none of us expected it to be THIS bad. they are a team playing with zero passion. they rank nearly dead last in offense and defense. i NEVER thought it would be this bad. before the season started my brother-in-law was joking with me about being a texans fan...my response was, "well, it's gotta get better right?" wrong.
New coach, new GM, new systems, new players... u had to account for some adjustment factor. Once they didn't draft Reggie Bush, I definitely thought it could get worse before it got better. The drafting of Mario Williams signalled that they didn't care about immediate results... they were simply going to be laying the foundation that was never laid 4 years ago. That being said, before Sunday the passing offense looked improved... and if it wasn't for the horrific running game, the offense as a whole would look to be at least making progress. As long as the offensive line can form a pocket... that's already more progress than they've had in any of the last 4 years. Don't let 7-9 fool you again... that team was nowhere near that record, and likeley overachieved the first two years as well. Talent-wise, this has been a 2-14 team every year.
ok..i was wrong. one person thought they would be worse. the drafting of mario williams was sold a quick fix. the drafting of mario williams made us all believe they might finally get pressure on a the QB. and we were told that DE's don't take forever and a day to have an impact. we were told this was to show real improvement real quick. this isn't rocket science...get the freaking QB and tackle him. progress?? they're at the bottom of the well in offense and defense. aside from the dolphins game, they haven't been within 2 TD's of an opponent. carr has looked great in the 4th quarter of games where the texans are getting blown out. he's looked very good on scripted first drives that he's practiced all week. aside from that, it's all been very mediocre. if he could figure out a way to fumble less, that might be helpful, too. 8 fumbles in 5 games so far?? for his career, he averages better than a fumble a game. in the words of J.J. Walker: DYN-O-MITE!!!! but i'm sure that he bears none of the blame for that, as well. 7-9 is 7-9. at least its competitive. last year people said 2-14 really wasn't fair because they lost some close games. they still finished 2-14. now i'm hearing 7-9 really wasn't 7-9. man...i'm lost. you win a game or you lose a game. this team utterly sucks. i'm pissed. i wouldn't hesitate to rework any of it. i wouldn't exclude anyone from the criticism. at some point there has to be improvement. at some point all the reasons/excuses/whatever you want to call them have to dry up and you have to win ball games. i know, i know...i'm unreasonable to expect them to be better than they were last year when they were absolutely freaking awful.
Apologies for the long post. I've been patiently reading this and other threads here and would like to share my thoughts on the state of the Texans. As I look at their current state, I'm also looking back 20 to 30 years at the history of pro football in Houston in order to gain some perspective: To me it all boils down to history - specifically the lessons of history. Now, Bob McNair did an incredible job of bring NFL football back to Houston especially considering the fact that the league really wanted to put a team in Los Angeles and not Houston. He put up over $700 million and got a first-class facility built. He basically did everything the right way with one exception: he forgot to consider the emotional impact from the history of pro football in Houston. By history I refer to the late lameted Houston Oilers - a team that more than once epitomized the definition of futility. The one thing that McNair failed to do was to study and learn from the Oilers' legacy of inept football. This was a franchise that suffered for years from an inept ownership and organization, bad personnel decisions, terrible coaching, horrible drafting and on and on. McNair had to understand that the potential fan pool for his Texans would be comprised of ex-Oiler fans - fans who, thanks to Bud Adams, had been left with a foul & bitter taste in their collective mouths. The last thing - THE VERY LAST THING he needed here was to make his fans relive the bad Houston Oiler football experience. Yet 5 years later, that is exactly what he's ended up giving doing. So you see, I really can't blame folks here for being fed up and angry because one can sustain geniune passion for a team only so long and for many here, time has run out on the Texans getting their act together. McNair's two most critical hiring decisions were head coach & general manager. This is where he should have heeded the lessons of history. The prime reason that Oilers stumbled and bumbled for so long because their organization was horrendous. This team was horribly mismanaged at the top and over time, it was that mismanagement that ultimately doomed them. Above all else, McNair should have been cognizant of what had befallen the previous pro football franchise and taken concrete steps to avoid repeating their fate. What he should have done is look into the ranks of a successful football organization with a history and track record of solid football decisions for his GM. Instead, he chose Casserly as the GM to build this franchise from scratch - a guy with a checkered record who made numerous draft & personnel mistakes at Washington and, if memory serves, was out of football