down. They got Baltimore to call a timeout, so that was nice. But then they out-thought themselves. Randall Cobb literally said they “might’ve been ready for that one.”

And then after he failed, O’Brien turtled right back up. He may come to the analytical side of fourth downs well as a theory, but as soon as he touches the hot stove and gets burned, O’Brien is back on DoorDash ordering empty field goals. The Texans had a drive cooking in the third quarter, down 13, sputtered out on the aforementioned throw to Cooks, then turtled up so that they could turn a two-score game into … still a two-score game. On a reasonable fourth-and-6.

After going down 30-13, in a game where with Baltimore’s run offense you can’t reasonably expect three possessions, they settled for another field goal. Fourth-and-15 makes that a little more presentable as a casual call, but with 8:13 left in the game, you have to figure there’s little chance you’re seeing the ball two more times. You need points in a hurry. Dial up Ka’imi Fairbairn. The Texans didn’t get the ball back until there was only 3:44 left. Was that their biggest sin? No. The first one was. But it was a mopey mentality.

Bill O’Brien’s Houston tombstone is going to read that he had some genuinely good ideas at times, and when he cared, he was able to scheme it up pretty well too. But the consistency, the logical connection of the steps … they were never there. What it adds up to without that edited and arbited train of thought is that things feel random. Why does Max Scharping get benched but not Zach Fulton? Why does Vernon Hargreaves get benched but not Brandon Dunn? It all begins to feel like management by rolling dice.

4) Speaking of logical connections: Do the Texans have a deep passing offense?

Deshaun Watson threw three balls of a depth of more than 20 yards, completing two of them for 62 yards. The one he missed was the one play I’d been wondering if we’d ever see: David Johnson in man coverage. This is the throw that you have to believe can play if you ever want any chance of seeing a rationale in the Hopkins trade:

Another harried throw, another one just barely missed.

In game one, Watson threw just three balls deep as well. That was with a healthy Will Fuller. Last year, Watson attempted 76 throws of 20 or more yards, an average of a little over five per game since he sat Week 17. In the games that Fuller played last year, they threw 5.36 20-yard throws per game.

Now, is some of this locked behind whatever happened to Fuller’s leg in this game? Yes. Is it about the defenses they’ve faced? Maybe Baltimore, but you shouldn’t be scared of attempting deep balls on Kansas City’s cornerbacks. Is some of it to do with getting new chemistry with receivers? Maybe a bit. But that shouldn’t stop teams from attempting deep balls. The fact of the matter is that all the expensive design of this team with Watson has been aimed at deep balls. Will Fuller is supposed to get them. Brandin Cooks is supposed to get them. Laremy Tunsil is supposed to buy time at them.

The fact that this team has only attempted six of them in two games is a major commentary of where this offense is right now. What this team is supposed to be isn’t happening. This is … well, this is long look in the mirror territory. The Texans need big plays to win games on offense, because they can’t rely on their defense to play as well as it did this weekend. What is stopping this team from hitting deep balls? What about their philosophy is failing? If you took Watson off this team right now, I believe we’d be talking about this offense in the same vein we talk about like, the Jets. There’s not a lot of time to get this corrected, as a certain head coach would say. There’s a lot of improving that needs to get done to get this team back in a playoff driver’s seat. These two losses won’t bury them, but they sure as hell have clarified many issues the team needs to address before they’re ready to be in the same breath as the real contenders of the AFC.

***

I’m writing this article free of charge — this website is ad-free and non-intrusive. If you enjoy my work and want to encourage me to produce more, please feel free to leave me a PayPal tip.

Posted on

Week 2 Preview: Texans vs. Baltimore

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.

***

Well, I’d like to say this gets easier after the Super Bowl champs. But it doesn’t.

The Texans do have three extra days of rest on a Ravens team headed to NRG for the first time in the Lamar Jackson era, but that’s about the only edge I see them having on the Ravens. And last year, with a full bye week at their disposal, they went into M&T Bank Stadium and got cornholed by the Ravens 41-7. Here’s my recap of that game at the time. Here’s what the preview looked like for that game. I’ve done a preview podcast with Ken McKusick if that’s more to your style of previews:

Ken kept trying to bring me back from being too down on the Texans throughout the show, but the truth is that not only is Baltimore the better team, they are a nightmare matchup for this current incarnation of the Texans. If you take out DeAndre Hopkins’ contributions, the Texans’ leading receiver against Baltimore last year was Kenny Stills, who caught four balls for 27 yards. Oh, also, there’s no homefield advantage and everything is quiet, and Lamar Jackson is coming off a three-touchdown depantsing of the Cleveland Browns pass defense. Other than literally everything about this game, the game sets up well for the Texans.

Thus, despite the homefield and the rest, the Ravens come into this game minus-7, and the over/under currently stands at just 50 points. It opened at Ravens minus-6, and the over/under at 54.5. That speaks a lot to how gambling experts expect this game to go: more in favor of Baltimore, more game-scripted away from the Texans.

