Texans Training Camp/ Pre-season Thread

TMac'n · Aug 15, 2018

Nimo said: ↑

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So Ward is still at practice, but O'Brien sends Hopkins out for the fight? What kinda message is that?

Nimo · Aug 15, 2018

Nimo · Aug 15, 2018

gucci888 said: ↑

Get the feeling this is just BoB not risking any further escalation with Hopkins. Keeping him in practice just helps the 49ers DBs IMO.
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I guess too that he had a policy prior that if you fight you're done with practice. And he couldn't break the rule even if it was his star receiver.

Fantasma Negro · Aug 15, 2018

conquistador#11 said: ↑

The new Houston millennial media acting like these team practices against other teams is something new b.o.b brought over. I'm old enough to remember 77 yr old Jerry rice burning demarcus faggins In these style practices.
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Good lord, Petey Faggins smh, this team has come a long way

coachbadlee · Aug 15, 2018

TMac'n said: ↑

So Ward is still at practice, but O'Brien sends Hopkins out for the fight? What kinda message is that?
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Keeping his star receiver out of harms way?

zeeshan2 · Aug 15, 2018

Fulgore · Aug 15, 2018

Hop don’t let that damn scrub get in your head. Cmon man

Mr.Scarface · Aug 15, 2018

HstnSprtsFan101 said: ↑

I like it. If there’s any doubt at all about Fairbairn we need to bring in competition.
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Um....it is because he has a minor injury.

zeeshan2 · Aug 15, 2018

1. DeAndre Hopkins and 49ers DB Jimmie Ward fought after the first rep of joint practices. Ward jammed Hopkins hard and went under the chin and dislodged Hopkins’ helmet. After the rep was over Ward swatted at the ball eliciting a shove from Hopkins. The Texans wideout shoved Ward in the face and the fracas was on. Ward took some swings at Hopkins and the two tangled and went to the ground. Hopkins ended up on the bottom of the pile with Ward on top of him and coaches and teammates pulling the two apart. Both were sent off, though Ward returned to the sidelines. Oh, and Hopkins caught the ball.

2. "Ridiculous. We gotta move on from that quick" was Bill O’Brien’s response. 49ers head man Kyle Shanahan lamented the missed opportunity for those two in practice. Tuesday O’Brien said anything eliciting an ejection in the game would see a player leave practice. In a game, both would have been ejected.

3. The defenses were the big winners today with the offenses having minimal consistent success. Not to say there wasn’t any, Jimmy Garoppolo and Deshaun Watson both threw some beautiful passes today, but chalk up a win overall for both defenses.

4. The Texans had no luck running the football today against the 49ers. The team lacked consistent gains on the ground and often found themselves with the line of scrimmage as their best result. The offensive line struggled to protect Watson a few times in the middle of practice but picked it up near the end where Watson was able to stand and deliver a few nice passes.

5. J.J. Watt is no stranger to being the driving force behind a "welcome to the NFL" moment and today he was at it again. 49ers rookie tackle Mike McGlinchey had very limited success against Watt. He was mauled in a one-on-one drill by Watt and in some team reps Watt flew by the rookie for what would have been the end of Garoppolo. Watt has looked fantastic this preseason and much closer to pre-back Watt than last year’s version.

6. Angelo Blackson again had a solid day as he works into the defensive line rotation. He won a few reps in line drills and in some team drills flashed penetration which would have ended with a sack in a game. He even batted a ball down as well. He has a great shot to make this team and could easily be one of the backup defensive linemen for the Texans.

7. With no Jadevon Clowney or Whitney Mercilus in team drills, the Texans have to be thrilled with that their pass rush looked like today. Watt was a monster as usual. Brennan Scarlett is making the most of his opportunities and is annoying offensive linemen. Rookie Duke Ejiofor flashed a nice pass rush move or two today as well. It may not be until the season debut against the Patriots, but watching this Texans pass rush is going to be fun.

8. The Texans wide receivers had one heck of a day in drills and even in some of the team portion. Even without Hopkins, they should count today as a big win for them over the 49ers secondary. Almost every wideout had a play or two to be proud of in drills.

9. The Texans secondary can chalk up a win as well for today. Though they had a few breakdowns in the latter portion, they did well against a fairly talented 49ers group. Marquise Goodwin is a freak for the 49ers and seems like he will end up the No. 1 target there. He didn’t have a lot of success today though. Kurtis Drummond had a pick-six for the team and Tyrann Mathieu took a Garoppolo pass back to the house in a team session.

10. Sammie Coates and Braxton Miller didn’t do anything to separate themselves from each other in their quest to round out the pass catchers. Miller shook loose on more than a few 49ers and left them looking for their jocks. Coates ran right past a DB catching a beauty of a pass from Brandon Weeden for a touchdown in a one-on-one drill. Bruce Ellington had a shake on a 49ers defender than nearly broke his ankle as Ellington ran free. A good day for the pass catchers on the Texans.
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ipaman · Aug 15, 2018

TMac'n said: ↑

So Ward is still at practice, but O'Brien sends Hopkins out for the fight? What kinda message is that?
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Discipline

Juxtaposed Jolt · Aug 15, 2018

Glad Watt is returning to form.

zeeshan2 · Aug 15, 2018

Nimo · Aug 16, 2018

zeeshan2 said: ↑

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HstnSprtsFan101 · Aug 16, 2018

Mr.Scarface said: ↑

Um....it is because he has a minor injury.
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We’ll see.

