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TY Hilton, AJ, Donte Moncrief, and the TE's... That's probably one of the top receiving cores in the league now (especially if AJ still has something in the tank). Luck may shatter his fantasy numbers he posted last year. Good for AJ... He finally got himself a quarterback. Wish he would have found a quarterback in a different division though. Lol.
lol missed this gem. We lost AJ. As in We being a fan of the Texans. That's cute. "I'll never cheer for the Texans"
Good for him. I stopped watching the Texans during the 2010-2011 season when it became painfully obvious that nepotism (keeping Kubiak) was more important than winning. But that's a life lesson. I'm glad I learned it in my mid-20's. Hope the Colts go 2-0 against the Texans.
Those aren't really Texans fans...but as we've seen there's a lot of people who pretend to be Texans fans that aren't actually Texans fans.
PFF says 80 catches and 1,000 yards within reach for Andre. https://www.profootballfocus.com/blog/2015/03/11/colts-sign-andre-johnson/ Colts Sign Andre Johnson Akshay Anand | March 11, 2015 Andre JohnsonFor the first time in his career, Andre Johnson isn’t a Texan. However, he’s staying in the AFC South, as the Colts signed him to a three-year deal worth $21 million. From a fantasy standpoint, the immediate implication is that Johnson’s situation improved drastically. While T.Y. Hilton should be the primary target in Indianapolis, the upgrade from Ryan Fitzpatrick and company to Andrew Luck should pay immediate dividends, as Johnson is likely to take Reggie Wayne’s snaps in the overall scheme of things. Editor’s Note: Be sure to sign up for PFF Fantasy Gold and gain access to 100 percent of our rankings, projections and expert advice through the Summer of 2016. Gold is available for only $29.99, or you can get it free by opening an account with DraftKings and depositing at least $10.00. Volume will also come into play for Johnson. During the 2014 regular season, the Colts threw a total of 614 times. By contrast, the Texans threw the ball 455 times over the same span. A declining Reggie Wayne saw 110 targets, while Johnson saw 141. Johnson should see at least the same amount of targets as last year because of the volume differential, and the quality of targets will be higher. Johnson was also a top 20 receiver in terms of yards per pass route run last year, with 1.92 yards per pass route run, and his PFF rating had him near the top third of all wide receivers. Perhaps most importantly, as T.Y. Hilton excelled from the slot position, Johnson can take snaps at the X or the Z position, allowing him to stay on the field in most situations. Johnson is also still a top half guy in terms of run blocking (not that the Colts did much of that). So what are the downsides with Johnson? One, he’s getting older. This isn’t the same guy who had 1,600 yards in 2012. Though he’s still good, he’s no longer in his prime. Two, even more so than last year in Houston, Johnson won’t be the top dog in the pecking order, as Hilton is the Colts’ best receiver, and Donte Moncrief has flashed potential. While Johnson should start off taking No. 2 receiver snaps over Moncrief, you never know what may happen if Moncrief keeps progressing by year end. The Colts have also fielded a bad offensive line for Luck’s career, and if that continues and something unfortunate happens to Luck, Johnson’s value hits the tank. However, that can be said about many receivers, so it’s a very minor nitpick. If Luck throws for 4,700 yards again, Johnson seems like a safe bet for another solid WR3 type season with sneaky, “unsexy” upside to slip into WR2 ranks. Hakeem Nicks is gone, so Luck’s near 600 attemptss in the regular season have to go somewhere. If Johnson sees a tick over 20% of Luck’s production from last year, an 80-catch, 1,000-yard season is within reach. And you’ll take that from your safe, old man receiver all day. Our complete offensive projections will be updated daily during free agency. Click here to view them (free when logged in).
I'm assuming Luck will get a ring before his career is over, regardless. I hope the Texans beat him every time they play him...but if they don't, I will root for him to do well in the playoffs. I watched him take nearly every snap he ever took in high school. His family is great, and he's a great guy. Would be nearly impossible for me to root against him having success, generally.
Exactly the same way I feel. Of course my allegiances lie with the Texans, and I will never actively root for anything that would directly (or indirectly) affect their success. However, if the Colts are in a position to get to the Super Bowl while the Texans have already been eliminated, then that's the team I'm going for now. Andre deserves a ring, and I want to see him get it if the Texans aren't going to win one.
Oddly enough, even though I loved Andre while he was here....I really don't care if he gets a ring or not.
I'm with you. If the Colts are in the playoffs and the Texans aren't, I will ambivalent to their success. If the Texas ARE in, then I'm rooting against Andre.
