The 12-4 season wasn't a fluke, not when your RB is chewing up yardage like Godzilla scarfing down minivans. Fool's Gold is a more accurate description. But 2-14 wasn't a fluke, either, both Kubiak and Schaub were exposed, and Uncle Bob had no choice but to dump them. It's too bad that it took the Texans being the laughing stock of the league to finally restore accountability, but it was a price worth paying.
Any player on a football team will lose heart if his QB keeps throwing pick 6's. The team quit, but Schaub and Kubiak made them quit. All that being said, it was a 10-win team that quit, so we were lucky in the sense that we got out from under a situation where our ceiling was gonna prevent us from ever winning anything.
Both seasons were flukes. 12-4 featured too many horrible losses vs great wins. Best victory was @DEN. BAL was shell shocked after Ray went down and CHI didn't have Cutler for the entire 2nd half. We were only +85 in point diff. NE had the same record and was +225. GB was 11-5 yet had a +97. SF and SEA had worse records than us and went +124 and 167. Having said that, 2-14 was the bigger fluke. No way should that team have only won 2 games (unless their QB was a pick-6 machine). At worst they were a 7-win team and the '12 squad was a 10-win. One team ('12) overachieved by 2 games and '13 underachieved by 5 games. Now, with a competent coach, we will surprise people... especially Dre. 10+ wins!!
I guess you can throw in that was just Manning's 3rd game after being out for a year. And the Texans aided Green Bay's and New England's point differential by giving up 84 points and only scoring 38 points in two games against those two teams in the regular season. And in 2012 the only good team the Texans convincingly beat was Baltimore (with the Ray Lewis factor you already pointed out). I think an issue for this team was that it doesn't have a wealth of talent and depth with question marks at certain starting positions to go along with the incompetence of Kubiak. Just replacing Kubiak with O'Brien may not equal a 8-10 game swing in the win column.
Looking back at 2012, so few of those games were close. @ DEN 31-25 - No luck involved here. No turnovers forced, no weird bounces, no busted special teams plays. This was just Kubiak's offense humming at its peak. @ NYJ 23-17 - This was a game the Texans controlled most of the way through but never got that "breakout" play or two that would normally have happened in such a dominant performance @ CHI 13-6 - Very hard fought ugly road win in the sloppy cold. vs JAX 43-37 - Not lucky but the defensive holes started to show, especially with Cushing gone. @ DET 34-31 - Absolutely lucky lololololol.
That Jacksonville game was where I started having doubts, Donny. Watching that terrible team throw the ball downfield on the Texans at will was disgusting. I had hoped it was just a one week occurrence...but then the next week was the Lions, and it happened all over again.
The Lions offense was good that year, so it didn't bother me as much. But letting Chad Henne rip you a new butthole in your own house is just inexcusable. I think Blackmon went for over 200 yards on JoJo. That may have been when that sore hammy really caught up to him.
Had the Lions, alone, done that I wouldn't have been as freaked out...but having it happen right after the freaking Jaguars did it cast serious doubt for me.
Yep. We were 10-3 and just mailed in the last 3 games. Still not sure why. We toyed with the bengals and probably would have beaten the Ravens had we not been using our 3rd string QB.
There is so much parity in the lower 25 NFL teams they should all be considered 7-9 potential teams, higher if they play more of each other and less elite teams like 2012, lower if they have a schedule with more elite teams, like 2013. Turnovers, penalties and loss/rise in confidence though do play a role. They seem to be cumlitive like a snowball rolling down hill, either way, positive or negative.
Agreed I think after this game it was pretty much down hill. Even though we beat Cincinnati in the playoffs
I don't think either season was a "fluke" per se, since you are what your record says you are. 12-4 was a team that had a strong system in place with players who understood their roles. Now, the fact that in reality it was 11-1 (with a terrible loss against Green Bay) followed by 1-3 also tells a very clear story. Going essentially 4-18 after the 11-1 start showed just how much Kubiak lacked in adaptability, and how much he truly lacked in game-planning. Sure, losing 14 games in a row is fluky in the sense that chances are you'll win at least ONE of those games, but the that doesn't really matter. We were a very, very bad team almost immediately after being a very, very good one. Neither of those was a fluke to me. You could see the cracks in the foundation already starting to form.