zeeshan2 · Aug 16, 2018

red5rocket · Aug 16, 2018

zeeshan2 said: ↑

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Man I love Mathieu

donkeypunch · Aug 16, 2018

red5rocket said: ↑

Man I love Mathieu
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If hes 75% as good as hes looked in TC, Gaine needs to extend him already. It feels so good to finally have a lock down safety as a Texans fan. Plus his leadership is uncanny.

bj83gc · Aug 16, 2018

Man i really hope Mathieu works out. He seems to be everything we need in a leader in the secondary, and is even helping Watson with recognizing coverage.

donkeypunch · Aug 16, 2018

Sexy AF.

zeeshan2 · Aug 16, 2018

The Leadership Is in Place, the Roster Is Strong, and Expectations Are High in Houston

HOUSTON — Back in 2013, I ran into then-Dolphins assistant GM Brian Gaine on the Gillette Stadium field a few hours before Miami played New England. Gaine asked me, “What do you think of Bill O’Brien?”

It wasn’t a haphazard question. Gaine had been on a couple GM interviews, and was working to prepare himself for more. That meant researching potential head-coaching candidates he felt he’d pair well with. And that background work led right him to the former Patriots offensive coordinator, who was at Penn State at the time.

“What I appreciated about him was his leadership skills, his ability to communicate clearly with players. He won, he knew what success looked like … It was his feel and understanding of how to build a program,” Gaine says now. “You’d seen him create great game plans in the [AFC East] and at Penn State. He was well-respected amongst his peers but also a great person who had a great passion for the game.

“What he did at Penn State was phenomenal under the circumstances. And it was [because of] a global viewpoint he had on what a winning program should look like.”

It hasn’t exactly been a straight line from then to now. But here they are, a half-decade later, Gaine as a first-year GM with the coach he was most curious about—but didn’t even know—all those years ago.

We’ll get to your mail in a minute, but I thought a good place to start this week was with the Texans’ re-start after a tumultuous 2017 that saw Deshaun Watson flash enormous potential, then go down for the year (with J.J. Watt and Whitney Mercilus joining him on IR), franchise fixture Duane Brown traded, the locker room tested during the anthem controversy and the team’s football operation reconfigured. What’s left in the aftermath is one of the NFL’s most intriguing outfits going into ’18.

With the caveat that everyone’s undefeated on Aug. 13, the Texans are humming now. There’s a new weight room (or sports performance center, as they’re calling it), a new cafeteria (that’s the sports performance café), a new strength chief, a new nutritionist, a new team meeting room, redecorated walls reflecting players’ investment in the organization, and a reconfigured scouting system and staff.

But what’s really interesting here is how the existing foundation will fit into all that. Watson, Watt, Mercilus, DeAndre Hopkins, et al are mainstays, and O’Brien is now five years in. Gaine worked in the team’s personnel department from 2014-16, a three-year span during which Houston won a pair of division titles. That is to say, this one isn’t coming from the ground up.

Along with the talent in-house, O’Brien and Gaine knew there’d be a common belief system to build off of.

“Alignment’s big,” O’Brien says. “Brian having worked for coach [Bill] Parcells, and myself having worked for Coach [Bill] Belichick, there are a lot of differences obviously, but there’s also some things that we both believe in—the draft, what type of players we want, what type of culture we want. We’re both from the Northeast, we grew up in the business in a similar way.”

So what are they looking for? It’s straight out of the Belichick/Parcells playbook. Gaine worked to tighten height/weight/speed parameters for each position—Parcells used to say, “If you keep making exceptions, you’ll wind up with a team full of them”—and the two emphasized a personality profile they wanted in players. That applied, as O’Brien explained it to me, in the reworking of the offensive line. Gaine knew Seantrel Henderson from his year in Bufffalo, and his assessment matched what former Bills coach/O’Brien buddy Doug Marrone had said to O’Brien in the past. Both guys liked the center/guard versatility of Chiefs free agent Zach Fulton. And they were in agreement too, watching ex-Saint Senio Kelemete.

“We have our disagreements, which is healthy, “ O’Brien says. “But then we go and watch the film together and come to a conclusion, and I think that’s important. … Part of it’s our friendship—we’re very good friends, our families know each other, it’s easy. It’s very comfortable for me to go to his office, knock on the door and say, ‘Hey, let’s talk about this.’ And the same goes for him.”

The results are already apparent to the players, especially when it comes to the most obvious intangible trait that O’Brien and Gaine are looking for.

“You bring in a guy like Tyrann [Mathieu], that’s obviously a big move for us. You have a guy like Deshaun. I don’t think we’ve seen the extent of what it’s going to be, but you can start to see it,” Watt told me. “I think the No. 1 thing they want is guys who love football. That’s probably the biggest thing you can see, they want guys who want to be on the field, want to play the game, want to work in practice and get better. That’s how you’re going to win.”

Whether this will take the Texans to another level of success is yet to be seen. What’s already clear, though, is how the organization is moving forward in lockstep with a pretty defined model in mind. Gaine points to watching ex-Jets personnel chief Dick Haley and Parcells work in tandem as a young scout in the ’90s, and believes that is his ideal for the relationship: The personnel people getting players specifically for the coaches, rather than just throwing talent at them. And O’Brien saw Scott Pioli and Nick Caserio carrying out their roster building similarly for Belichick from 2007-11.

Their early moves have produced a team that’s bigger, longer and stronger based on, as Gaine puts it, “how we wanted our team to physically look,” with more athleticism at the skill spots. And again, while it’s hard to say where all of this goes, it’s easy to see how healthy this place has become. It’s not hard to see why, either.
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