at the time. Well, we can all see how that did not work out as more and more of Casserly's picks are jettisoned from the Texans' roster with each passing day. All the advantages that were given the Texans - expansion draft, extra draft picks - have been squandered away and all because McNair made a poor choice in Casserly. Next, his choice of Dom Capers also proved to be a poor one as well. While Dom had experience in successfully coaching a team from scratch (Carolina) he'd also been exposed as being unable to sustain that success which is why he was available on the recycled coaches heap. Again, given the legacy of bad coaches in Houston, McNair should have looked to the staffs of successful NFL organizations for his head coach. Instead, he made the safe choice and the easy choice in going with the good old boy network choice in Dom. Once things started to go wrong for the Texans, Dom was (once again) exposed as being unable to address the team's problems and find (and implement) the proper solutions to turn things around here. This is exactly what happened to him at Carolina so it should come as no surprise to anyone that it also happened to him here which is why he's no longer amongst us. So now, after 5 years, the Texans find themselves back to the proverbial square one and it's going to one long slow march back to football respectability. In the NFL there is very little margin for error and teams can literally wander around for years before regaining the right path. All it takes is one or two years of bad management to set a franchise back for years and the Texans have gone through 4 straight years of bad management (both on and off the field). What Kubiak & Smith are left with is the fragments of a legitimate pro football franchise. That can't be changed over night and there are no freebies to be had and no easy buttons for them to push. No, this will have to be done the old-fashioned way: through the draft, trades and with good personnel moves. The cynics out there will point out that this has always been the case in the NFL and that other teams do it all the time and with great success. That's true but the previous regime conclusively showed us that it was incapable of carrying out that simple mantra. The Casserly & Capers roadshow has moved on and now it's up to the new guys to rebuild from the ashes they left behind. What's changed now is that the Texans finally have in place a management and coaching team with the determination, ability and most important of all A PLAN to properly build this franchise from scratch. All they need is time. In the interim, I would suggest that folks not invest too much passion in the Texans because for the next couple of years they are going to be really bad and expending passion on a bad team would only lead to more heartbreak and despair.
i have tons of patience for the astros and rockets. i was born into rooting for those teams. different with the texans. i'm honestly surprised i work up as much passion for them as i do.
Its because its in Houston... and its the NFL. We all know that nobody was born rooting in for the Texnas. Does that mean they will never generate a passionate fan base? No. They need to start winning... but given that they pissed the last 4 years away, it will take time. Blame everybody u want... its still going to take time. I'm going to follow them because I'd still rather have this football than no football at all. Also, a team's high is much more enjoyable if you've also experienced a team's low... I know u stuck by them all these years, but if you want to give up on them now (when they're at their lowest), I don't need to say much else (probably because I know you're more frustrated than anything else, and you're still going to support them in the end).
Exactly! Given the history of pro football in Houston, the only way the Texans will be able to generate the type of passionate, generational fanbase you see in other places (like Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Denver and even Oakland) is going to be by what they manage to accomplish on the field. I still feel that they now have what it takes to get it done but it will may well take 2, 3 or 4 years before that becomes a reality.
no, no - in fact, there's a quote somewhere from mcnair in which he point blank said, "if we wanted immediate results, we would have drafted bush." that's a paraphrase - i'm sure someone here can find it. williams was always viewed as a bit raw with a longer shelf-life and thus a longer-term, as opposed to shorter-term, solution. that's actually a great point - here's a great question; why isn't more of the game scripted? why can;t kubiak develop scenarios and run carr thru those drills? they played 4 playoff teams in 5 weeks starting in week 8 and lost by a combined score of, iirc, 125-47; they were far from being competive. unfortunately, no one (within the organization) paid attention in 2004; the brown game was the wake-up call, but they convinced themselves it was an aberration. or casserly sold it to mcnair that way to save his ass. even justice cites it this morning. regardless, when you lose to playoff teams by an average score of 31-12, you have a looooooong way to go and wins against the chad hutchinson-led bears or equally inept titans, or close games at home against the colts, who, 4 weeks earlier, had throttled you 49-14, do not (or should not) erase the distance left to travel. the texans wanted too much to believe it did. agree 100%.