Well, you’re still here. So let’s talk about it.

When the Texans have the ball

All stats courtesy of Football Outsiders

The Texans were lost as a passing offense in Week 1, with Deshaun Watson and Will Fuller having the only real fungible chemistry and the Chiefs big-blitzing at will to take Watson down. The Chiefs brought the heat on 32.5% of Watson’s passing snaps per SportsRadar/PREF data, and Watson was sacked four times and pressured on an astonishing 37.5% of his dropbacks. Some offensive lines produce those results without costing a metric ton of draft capital, but that’s a little unfair. The real culprit, as always, continues to be the lack of any real easy hot route or passing-game design.

I wrote at length about this last year, but the Texans under O’Brien simply don’t have easy checkdowns for Watson as a default state of the offense. Sometimes they come as first-15 designs off the script, and sometimes they get adjusted to. But generally, the Texans have been content to let this sort of thing happen since 2018. When they play big blitzing teams, it gets Watson killed. That’s why he threw for just 169 yards against the Ravens last year when he was blitzed 18 times, and why he managed only 184 against the Bucs last season when they blitzed him 19 times. The Ravens and Bucs were 1-2 in blitz rate in the regular season last year.

The Ravens actually didn’t have much in the way of success in sacking Baker Mayfield in Week 1, but they definitely impacted him heavily. They sent the heat at Baker on 22 of his 39 dropbacks, and even though Mayfield only was pressured seven times, he panicked and played very poorly.

Throw in constant pressures with bad hot routes and I think Watson will probably take at least three sacks this week, if not more, without major adjustments. The funny thing is it would be incredibly easy to go in and change this stuff — having someone drag across the line of scrimmage is actually wildly simple. But until I see a devotion to this beyond the beginning of the script, I won’t believe it’s happening.

For what it’s worth: I don’t think Watson played poorly at all last week. I think he was hurt by some timely drops, and I don’t think he had the kind of signature Houdini play we all expect from him. But on a dropback-to-dropback basis, he made good throws and was on-point with his reads.

The best way for the Texans to move the ball will probably be between the tackles with what looked like a rejuvenated David Johnson in Week 1. Johnson’s cuts were crisp and he was able to thrive even on plays where the best blocking was not available:

The Ravens beefed up their defensive front this offseason by signing Calais Campbell and Derrick Wolfe, among others. Given the uh, “run blocking prowess” that this line showed through most of Week 1, Johnson is going to have to squeeze through a lot of tight creases to make that impact. But, it’s worth noting the Browns were able to run for five yards a carry, and Baltimore’s run defense was shaky out of the start last year. If there’s ever a time to catch them, it’s probably now.

Brandin Cooks continued to be limited on the injury report with his quad injury. Stills had two of the big drops last week, but I think he’s still probably the best bet to create production of those two. Randall Cobb admitted that he thought he looked like he was playing in a preseason game on tape last week, and I barely even noticed he was on the field throughout my own re-watch of the game. Can you be a decoy slot receiver, or does that just mean you’re occupying space? Baltimore didn’t do much shadow coverage down the stretch last year and projects to just roll out Marlon Humphrey in the slot on Cobb, Marcus Peters on Fuller, and Jimmy Smith on Cooks. Earl Thomas’ release has left a little more hope on deep balls as the main deep safety in Week 1 was former sixth-rounder DeShon Elliott, who has under 500 career defensive snaps.

When the Ravens have the ball

Well, you pray. Anthony Weaver told reporters on Friday that his first instinct was to take care of the running attack first:

The last team that did that got scraped off the turf to the tune of a 146.1% DVOA allowed even if they did keep the run attack handled. But if we’re being honest with ourselves, there’s not anything inherently surprising with getting your ass kicked by Lamar Jackson. All Weaver could focus on in that press conference was the turnovers. Other than that, it’s been the same “keep it simple, let them be aggressive” rah rah stuff the Texans passed around last time they played the Ravens.

Weaver’s defense in the first game was actually fairly aggressive against the Chiefs. They blitzed Mahomes 13 times in 32 dropbacks. They just didn’t generate much in the way of pressure. The major changes from last year schematically had A.J. Moore seeing more of a role as a linebacker on dime downs, J.J. Watt playing well inside and even standing up inside on a few plays, and an emphasis on the overload and amoeba looks on third down. I actually didn’t think the pass defense looked all that bad in Week 1. There were always going to be easy scheme wins on a few plays by Andy Reid, but the Texans bottled up a lot of stuff underneath and kept Tyreek Hill from generating any big plays by shadowing him with Bradley Roby. I don’t think Roby shadows again this week, but if he does, it’s almost certainly on Hollywood Brown.

