Are Houston Texans Already on the Clock?

NFL Week 4 - The Houston Texans look like they belong in some upstart minor league. They're coached by a relic from the turn of the 21st century. Their quarterback is an overpromoted clipboard jockey. Their roster is full of veterans with "so that's where he ended up" name recognition. Everything about the Texans screams USFL. For the second year in a row.

The 0-2-1 Texans are now the favorites to end up with the first overall pick in the 2023 draft according to our Football Outsiders playoff odds simulations. Yet they are also just a few plays away from being 3-0. They would have beaten the Chicago Bears in Week 3 if not for a goal-line Davis Mills interception, settling for a 23-yard field goal, and other scattered miscues in a 23-20 loss. They might have beaten the Denver Broncos in Week 2 if they punched in a touchdown from first-and-goal from the 4-yard line. And the Texans could have beaten the Colts a dozen different ways when they held a 20-3 fourth-quarter lead in the season-opener that ended in a tie.

We can pull the ol' "a play here and a play there" routine with most NFL teams right now. The point is not that the Texans are secretly good, simply that they are not as bad as their record, and it's time to come up with an improvement plan to make them better.

That's right folks: TankWatch is back!

TankWatch: Houston Texans

The Texans Story So Far: After appointing Lovie Smith as a placeholder coach for an organization incapable of making up its mind, the Texans successfully sparked an offseason bidding war for Deshaun Watson's services. It was like some minor comic book villain getting Lex Luthor and Brainiac to out-bid each other for a lump of Kryptonite, and it worked: the Texans pried three first-round picks and change from the Cleveland Browns. The team then added a deep and promising draft class headlined by cornerback Derek Stingley to a Nick Caserio-built roster of bargain-bin veterans.

The results so far? A team just good enough to lose.

What's Going Right? A few things:

• The draft class looks great. Safety Jalen Pitre intercepted two passes and recorded a sack against the Bears. Running back Dameon "Three Pitbulls" Pierce has become a fantasy favorite and folk hero with his Beast Mode rushing style. Stingley is having a typical early season for a rookie cornerback: some penalties and mistakes, but plenty of opportunities to flash his ability to stick with top receivers. Guard Kenyon Green is holding his own as a starter.
   
• Caserio's latest batch of stopgap veterans, headlined by Jerry Hughes, is also playing rather well. O.J. Howard caught two touchdown passes in the season-opener. Steven Nelson has been fine opposite Stingley.
   
• Lovie Smith's beard looks like freshly fallen snow on a cedar grove at sunset.
   
• Everything looks professional. The Texans no longer feel like a sidebar project to help team vizier Jack Easterby sell Christian comedy improv videos. That's remarkable after a winter in which Easterby tried his darndest to promote Josh McCown from backup quarterback to head coach.

What's Going Wrong? Of course there's a lot here:

• The run defense is pitiful. The Texans rank 30th in run defensive DVOA. The Bears (admittedly an excellent rushing team) gashed them with runs/scrambles of 52, 41, 29, and 19 yards in Week 3.
   
• The Texans goal-to-go offense ranks 31st in DVOA, ahead of only the Denver Fumbles and Field Goals Club. Davis double-clutched before throwing an interception into the end zone against the Bears. Pierce is a bruiser, but he's also a fumble-prone rookie, and opponents know what's coming when he lines up in an I-formation at the goal line.
   
• Everything is too conservative. Smith kept his safeties deep for the entire Colts comeback, even when Frank Reich countered by running Jonathan Taylor late in the fourth quarter. Pep Hamilton's offense is content to run Pierce and Rex Burkhead into the ground while trying to open up the middle of the field for Mills. There are moments of flair, like a fake punt against the Bears, but the Texans play every week like they are trying not to lose.
   
• Mills is a creaky journeyman veteran disguised as a second-year prospect: a less mistake-prone Mike Glennon. He'll limit anything the Texans try to do offensively.

What Needs to be Done? We're not going to pretend the McNair family will sell the team or Easterby will leave to to start a TikTok ministry. So let's propose some solutions from within the McNair/Easterby Cinematic Universe.

• The Texans must determine what they want to be. The Texans only promoted Smith because they spent so much time flirting with McCown that they were about to get pulled over for driving 120 mph past the Rooney Rule. The Texans will move on from Lovie in the offseason, and that will be an opportunity to finally establish a post-Deshaun/J.J. Watt/Bill O'Brien identity. Will they seek a Mini McVay? Someone from the Andy Reid tree? A college hotshot? A defensive coach? Some of those choices sound sketchy, but failure to choose would be the worst choice of all.
   
