I'm off the "FIRE HIM" bandwagon for now. The first 3 wins of this streak seemed like they were in spite of his coaching. The last 2 have been solid well coached and well played wins. Whatever the reasons were for the first 6 games were, I'm good with where things stand right now. If they can maintain relative health the rest of the way, 11 wins isn't impossible. My opinion is that there was equal share of bad coaching and bad play. The rash of penalties and dumb red zone play calling were coaching. Missed assignments and bad decision making were the players. Everything seems to be on the right track...even the OL is playing semi-respectable ball right now. A win in Denver this week going into the bye would be big as we'll have time to get more players back and healthy with the division lead still in hand when it's time to face a decent Redskins team.
Yep, iirc he wouldn't attend the special team meetings and when it was suggested he should he refused and was sent packing.
I agree that adjustments need to be made. But we're in year 5. He doesn't have the QB excuse. He doesn't have the Rick Smith excuse. And the offense is still bottom 10 and he almost got the franchise QB killed because he doesn't know how to develop an OL. Early in his career this might be defensible, but it's year 5 of the same thing. Why should we expect it to change?
We'll just leave it as you conveniently ignored the debut of Watson and gave BOB absolutely zero credit in how the offense did then. The O-line, Watson, and BOB all struggled to start the season, but you like to only blame one person. The offense has been better as of late, both in total production and in red zone execution. Watson has played better, the line has blocked better, the coaches have coached better. Part of the line playing better is due to adjustments made. Part of Watson playing better is his knocking off rustiness and BOB putting him in better situation by avoiding all the things you were clamoring for (not much RPO, more power running schemes, setting up the intermediate and deep routes). Nobody is making excuses... we're just looking at how the season trends and seeing which games this team is in a position to win. We're looking for progress. You're on the witch hunt.... and will skew whatever results or whatever scenario to fit your narrative.
Could that have anything to do with BoB: 1) penciling in a project at 1 OT (Davenport) 2) penciling in a backup at other OT (Henderson) 3) penciling in a rookie at backup OT (Rankins) 4) not playing the starters much at all in the preseason
Ultimately, he should get all the blame for the above. Does he also get the credit when everybody starts playing better too? It’s far easier to assign blame than attribute credit. It just gets tiring to read posts from people who can only look at things from one side.
They're not playing 162 games, for *** sake, you don't get 3 do-overs or extra preseason games if you choose not to take them seriously. That's his biggest fault this year. Neither he nor the coaches nor the players were ready to play Week 1. That's inexcusable.
Most of the league wasn’t ready to play week 1... that’s the NFL nowadays. Could we have been more prepared? Sure, but I think if you judge teams off the first month of the season your going to find that’s not who they really are. I think the only inexcusable thing about this season so far is that we lost to the Giants... that was just flat out bad from the coaches and the players. But at the end of the day I think some people take for granted just how hard it is to win NFL games and always think some other coach is going to come in and have a magic wand that will fix all the problems. But it rarely happens like that. Hell it could be worse... we could be the Browns!
Horsesh!t. Prove me wrong. I doubt that any team in the NFL played fewer preseason 1st team snaps than the Texans did. It was a serious topic of conversation all the way back from training camp through all of the preseason.
No matter how good an NFL team looks in week 1, they're going to have to make adjustments throughout the season to maintain that. Likewise, if a team comes out flat or their gameplan isn't working, they're also going to need to make adjustments. I believe they have made adjustments for the better, and 5 game winning streaks don't grow on trees, regardless of the context. Kubiak's teams also had a similar MO but in reverse... started out seasons strong (when they were at their peak talent 2011-2013), but slowly got exposed as the season went on.
Other than Watson being appropriately held back due to his injury recovery, I'm not sure who else you were wanting to get more reps. Yes, the O-line was a ****-show to start the season. Most patch-work or new O-lines need about 5-7 games before they get some cohesiveness.
That's every year with O'Brien. When will he have the offense ready to play week 1? When will he build an offense that is at least average? I think after 5 years it's fair to want a change