The run defense, unfortunately, I can’t say the same for. They were handily overmatched by a Chiefs line and run game that hadn’t been this devastating since Jamaal Charles was ruling the roost:

I think Brandon Dunn had a poor first week replacing D.J. Reader at nose, and honestly I wouldn’t say anybody on the run defense had an outright good game in Week 1. Zach Cunningham was guessing wrong gaps all day, quite uncharacteristically so. Benardrick McKinney missed a few tackles. The team rotated through a few guys — P.J. Hall, Charles Omenihu, Ross Blacklock, even a few snaps of Brennan Scarlett — inside as they tried to replace Angelo Blackson on run downs. I think their best hope is that Blacklock is ready to start as soon as possible, and that Hall can eventually spell Dunn in power matchups. Anyway, the Chiefs ran for 166 yards and the Baltimore Ravens have run game conflicts that would make Kansas City’s RPO’s blush. The Texans gave up a cool 70 yards on RPOs last week, with the Chiefs running 14 of them, tied for second-most in the league. The Ravens — this may not surprise you — are going to have some RPO looks.

I think Baltimore has upgraded its secondary receivers around Mark Andrews and Brown this offseason, and in particular Devin Duvernay has a chance to make some noise this season. Miles Boykin has the exact kind of physical style that I think could give the Texans lower-rung corner options some problems. Houston last week benched Lonnie Johnson for the better part of the first half, then puzzlingly O’Brien pointed to the injury report in pressers about that decision. That was neither a great sign for the coaching staff’s confidence in Johnson nor a good look for Johnson’s ability to seize the CB2 role. That said, I don’t know who else would take it. Vernon Hargreaves was beaten whenever thrown at, and John Reid just played his first NFL game. This has all the makings of one of those position groups that looks nice in the offseason when you have the rose-colored glasses on but falls apart the second any real pressure is put on it.

The last time I did one of these previews I thought Lamar Jackson wasn’t a superstar just yet. Well, he definitely is one now. He threw the ball with confidence last week, he took throws that you rarely see attempted. It’s obvious that he has had few physical peers as a running quarterback outside of Michael Vick, but the throws in and of themselves are starting to grow. Don’t buy into the narrative that the Ravens lost in the playoffs because Lamar couldn’t throw — they were aggressive and lost a few too many fourth downs. Jackson is electric and if the Texans try to follow the Browns and shut down the run game by leaving stuff open deep, they will likely also get hot fire rained on them.

Special teams

Both teams played pretty well last week outside of Kai’imi Fairbairn’s missed field goal, a poor stay-away decision by Ravens returner James Proche, and three DeAndre Carter kickoff returns that went nowhere. Justin Tucker is one of the few kickers that I feel like single-handedly sways a matchup. So it goes, in a game where the Texans don’t have a lot of edge in my estimation.

The read

I would be astonished if the Texans won this game. It would buck every trend and gut instinct in my body. I don’t often get to say something like this since Deshaun Watson took over, but it so happens that two of the times are just stacked back-to-back to start the season.

The big question to me isn’t if the Texans can stop the Ravens, because even with the addition of J.J. Watt from last year’s team, I think that unit is overmatched. The question is just how badly the offense will react to the blitzing. If they come out with a brand new game plan, I will be pleasantly surprised and shower them with praise. This does happen from time-to-time.

But with all this talk about simplifying, personal responsibility, and trying to do what they were trained to do in the first place, I will put my chip on the Texans not understanding the normal that they need to create to win this game. Baltimore 32, Houston 14.

***

I’m writing this article free of charge — this website is ad-free and non-intrusive. If you enjoy my work and want to encourage me to produce more, please feel free to leave me a PayPal tip.

Posted on

Getting rid of DeAndre Hopkins was a football decision

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 going to be the last post we write about DeAndre Hopkins on this website. He’s gone. We all know he’s gone. We all have strong feelings about the trade. The only reason I want to talk about DeAndre Hopkins today is that I have to combat a particular strain of argument that I’ve seen pop up lately. I am not shaming the below Tweets or Tweeters, just pointing out that this is a slant I see a lot and that has become prevalent amongst Texans Twitter as they try to grapple with the aftermath of the trade.

I know this is going to feel overly semantical to some of you. I know this post is going to have people upset with me. But I need to combat this talking point that has risen out of DeAndre Hopkins finally getting a big extension last week.

The Texans absolutely could have paid DeAndre Hopkins. The objections to paying him come from a place of abstract theory where the team has decided not to re-do deals with three years left on the contract. Or from a place where the team doesn’t want to tie up all its money in three players long term, which is one that was offered very early in the process by O’Brien.