• The Texans must plan to draft a quarterback. Giving Mills an extended 2022 audition is fine; there's a slim chance that he will develop into more than a bottom-quartile starter. But with two first-round picks in 2023, and their own pick likely to be high, the Texans must position themselves as major players in the Bryce Young/C.J. Stroud sweepstakes.
   
• The Texans must establish a core. There's not much young talent behind this year's rookies and some stray Nico Collins types. The Texans must spend 2022 developing their Stingley/Pitre/Pierce building blocks while trying to find other players under 24 who can grow alongside them. That may mean phasing out some Hughes/Nelson/Desmond King/Christian Kirksey types as the season wears on. That won't be a popular decision among Caserio (the NFL's greatest secret shopper), Lovie (veterans are safe), or Easterby (he's heard of those guys!), but someone's gotta make the call.
   
• Create a coherent cap plan. The Texans have $49 million in 2023 cap space: not bad, but not outstanding for a last-place team with no A-tier veteran stars. Much of their 2023 cap space is tied up in left tackle Laremy Tunsil ($35 million) and Brandin Cooks ($26.6 million). That's fine—they are two of the Texans' best players, and both could prove invaluable when developing a real quarterback prospect—but all those AAA-affiliate veterans are nickel-and-diming away the Texans' future budget. Caserio should switch philosophies from spackling together the roster with veterans to embracing a youth movement and saving money for future tactical free-agent strikes. Again: an unpopular change in Houston which must occur.

How Bad are the Texans? DVOA ranks them as the second-best team in the AFC South through three games! Of course, even the world's biggest Colts skeptic (me) thinks Matt Ryan and company will figure things out to a degree, and Mike Vrabel could take the field with his arms and legs cut off and win a few Titans games. But the Texans are mediocre by design, and they need to take a long look at the early-season jolt the Jaguars are enjoying. The climb from laughingstock to credibility does not need to be that long. The Texans just need to stop snoozing through gap years.

What's Next for the Texans? They host the Chargers, who are so injury-crippled that Texans +4.5 looks tasty. Then they visit the Jaguars, who may be huffing a little helium right now. For self-esteem purposes, the Texans need to split that series. For draft position purposes? Their lay-low-and-lose-late tactics are working just fine.

A Brief Dive into the Victory Formation

This quirky video from Quirky Research crossed Walkthrough's desk on Wednesday morning. It shows the 1980 Houston Oilers attempting to run out the clock at the end of a 13-10 victory over the Cincinnati Bengals.

On this date in 1980, the Oilers tried to kneel out the clock but didn't quite know what a kneeldown play should look like. pic.twitter.com/bZcNs8J4X7

— Quirky Research (@QuirkyResearch) September 28, 2022

Bum Phillips first orders an awkward-looking handoff to Rob Carpenter from a full-house backfield, then a Ken Stabler flop, then another awkward handoff to Carpenter. Carpenter stands perfectly still after each handoff and waits to be tackled. A fracas erupts after the second handoff, and the offsetting personal fouls actually stop the clock, defeating the whole purpose of the plays.

So why didn't Stabler just kneel?

The quarterback kneel and the "victory formation" were just becoming widely accepted as of 1980. As this Wikipedia entry (our primary source) notes, stadium game clocks were not standardized until 1976; referees kept the time, and coaches only had a rough estimate of exactly how many seconds were left. And the idea that anything which needlessly endangers a quarterback is inherently foolish is also a rather new idea. Teams used quarterback sneaks to kill the clock after the two-minute warning for most of football history. Kneels happened when there were only a few seconds left, but they weren't a popular strategy among rugged old-school coaches.

The Miracle of the Meadowlands changed all of that in November of 1978, less than two years before that Oilers-Bengals game. You probably know the tale: the Giants called a handoff while leading the Eagles 17-12 in the final moments, quarterback Joe Pisarcik botched the exchange with running back Larry Csonka, cornerback Herm Edwards scooped and scored. The Eagles and Giants immediately began tinkering with "victory formations," and those tactics began spreading through all levels of football.

Early victory formations looked like that Oilers full-house backfield in the video. The Eagles, as I recall, liked to line Harold Carmichael up as the deep back. Over the years, the "fullbacks" moved closer to the line of scrimmage, placing them in better position to dive on a loose snap, while the tailback began lining up as more of a deep safety; I remember Wes Hopkins as the tailback in the Eagles victory formation a few times. Placing a safety deep has obvious advantages for a team trying to prevent a scoop-and-score catastrophe, though anyone fast enough to chase down a defender and knock him out of bounds will do.

The victory formation was not immediately adopted everywhere. Quarterbacks also still sometimes flopped like Stabler does in the video instead of kneeling. Tracing the development of the fully codified kneel play is beyond the scope of a Thursday Walkthrough, but Wikipedia claims (without citation) that the kneel was added to the NFL rulebook in 1987. No one really thought much about the kneel after that, give-or-take Greg Schiano. (Please take him.)