With Colts, Andre Johnson rediscovering love for the game Spoiler Here was a beginning: A college coach, sitting in the living room of a high school All-American who's slumped in a beanbag chair half-asleep and hardly paying attention. The first time he met Andre Johnson, Chuck Pagano remembers walking out of the house and his boss mumbling, "This guy don't want to go to Miami." No. Not at first. That boss was Butch Jones, head coach of the Hurricanes. Pagano coached the defensive backs. It was 1999. Johnson was the recruit half the country was chasing, the prospect who'd bloomed in The U's backyard — his high school sat six miles from Miami's campus — but resisted, at first, starring for his hometown school. Johnson had his pick of suitors. Miami would wait in line like everybody else. So Pagano worked at it. He got to know Johnson's mom, his uncle, his younger brother. He'd drag his wife to Johnson's high school basketball games and wait patiently outside the locker room afterwards. One night, Johnson strolled out decked head-to-toe in red and gold USC garb. "Andre, this is how you're going to treat me?" Pagano said, smiling. Johnson politely turned his hat around. Then Pagano became part of the family. He convinced the Miami kid to stay home and watched him become the best receiver on the best college football team of the 2000s. Watched him become the No. 3 pick in the NFL Draft, one of the premier wideouts in the game and the best player in Houston Texans history. Watched, too, as Johnson stayed silent and remained selfless — an anomaly amid this me-first receiver generation — while 11 different starting quarterbacks shuffled through town and 12 seasons in Houston produced all of two playoff wins. The coach and the receiver stayed close. The past few years, they'd meet at midfield after games, Pagano now coaching the Colts, Johnson the Texans' veteran whose career was fading fast. They'd hug. "How's your mom?" his old coach would ask. "How's your uncle? How's your brother?" Beneath the pleasantries, Pagano saw it. Years of frustration had worn Johnson's passion thin. That half-asleep kid slumped in the beanbag chair all those years ago? He'd lost his love for the game. His divorce from the Texans in March left him without a football team for the first time since he was six years old. Then Chuck Pagano realized something. He had the chance to recruit Andre Johnson all over again. *** Here was an end: Houston's second-year head coach, Bill O'Brien, summoning the franchise's greatest player into his office, a loyal employee with 12 years of service, 13,597 receiving yards, 64 touchdowns and seven Pro Bowls to his name. He's the only Texan who's lasted through a decade of NFL mediocrity. Andre Johnson couldn't believe what he heard next. O'Brien told him he'd only start certain games next season. That he'd only catch around 40 passes — less than half his career average. Johnson's role, apparently, was shrinking. The receiver shook his head. Then he laughed. It's all he could do. "You should trade me or release me," Johnson told O'Brien. "Because if that's going to be how it is, you're going to have a player who's miserable." He walked out of the office and called his agent. "It's over," he told him. "I'll be playing for someone else next year." The Texans granted his wish a few days later and cut him. For the first time in his career, Johnson was a free agent. He's 33 and will turn 34 in July. "I think they wanted to go in a different direction and just didn't know how to tell me," says Johnson, one of the newest Indianapolis Colts. "Deciding who was going to start six months before the season? I've never heard of that in my life. And I caught 85 balls last year. It didn't add up. Don't tell me what my role is going to be when we haven't even started workouts." It was a painful split and a sigh of relief at the same time. Houston was the only NFL town Johnson had ever known. It had become home. (Construction on his retirement house is wrapping up there this summer.) But it was time. He knew it. The late-career contract squabbles, management's inability to provide him a stable quarterback, his vanishing role under the new coaching staff — each had buried him deeper in frustration. It all led to one unavoidable conclusion. Johnson would not finish his career in Houston. He walked off the field at NRG Stadium after last season's finale — a game in which he caught 10 passes for 134 yards and a touchdown, a vintage Johnson performance — yet nonetheless knew his fate. "The reporters asked me if it was my last time in a Texans uniform, and I told them no," he says now. "But deep down inside I knew it was." Johnson made his way around the locker room that afternoon, pulling aside close friends — running back Arian Foster, receiver DeAndre Hopkins — to break the news. He wouldn't be back. This was goodbye. "They looked at me like I was crazy," Johnson recalls. "They didn't believe me. They're like, 'No, man, you'll be here forever.'" Forever lasted 12 seasons. Those closest to Johnson, including his uncle Andre Melton, who's served as a father figure all his life, knew it was time to go. (Johnson hardly knew his father, LeRoy Richardson, who died in 2002.) "I basically watched him those last few years lose his love and passion for the game," Melton says. "They'd been telling him for years, 'We're going to put the pieces around you, we're going to get it done.' Well it never happened. They didn't give him a quarterback for years." They did. But those quarterbacks were named David Carr and Sage Rosenfels and Matt Schaub and Case Keenum. None stuck. "Everyone saw the frustration the last few years," Johnson admits. "Not only in me, but in my play on the field." "I've been watching him play football since he was six years old," his mom, Karen Johnson, says. "I could see the unhappiness during the games and after the games." The news of his release broke while Johnson was relaxing on the couch in Miami. The phone rang. "What you going to do?" came the caller. It was Frank Gore. The two former Miami teammates and close friends had found themselves stuck in similar predicaments: Both had seen decade-long stays in the only NFL cities they've ever known come to a close. Just as Johnson was exiting Houston, Gore, a five-time Pro Bowl running back, was leaving San