Now, the numbers that have come in about DeAndre Hopkins’ deal are enormous. He basically got a two-year extension with a bunch of guaranteed money to make him happy, receiving more guaranteed money on the contract than anyone but Julio Jones. His cap hits remain reasonable for 2020 and 2021, and then spike to tough decision territory:

Source: OverTheCap via Joel Corry

If I may, let’s look at the players that the Texans have under contract that matter besides Deshaun Watson and Laremy Tunsil for 2020, 2021, and 2022:

From 2022 on, assuming the cap bounces back from COVID, Deshaun Watson and Laremy Tunsil are going to combine to take up about $61 million of the Texans cap that OTC currently projects at $227 million, or 26%. However, there is really nobody else on the roster who couldn’t be cut at that point — most of the guaranteed money on these other contracts is out at this point. Whitney Mercilus cuts with $11.5 million in cap savings at an advanced age, Nick Martin for $8 million, Brandin Cooks for the full $13 million, Benardrick McKinney for $9.5 million, Randall Cobb for $8.25 million. Even Zach Cunningham, should he age poorly, saves $5.7 million. Along the way, J.J. Watt’s deal runs out, Will Fuller’s deal runs out, David Johnson’s deal runs out.

Had there been no COVID-19 pandemic, there would really have been little in the way of the Texans keeping Hopkins via extension. Even with that temporary short fall, the pain to remedy the fix could have been as easy as “don’t sign Whitney Mercilus.” Don’t get me wrong, I am very happy that Mercilus got paid because I like him the person. But he’s not a star edge rusher, and he was valued like one because he has the personality traits the Texans covet.

So there’s all this kerfluffle about cap hits but the difference between what the Texans are signed on to with Cooks and Cobb and what the Texans would be signed up to with Hopkins is so minimal that you could fill it up with just the cap hit of Brandon Dunn.

Now, there are obviously other factors in play. Hopkins is pretty much uncuttable in 2022 outside of a post-June 1 cut for any real savings, while Cooks and Cobb are not. The Saints have proven again and again that manipulating the salary cap around to keep who you want at a fair price is really not hard: the question is just who do you want?

Listen, the Texans devote a large amount of salary cap space to players who aren’t really all that great. I’ve grown up enough to not see players as numbers on a screen. I enjoy pulling for Darren Fells. He seems like a good guy and I love anyone who enjoys a good bath. But the Texans found him as a veteran free agent who came in to camp for $1.5 million. He did not play beyond that contract in any way besides his playing time. He blew the most blocks in the NFL among tight ends and he is, at best, an adequate receiver who scored a lot of touchdowns on option looks. From a pure salary cap perspective, the money that was spent on him is pointless to me — Jordan Akins catches better, and falling in love with Fells cost the team Jordan Thomas. A.J. McCarron seems to be a favorite of O’Brien and Watson. Awesome! Sign him up as a coach, because as a player, he is not taking you anywhere and on merit probably wouldn’t crack the top 30 backups in the NFL. Coaching staff money won’t count against the cap. You can fit $7.5 million in cap space between these two players, which is enough to massively upgrade a position.

I’m not going to cherry pick up and down the roster because this is not really news — most rosters in the NFL spend a little more than they need to on the fringes for guys that they like. But most NFL teams do not trade a top-five receiver for pennies on the dollar — including for a running back with an exorbitant contract who was essentially a rehab project . Teams in such a situation would generally cut at the fringes rather than let the star go if they liked him. The Steelers ran into a real issue with franchising Bud Dupree this offseason and it cost them a few guys they liked: Javon Hargrave, B.J. Finney, and Anthony Chickillo. But they … like Bud Dupree more.

What we saw from the Texans post-O’Brien takeover was a massive swing of rewards to his tough, smart, and dependable guys. I’m not going to eviscerate Mercilus in this post, I’m not going to sling poo at Nick Martin for getting a contract. Good for those guys. But if you think either of them had as much to do with the Texans winning as Hopkins did over the past two years, you’re living in a fantasy world. Those contracts are the little building blocks that lead to things like “well gee, I dunno if we can keep this top receiver happy.” Those are football decisions. Now, obviously, I hope the football decisions turn out to be good ones! Early returns aren’t great, but there’s a lot of season left. But … I can’t stand by and let this poverty talk take over the timeline. They absolutely could have paid Hopkins.

So, okay, quick Q&A with the imaginary guy in my head I always think reads and complains about my posts:

Q: But Rivers, what if they didn’t want to pay three signing bonuses that big in the span of three months?

A: As I said, don’t sign Martin and Mercilus and it’s right there. Football decision.

Q: Rivers, you don’t know the real relationship between Hopkins and O’Brien! There was no way they were ever reconciling!

A: I think that speaks pretty poorly about the person who is paid to manage personalities and egos!

OK, for real, I understand that Hopkins didn’t practice enough for O’Brien’s good graces. I can understand that Hopkins is not a perfect, flawless angel. I get it. But at the same time, properly valuing what Hopkins brings to the table is priority No. 1 when you are the general manager. I don’t think there’s any way you can exit a view of the 2018-2019 seasons with an objective eye and not note that Hopkins was one of the four best players on the team. A guy like that is someone who gets preferential treatment in today’s NFL. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. If Deshaun Watson wanted to stop practicing on Wednesdays, I bet he’d get his way too.