Anyway, the silliest thing about those old Oilers plays is Carpenter making no attempt to run, which both: a) opened himself up to wicked hits; and b) signaled "we're just futzing around here," which courted the clock-stopping roughness penalties. Phillips probably wanted to milk that extra second it took for the defenders to reach Carpenter, but calling a sweep and ordering the back to dive before he reached the sideline would have been more effective and less incendiary. But the NFL was full of pretty dumb ideas back then.

It all goes to show you how rapidly football evolves. Every high school team knows how to kneel from the victory formation nowadays. But 40 years ago, Hall of Famers were still expected to flop on the field and hope for the best.

Requiem for Pro Bowl Requiems

Making fun of the Pro Bowl is a tradition almost as old as the Pro Bowl itself.

In fact, it's such a hoary tradition that I have written many "poke fun of the Pro Bowl" articles over the last 15 years or so. Here's one from 2018 on a janked-up webpage; the others are lost to the vagaries of search engines.

Most of the gag columns were prompted by developments like the news that came down from NFL headquarters on Monday: the Pro Bowl is dead, replaced by "The Pro Bowl Games … a multi-day AFC vs. NFC competition" culminating in "an action-packed flag game featuring Pro Bowl players." The Pro Bowl has been on life support for decades, with the NFL adding and removing fantasy drafts and other wrinkles to try to resuscitate it. But they finally pulled the plug.

I won't be poking fun at the Pro Bowl Games concept because, while the flag football game sounds lame (that copywriter really quenched their thirst with the adjective action-packed), I would rather watch Pro Bowlers play cornhole on a random weeknight than watch the Pro Bowl. A quarterback skins game on the links? Sign me up! Let me bet on it! It sounds like fun! And it's not funny to poke fun at fun things.

Major league baseball more or less invented the concept of the professional sports all-star game in 1933. It was a Depression-era gimmick to sell tickets and drum up interest in baseball when folks had little time or money for any pastimes. Baseball's Hall of Fame was concocted at about the same time for about the same reasons. The NFL fiddled with all-star concepts in the late 1930s and early 1940s before concocting the modern Pro Bowl in 1951.

All-star games proved wildly successful for major league baseball and became a tradition. But that tradition comes from the pre-television era, let alone the pre-Internet era. One reason I loved watching baseball's All-Star Game as a child was that it was one of my few chances to see American League stars such as Jim Rice or Rod Carew in a live game. All-star games were also a tool for promoting last-place baseball teams in an era when playoffs as we now know them didn't exist: the Phillies might finish 48 games short of the pennant, but come to Shibe Park to watch All-Star Chuck Klein!

The Pro Bowl never really caught on, for a litany of reasons. My favorite oft-told Pro Bowl tale involves Mike Boryla, the Eagles backup quarterback who became a Pro Bowl hero after the 1975 season. Fran Tarkenton, Roger Staubach, Archie Manning, and Steve Bartkowski all declined invitations due to injuries and "injuries," so Boryla, who was just about to start taking offseason law classes, was pressed into service as Jim Hart's backup and ended up throwing two touchdown passes in the fourth quarter, including one on a play he designed himself. You can read more here.

So yes, the Pro Bowl was a joke nearly fifty years ago, long before cable and satellite packages made the concept of an NFL all-star extravaganza utterly obsolete. Poking fun at it now feels almost cruel.

One reason the Pro Bowl never died was the television ratings: terrible by NFL standards, but still better than anything else on television. Ratings have dropped, but the Pro Bowl isn't disappearing because no one watched, but because the players don't want to do it anymore and the league decided that it's not worth the fight to keep it going.

The Pro Bowl Games will retain the game's vestigial value. Specifically, it will create a reason to announce AFC and NFC rosters, which are essential for contract incentives and journalistically useful when referring to someone as a "three-time Pro Bowl guard." The concept of the Pro Bowl is much more useful than the game ever was. And while fan Pro Bowl balloting doesn't have the cache that baseball All-Star balloting had in yesteryear (voting was another incentive for purchasing a ticket), it's the sort of low-effort fan-activation micro-transaction that feeds the NFL's insatiable machine. To be blunt: "Pro Bowl SNUBS" articles drive a lot of traffic in my industry, folks.

So farewell, Pro Bowl, 1951-2021. You outlived your usefulness by about three generations but also outlasted your hecklers. May you live on as something that honors players without injuring them while appealing to a 21st century audience. And may our grandkids write angry social media posts about Pro Bowl snubs long after anyone has forgotten why the annual awards ceremony and beer-pong tournament is called a "Pro Bowl" in the first place.