crazy how? his and dunta's regression has me FAR more worried than carr, though AJ's been better this year. still, for all this talk about playmakers, why does johnson not make more things happen? there are a LOT of wrs with far worse partners than eric moulds who consistently make things happen. that's a component of carr, too, btw.
It just shows you that you're a good Houston sports fan... the type of sports fan that's a dime-a-dozen in Boston, Chicago, and even in the overhyped NY... but in Houston its a rare commodity. If more people were like you, they wouldn't need a "Rockets Rowdies" section to promote cheering. They wouldn't need to "guarantee" sellouts for the first 5 years to get the NFL franchise.
truthfully, i'm not buying tickets to the Texans, so don't pat me on the back too hard. i'd rather spend my money elsewhere, or save it up for baseball season!
Hey... I never had a problem with how he coached the defense. Talent acquisition, offensive strategy, and in-game adjustments were never his strong suit... but developing a defensive game-plan for the team they were playing on Sunday is what he was/and still is/ good at. That Pittsburgh game they won during the expansion year was textbook of how to overachieve... no business winning that game. In the long run, I'd rather have a team that wins when its supposed to... and not simply overachieves (which doesn't last forever). I also think Dom was made the scapegoat... and that was in-part engineered by Casserly (who should have been the first to go). Once McNair felt the need to bring in Reeves to take a look at all of this, he knew that Casserly couldn't be trusted.
theres only 1 way to solve this matter and thats for carr to get hurt, and see what sage can do...Yes,Im going out on a limb and saying sage is better than carr. The only way I can prove it is for carr to be replaced by sage and see if Andre keeps dropping those passes(after all it could be the way carr throws) and lets see if the texans can score td's instead of fg's and lets see if theres more flow to the offense. Im not saying sage is starter material, Im saying carr is ni the same class with Trent Dilfer,Joey Harrington,Tim Couch,Bucky Richardson.
His numbers, on teams that were worse than the ones you mentioned, prove otherwise... I can say the sky is really purple, but it doesn't mean its true. Also, Dilfer is a Super Bowl winner, and has had a pretty long NFL career.... did you mean Heath Shuler?
Even if you think Carr should be traded...who would trade for him? What would be good value for him? Who would replace him? I agree that the Texans need to start looking at replacing Carr, as of right now, the only constant we've had in the Texans franchise is Bob McNair and David Carr, and I don't think McNair will be going anywhere anytime soon. I think Carr is just shellshocked from all the sacks the past 4 seasons. When you've been hit that much, it's natural to always look over your shoulder and to get rid of the ball quicker, even if you don't have to. Not to beat a dead horse, but that's why I wanted VY. I thought the Texans needed a change at QB, but I also thought that Kubiak should at least get a shot at turning Carr around.
The FLOW will happen when a running game evolves out of the ashes of what is so far albeit early of this season. I'll give you this, Carr is running out of chances to impress and prove he can be any kind of leader for this team. One more "meltdown a la Dallas" and I bet he gets benched for a long while.
Also. look at what they accomplished in yr. 2. They had an insane amount of players on IR, including Payne, Walker, Glenn, and Carr also was hurt with the shoulder twice. They played so well that yr. They went on the road and beat a 10-6 Miami Dolphin team, they beat the NFC Champion Panthers, they took SuperBowl champion New England to overtime and had them almost beat a couple of times, they had the lead on the Jets until the very end and almost scored at the end to win, the last 2 games of the yr, they had the 12-4 Titans beat until the very end, same with the Colts the next week. A few plays in a few games, and that team could have been 9-7 easily. This team showed so much progression until the Browns game at the end of yr 3. After that it totally fell apart and hasn't improved since.