Q: Why do you hate Bill O’Brien!!!!

A: Not a question, but I don’t hate Bill O’Brien. I hate his decisions. I don’t think his valuation of character over talent is going to end well for the Houston Texans, who I want to succeed.

Q: OK Rivers, but surely having 40% of your cap tied up in three players isn’t ideal!

A: I agree. Show me who else they should have spent the Hopkins money on from a talent standpoint. We’re not living in an ideal fantasy land. Everybody with a new quarterback contract is playing this game. The Chiefs are going to have roughly $100 million tied up between Frank Clark, Tyreek Hill, Chris Jones, and Patrick Mahomes in 2022. The Titans are going to have $78.2 million between Ryan Tannehill, Derrick Henry, Taylor Lewan, and Kevin Byard. Atlanta’s Julio Jones, Matt Ryan, Grady Jarrett and Jake Matthews will hit for over $102 million. No matter who you pair with Watson’s contract, the number is going to look obscene compared to where things were 10 years ago. But that’s hardly a Texans-only phenomenon and it hasn’t kept those teams from keeping their other stars.

Q: But they have to save money for extensions, don’t they?

A: Like I said, the only guys I think are must-keeps in the core at this point are Watson and Tunsil. Frankly, a lot of the players that you would think about extending or keeping are so old that there’s no way you can project they’ll be good in two years. The few young guys who I think are promising enough to really warrant an extension still have a lot of career left to reach the point where they’re extended. Justin Reid is probably the closest, but franchising Reid in 2022 is not going to leave much of a cap hold and safeties aren’t generally expensive. Maybe you think about extending Tytus Howard or Max Scharping, but I don’t think either of them have played so well at this point that it should be in the game plan in pen. This also ignores the fact that there’s still a lot of money to shift around.

Q: But what about free agency?

A: O’Brien’s two best priority free-agent signings are Bradley Roby and Tyrann Mathieu, one-year prove-it deals. Everyone else he has been involved in signing to a real free-agent deal has underwhelmed at best. Zach Fulton, Aaron Colvin, Jeff Allen, Vince Wilfork, Rahim Moore, Brock Osweiler, These are not the kind of guys and contract values good teams get hung up on making sure you can create in the future.

I hope this has left you better prepared to deal with this talking point. It is, to me, not something worth spending time on. The Texans moved on from DeAndre Hopkins because they didn’t want to keep him. Hopefully that plays out better than it did in Week 1. Don’t let the money become the talking point it has been, because it never mattered.

***

I’m writing this article free of charge — this website is ad-free and non-intrusive. If you enjoy my work and want to encourage me to produce more, please feel free to leave me a PayPal tip.

Posted on

Four Downs: Chiefs 34, Texans 20

Another bold first quarter in Kansas City was dashed under an avalanche of Chiefs points as the Texans jumped out to a quick 7-0 lead on the David Johnson rejuvenation machine. The problem was that they forgot to turn it off, and new playcaller Tim Kelly called the game like Johnson was on his fantasy team. They featured David Johnson heavily on all downs, and Duke Johnson’s injury (a knee that O’Brien wouldn’t say much about in the post-game report) shelved a lot of the creative two-back stuff the team had planned.

Unfortunately because we’ve had no build up, this game was a little like taking a drink from a fire hose. Or trying to defend against Patrick Mahomes. We have a lot to cover because there was almost nothing to cover in the build-up. I’m typing this right now because there are going to be players that splashed here or there that aren’t going to get mentioned. I’m sorry. There’s a lot to deal with here!

This was a disappointing game for me on a few levels that we’ll get to, some surprising, some mostly unsurprising at this point. I never thought the Texans were going to win this game, but I did think they had a little bit more than they showed. Ultimately, what I’m saying is that we have to start with the head coach and general manager again, because his fingerprints were heavy on this one:

1. Bill O’Brien’s situational awareness was in midseason form.

There were about 3-4 separate things you could complain about with O’Brien here, but the main flashpoint was not going for it on fourth-and-4 at the 50-yard line in a tie game in the second quarter. O’Brien would reveal in his presser that he was not necessarily aware of the length of that fourth down:

It is, well, it’s about what we’ve come to expect with O’Brien. He ran the hell out of the ball in this one. Down 14-7, with 2:26 to play in the half, they started with a RPO to Darren Fells and two running plays. With 1:26 left, they could grab only enough yards to set up a long field goal, which Kai’mi Fairbairn shanked to the right.

On their initial possession of the third quarter, the Texans ran on five of eight plays, gained 27 yards, punted, and got the ball back with 1:12 left in the third quarter. They somehow ran the clock out on their own chance to win the game.

There’s a lack of urgency that seems tantamount to whatever O’Brien is and does that … well, I’d call it something that needs to be corrected. But let’s be honest: It won’t be. This is who he is. As he said about David Johnson’s contract, it is what it is. The head coach does not believe, as a general rule, that the team should ever play fast. That’s a problem! Not one that a team can’t overcome, but a pretty big one!

