I was hoping Caserio would keep Cashman and sign Al Shaair to go with Harris. That would've been an awesome LB corps and Caserio had the cap space to do it. With that said, I can understand why Caserio didn't bring back Cashman considering his injury history.
Payne was trying to explain Tunsils false starts this season. Basically he times his snap move on a razor thin margin, it’s what makes him so good as a pass protecting LT, however he needs the Center to really be on point. So it’s gonna take a few games of familiarity working with Scruggs and the snap. Also Patterson was the back and I think Collin and Tirico brought it up on his FS penalties.
I always struggle with this take. I have the same general opinion myself just from the eyeball test, but I always have this niggling feeling that perhaps I'm not being fair to the OC and that the rate that the Texans run the ball on first downs is nowhere near as frequent as I think in my head. So I did a little checking and tracked the Bears game and here's what I found. Texans had 26 total first downs in the game. Ran the ball a total of 14 times of those 26 first downs (or 54% of the time). Of those 14 times, two of them were Tank Dell on a sweep that I would say is not your standard run type play and I personally have no issue with them running that. It seems more often than not to be pretty successful. In the Bears game, the first sweep saw Tank get 18 yards, the second -5 yards, so a mixed bag. Of the remaining 12 times they ran the ball (one of which was with around 2 minutes left in the game so you knew they were gonna run just to keep the clock going, but I'll include the stats here), they averaged 2.33 yards. 8 of those 12 plays saw us get 1 yard or less. So from that data my conclusion is that they aren't really that predictable on standard run plays on 1st down. It ends up being less than half the time. The real issue (at least with the Bears game) was that during those times they ran, it was almost always terrible, and did end up putting the offense in a 2nd and 9-ish yards to go. That's not the end of the world, but against a good defense it makes a difference. I think I'm good with their frequency of running the ball, they just need to get better at it. If they just increased that average yards by 1 - 1.5 it would probably open the playbook up a bit more on 2nd and 3rd downs.
Bottom line: Texans ran the ball too much on first down. 14/26 (or 12/26) was too often. Gotta play more to their strengths and less to their weaknesses (like running on first down).
But based on that first game against the Colts, would you have still said running the ball was a weakness?
Each game is situational. When Joe Mixon is gashing a helpless D-line, run more. Otherwise, run less. Don't be married to a philosophy when it isn't working. Demeco adapted and destroyed the Bears offense. Bobby did not.
lol jacksonsville: https://www.espn.com/nfl/insider/st...ws-updates-fantasy-tips-predictions-questions