Francisco. Both, too, knew their time in the league was running out. Both knew what they wanted in their next team: A chance at a world championship. "What teams are you thinking about?" Johnson asked. "I think we can win the Super Bowl if we go to Indy," Gore said. Johnson smiled. "That's funny you say that," he said. "Because I was thinking the same thing." *** Here was one of the NFL's premier players doing what he often did when the playoffs started: Watching from home. It was Jan. 5, 2014 and Andre Johnson was sitting on the couch, flipping through the channels. The Colts were hosting the Chiefs in a Wild Card matchup. Johnson saw the score — Chiefs 38, Colts 10 in the third quarter — and quickly clicked away. "They were getting blown out," he remembers. "I was like, 'This game's over.'" A half hour later he flipped back to the game. And he saw a quarterback do something he's never seen a quarterback do in his life. Johnson watched Colts QB Andrew Luck hand the football off to Donald Brown; watched Brown fumble; watched the ball ricochet off a lineman into the backfield; watched Luck scoop the football up at the 5-yard line and, in a moment of utter football improvisation, barrel forward into the end zone. Johnson couldn't believe it. He looked up at the score. Luck had pulled the Colts within three. "That's the first time I really started to think, 'Man, this kid is special,'" Johnson recalls. The Colts would triumph 45-44 that day, overcoming the second-largest deficit in NFL playoff history. The memory stayed with Johnson during his free agency process 15 months later. After he exited O'Brien's office that day, knowing it was over in Houston after 12 seasons, Johnson's agent asked him to list the teams he'd want to play for. The list starts with Indianapolis, he said. "Why?" his agent asked. His response consisted of two words: "The quarterback." There was more to it. There was the coach who'd lured him to the University of Miami 16 years prior and stayed close with the family ever since. When Johnson visited the Colts facility in March, he walked into Pagano's office and into a giant bear hug. ("Chuck wasn't going to let him leave," Johnson's mother says.) There was the team that had climbed one round further in the playoffs each of Luck's three seasons. The way Johnson saw it, they were just a few pieces away. He and Gore could be those pieces. And there was the final selling point: The glistening Lombardi Trophy that sat on the desk of owner Jim Irsay when Johnson walked into his office. "I was like, now that's what I'm talking about," Johnson says. "That's the only reason you play this game. That's it. That's what it's all about." He and Gore made the trip together and signed with the Colts hours apart. Two old Miami guys, each with decorated careers in cities they've left behind, each chasing what has eluded them their entire career. Johnson refutes the notion he signed with the Colts — perpetual bullies in the AFC South, a thorn in the side of the Texans since their NFL inception in 2002 — so he could rub his good fortune in Houston's face. "This decision has absolutely nothing to do with the Texans," Johnson says sternly. "This decision has everything to do with winning a Super Bowl." *** Here was a quote that told his whole story: "He's probably the best quarterback I've ever played with," Johnson said of Andrew Luck. This came after three practices together. Johnson's late-career change of address has reinvigorated his passion for the game. His mom hears it in his voice. His uncle sees it in his body language. Pagano senses it on the practice field. For Andre Johnson, football is fun again. "The last few years in Houston, his voice would just be so dry, so quiet," Karen Johnson says of her son. "Now he's so upbeat. He's always smiling. You can just feel the excitement." "It's like when he first came into the league," Melton says. "He loves Andrew, he loves T.Y. (Hilton), he loves (offensive coordinator) Pep Hamilton." Instead of pressing new teammate Coby Fleener for the rights to jersey No. 80, Johnson sought a fresh start. He's going with 81. It marks the year of his birth. He's even changed his shoulder pads. ("I don't want anything I had in Houston," he says.) With the Texans, he stood out from the moment he arrived, the top draft choice charged with pulling an expansion team into relevance. With the Colts, all he wants to do is fit in. And do something he's never done in his career: Win in January. "When you come from Miami, you're used to winning," says Gore, whose locker sits adjacent to his good friend's. "I think it was tough on him in Houston. 'Dre knows, just like I know, that all the stats don't mean nothing if you don't have a shot at that trophy." In the Colts receivers' room Johnson replaces longtime friend and former Miami teammate Reggie Wayne as the veteran presence. Johnson — calm, confident, quiet — has slid seamlessly into his new role, content to let T.Y. yap ("I just stand back and let him talk") and Andrew lead ("He's goofy. Really goofy. But he's smart as hell. He says, 'Do this,' and on the next play I'm wide open.") Pagano says it feels like Johnson's been with the team for five years. And they haven't even started training camp. That kid he met all those years ago, who sat in that beanbag chair half-asleep and hardly paying attention during that recruiting visit? He's found a new home. After Johnson's first workout with the Colts, he fired off a text to his uncle. "I see why they win," he wrote. "I see why they win." It's why he's here.
With Colts, Andre Johnson rediscovering love for the game After Johnson's first workout with the Colts, he fired off a text to his uncle. "I see why they win," he wrote. "I see why they win." It's why he's here. Yeah man they put in the hard work to magically get lucky enough to draft HOF QB's whenever they feel like it.
Interesting read. I see Andre's POV and can't argue against it, but hate that it portrayed him as being miserable the whole time here - we did have two years of some success with him. Love the guy but I hope we help make him feel as sad at the end of the career as the article claims he was while here. Yeah, that ending was a bit dramatic. You mean a team that has had an all-time QB and the best upcoming QB of this generation knows how to win? Shocked.