2) Deshaun and the disappearing deep ball

Remember the line that all those speedy receivers would help open up things for the Texans? Well, about that…

The offense got off to a great start by almost running more screens for their backs than they had all of last year. But it was mostly about a power run game making big in-roads and some great vision from David Johnson on his early carries:

While Johnson was a bright spot and showed a lot more burst than I personally expected him to have, that was about it for the offense in this one. Some easy drops by Will Fuller and Kenny Stills, and the new guys were complete non-factors. Brandin Cooks had two catches for 20 yards on five targets, and Randall Cobb had two catches for 23 yards — both in garbage time. I don’t think anyone expected the timing to be gangbusters in Week 1, but that was pretty disappointing.

Moreover, it didn’t seem like the Texans really had much in the way of deep balls all game. Watson talked about it at the podium:

Watson was sacked four times and hit in motion by Tyrann Mathieu during his one interception. I don’t have a good hurries source immediately post game but he was hit seven times in 36 dropbacks. This is a team where every member of the offensive line either cost a first- or second-round pick, was signed as a premium free agent, or was given a humongous extension. Against a team that, despite a good finish, was projected as an average defense this year. That is inexcusable.

I’m not going to linger on the lack of DeAndre Hopkins stuff much but it turns out that grabbing four fast receivers together doesn’t mean you just dominate the entire vertical passing game, huh? Who’da thunk?

3) Whither D.J. Reader?

I raised the suspicion in my preview that the Texans would have trouble dealing with the run games without D.J. Reader this season. That turned out to be spot on. With the Texans mostly playing two-deep and giving a lot of extra attention to Tyreek Hill, the Chiefs ran all over them.

Clyde Edwards-Helaire glided past Benardrick McKinney and Justin Reid on the touchdown that turned the game into a 21-7 laugher. Houston had problems at the point of attack all game, and mostly wound up using Charles Omenihu as a third defensive end. As much weight as he gained this offseason, run downs are a new role for him and I’m not completely surprised.

Schematically? I don’t think it was all bad for the Texans. I think there were multiple times where a secondary player was able to scheme their way past a pick and that communication was an upgrade on last year. The tackling was lackluster, but you kind of expect that against this team and with this little of a preseason.

The Chiefs are … well, they’re the Chiefs. They were always going to pants Houston’s pass defense. It’s just not good enough. Bradley Roby’s touchdown allowed to Tyreek Hill was all Hill’s speed. The screens work against every team in the NFL. I think the Texans did a good job of dealing with the dink-and-dunk game plan. I don’t think that Mahomes is ever going to make the mistakes to make that strategy work unless the Houston offense is also pushing the pedal to the floor.

Hey, you know what’s great? Taking this run defense to host Baltimore next week.

4) Playing time thoughts

The lone sack of Patrick Mahomes came from Jacob Martin, beating Mitchell Schwartz on the outside:

The Texans went on to play Martin … 17 snaps. The entire game. Let me point out that per NFL Next Gen Stats, Whitney Mercilus got one pressure the entire game and got pressure on … 3.7% of his snaps. The Texans can love Mercilus the person. I love Mercilus the person. The Texans paid him a ton of money and he’s not as good of a pass rusher as Jacob Martin is. That’s a pretty sad fact! And the contract is going to get Mercilus the lion’s share of the playing time unless they figure out a more-defined role for Martin. That would be priority No. 1 for me if I were defensive coordinator.

Lonnie Johnson played one snap the entire first half, and his role was mostly usurped by fourth-round rookie John Reid. Tough scene for footwork king offszn fiends. I think Johnson is one of the best corners the Texans have in terms of physicality but if they were playing to keep the ball in front of them I can squint and kind of see this as a play to stay disciplined? I don’t think Johnson fans are going to be happy with that one. But … that’s the best I got for you. Reid played 31 snaps, Johnson played 29, and Hargreaves played 43. A.J. Moore played a lot, and Justin Reid also played some man coverage including on the near-touchdown to Damarcus Robinson that he broke up.

The Texans wideouts mostly wound up as a true platoon, although Cooks being limited probably influenced that a bit:

Bless Bill O’Brien’s heart, always finding a way to reward DeAndre Carter.

As I said on Twitter, I don’t believe if you picked the Texans to make the playoffs this season, that this game should hold an inordinate amount of sway on you. This is who O’Brien is. He gets pantsed often by the NFL’s best. It so happens that a lot of the NFL’s best are lined up against him in the first four weeks. So, you know, maybe a little urgency for once, Bill?

***

I’m writing this article free of charge — this website is ad-free and non-intrusive. If you enjoy my work and want to encourage me to produce more, please feel free to leave me a PayPal tip.

Posted on

Week 1 Preview: Texans @ Chiefs

Well, we made it. A terrible, pandemic-ravaged year and an offseason that I would charitably call shaky are left in the past. The schedule has taken the Texans right back to the doorstep of one of their biggest meltdowns of all-time, a 24-0 lead blown to the Chiefs in the AFC Divisional Round at Arrowhead Stadium.

The Chiefs spent the offseason doing just about everything they could to run it back. They re-upped Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and Chris Jones. They were hurt by opt-outs of Damien Williams and Laurent Duvernay-Tardiff in light of COVID-19. But in replacing them with Kelechi Osemele and first-round pick Clyde Edwards-Helaire, I don’t think they’re much worse for the wear. Every defensive player that started in the Super Bowl except Reggie Ragland is back, though Bashaud Breeland will be suspended for the opener.

My previews for last year’s Chiefs-Texans games are here and here. Suffice to say, the Chiefs remain a major Super Bowl contender and this is a tough task for any team. Defending champions receiving their rings in the opener are 4-1 since 2013, with the loss coming in Kansas City’s thrashing of New England in 2017. Joe Flacco’s Ravens and Eli Manning’s Giants did lose consecutive games to lead off the 2012 and 2013 seasons, but, well, they weren’t empirically great champions to begin with.

The line on this game opened at Chiefs -10, but has been bet down to -9. The over/under has gone down by almost two points, from a 56.5 total to a 54.5 total. Brandin Cooks’ health is in jeopardy after he did not practice much leading up to the game. He drew a questionable tag on Wednesday. He’s likely to be on a snap count if he does play, which puts a lot of emphasis on the Texans to keep up their side of the line.

When the Texans have the ball

All stats courtesy of Football Outsiders

There are a number of new factors that the Texans are introducing to this matchup from last year, the first of which is the absence of DeAndre Hopkins. My expectation is that Will Fuller will be a target sponge in this game with Cooks limited. The Chiefs are missing Breeland and Charvarius Ward is probably cornerback No. 1 at this point. Fuller memorably just missed three deep touchdowns against the Chiefs in Week 6:

But because it is extremely early in the season and we have — let’s be honest — no idea if the Texans offense will change much under Tim Kelly’s play calling, I think there are a couple different ways this could play out.

What was successful for the Texans in their Week 6 upset win last year was the TE drag option game. They were able to grind out yards on the ground by the bushel and overcome an early burying.

The Texans were harassed often by the Chiefs in the playoff win — 24-0 sounds like a lot of work put in by the offense. But one of those scores was a special-teams touchdown, special teams recovered a muffed punt inside the KC 10, and the Kenny Stills touchdown was essentially an entirely blown coverage. The Chiefs blitzed 11 times and Deshaun Watson was pressured 16 times. Without the threat of the option game, the Chiefs had a lot easier time dialing in on their blitzes and rushes. The O’Brien offense had a hard time dealing with blitzes because the hot reads were not quick enough. Has Kelly changed that?

Then there’s the addition of David Johnson and how he and Duke Johnson change this offense in Kelly’s eyes. Those two are tied hand-and-hand to me because the easy adjustment to blitzes is “well, are you covering these two guys over the middle?” Randall Cobb will pick up some of the slack too, but I would not rely on him to make the kind of plays the two backs can in space.

The Chiefs largely solved the Texans run game without the read-option, holding the Texans to just 94 rushing yards on 4.4 yards per attempt and, most importantly, bottling up Carlos Hyde to 3.38 yards per attempt on 13 carries. It’s going to be very hard to know what level David Johnson is at coming into this game — we can talk about how good he looks in the pads, but we’re not going to see the speed until game time. I think he’ll probably have a hard time dealing with inside zone on this front seven unless he busts a lot of tackles.

The sticking point there is that the playoff game came with only four of the five starters from last year. Tytus Howard was already out for the season at that point. Howard had a tremendous game against the Chiefs in Week 6 — probably one of his finest of the season. It remains a possibility that the Texans line could take a step forward as a unit. Given how O’Brien coaches games, that would be massive both for this game and for the season.

I have a lot less conviction on these picks early in the season and, given we have no preseason games this year, even less conviction than normal. But I think it’s fair to say that downgrading DeAndre Hopkins to Randall Cobb is a big deal and that the Texans will need to manage the passing game carefully to turn something good out of it.

When the Chiefs have the ball

Well, the Chiefs are a phenomenal test for what Anthony Weaver’s defense will attempt to do. Problem No. 1 is that J.J. Watt, in his regular end role, is matched up against one of the best tackles in the NFL in Mitchell Schwartz. Will Weaver move Watt around? The Kansas City line reads as a lot easier to dent up the middle, where Austin Reiter and Andrew Wylie seem likely to start the season. Watt was held to three quarterback hurries in the divisional round. Whitney Mercilus seems to need easy pickings to work against to play well and Eric Fisher probably doesn’t qualify. If I had to bet on one player getting a sack in this game, it’s Charles Omenihu against the KC interior line. One of the things we remain uncertain about is how much moving around Watt will do and how exotic the blitz schemes will get. Patrick Mahomes is unlikely to get fooled. He took one sacks in just over 70 dropbacks against the Texans last year: The one Omenihu got that opened up the floodgates in Week 6.

Pressure is key in this matchup because the Texans secondary, on paper, is probably worse than it is last year without major jumps from second-year players or rookies. Lonnie Johnson played competently as an outside corner in the Week 6 win, but he had major Travis Kelce responsibilities in the divisional round and was punished. How much has he grown? Without Gareon Conley, my suspicion is that Vernon Hargreaves III will be the third corner. He hasn’t shown many indications of being a successful corner at this point and I would not be surprised if John Reid got some snaps in this game given how quick of a hook O’Brien has had. We could also see Phillip Gaines get involved, though I’d certainly hope not.

Hargreaves did somehow have the best pass coverage numbers per Spotrac tracking data in the divisional round last year. Mahomes was only 3-of-7 for 30 yards targeting him, and almost all of that was in the air.

Edwards-Helaire and Darrell Williams look to be the two backs that will get extended time as Edwards-Helaire tries to shake the idea early that he should be a committee back. The Chiefs run a ton of elaborate screen set ups with pre-snap motion and I think the No. 1 concern in this game for the Texans is dealing with those. The linebackers are going to have to have a lot of awareness to not get picked like Jacob Martin did on Damien Williams’ touchdown in the divisional round:

Beyond that, the question I think has fallen under the radar a bit is how the Texans will deal with the run game now that star nose tackle D.J. Reader is a Cincinnati Bengal. Reader and Watt combined were usually able to hold the fort on first and second down last season. The run defense got gashed a bit without Watt last year, though pretty much any team is going to get gashed by the Ravens. The Titans had no issues and neither did the Colts. The Bucs were held to a -16.8% rush DVOA, but also had an enormous 49-yard carry by Ronald Jones that meant he wound up averaging 5.5 per tote. Brandon Dunn and Watt will be joined by either Omenhiu or Ross Blacklock. I think this is a situation that could develop in a negative way for the Texans, though I’m not sure the Chiefs are necessarily the team that’s going to ball control offense Houston. There just hasn’t been a lot of attention given to the run this offseason, and probably rightfully so given how poor the pass defense was.

I expect the 2020 game plan for dealing with Mahomes to be a lot different from the divisional round one. The Texans played predominantly man coverage in the divisional round and the Chiefs were able to exploit it pretty easily. Most of the trouble they had getting started was about drops by the receiving corps.

I think Weaver is a little too tricky for that. What I don’t know is how much difference it makes. Trying to beat Patrick Mahomes, or any elite quarterback in their prime, is all about trying to stay three steps ahead of their processing. You have to absolutely master the mental game and you have to, if we’re being honest, guess right. A lot. Especially if you don’t have any other advantages, and I don’t know how we should expect the Texans to have real advantages in this matchup. Travis Kelce and Tyreek Hill are terrifying. Sammy Watkins pops up whenever those two are blanketed to remind you he’s real talented.

The Texans remain talent-deficient on this side of the ball barring immediate big-boy games from Martin, Omenihu, and Johnson. They may or may not be better schematically. It’s hard to say incremental improvements will matter in either of their first two games, unfortunately. But hopefully there’ll at least be some good splash plays.

Special teams

Since Brad Seeley took over for the Texans, these two teams have been excellent at special teams. The Texans have added another ace in Michael Thomas this offseason, and the Chiefs haven’t lost anyone of real importance. There were multiple game-changing specials teams plays in the first half of the divisional round, as both sides made impact plays.

I am still a little surprised Kai’mi Fairbairn got a huge extension because the way he is used and the kicks he has missed have led me to believe he’s seen in-house as more of a solid kicker than a great one. He must be the best teammate ever. I think the Texans are behind the Chiefs there, and pretty much even on the other segments of special teams as long as DeAndre Carter doesn’t drop the ball again.

The read

I’ve laid out a number of reasons why I think the Texans could surprise or change the way they do things. I have no idea which of these will become preseason talking points we forget about by October and which of these will become the new normal. I don’t see the Chiefs as a team that needs to change a lot — what they do works and most of the team is in place.

I think there are avenues where the Texans win this game, but it relies on a lot of those changes I’ve discussed earlier hitting at once. They have to call the right game plan, they have to get Watson involved in the run game, they have to have big defensive plays. Ultimately, I’m going to have them cautiously cover the spread because I believe in Watson’s abilities and if they surprise me, well, nothing will really surprise me this year. Chiefs 36, Texans 30.

***

I’m writing this article free of charge — this website is ad-free and non-intrusive. If you enjoy my work and want to encourage me to produce more, please feel free to leave me a PayPal tip.