The picks were underwhelming and Hamilton and Smith oversaw a lousy team. Caserio has done nothing with the Texans to inspire any confidence. The “2nd best rookie qb” this year is closer to winning a $5 scratch off than the power ball lottery.
Everyone but Lovie Smith, as far as I know. Maybe a couple of position coaches, I don't know for sure.
I mean, you are free to find joy in whatever you like. The Patriots Way is taking another hit tonight.
According to the Texans web site, only Culley and Kelly have been fired. https://www.houstontexans.com/team/coaches-roster/
Um...Coach is not a player. That is on the field product. A coach guides the on-field product. Easterby may help pick the coach, but it Caserio who manages the day to day, on-field operations with the coach.
I don't think merely making the playoffs is the stuff of legend, rookie QB, or not. They certainly had a nice year compared to the expectations coming into the season, but the collapse over the last month happened, too. You can't look at this Patriots roster (which was supercharged in free agency) and see how they will be able to handle Josh Allen. The skill position firepower of teams like the Bengals and the Chiefs is way out of their league, too. Moving forward, I think the Patriots are going to fare a lot like Bill Belichick teams did before Tom Brady if he sticks around. Solid, but nothing special. It will take a *lot* of work to get the Texans back to that mediocre state and I don't know if slavishly emulating the Patriots Way (for 8 years now, by the way) without Belichick is a good idea.
There is no way I would come to the Texans if I was a hot head coaching candidate. Caserio is on the headphones and Easterby is standing next to the coach on the sidelines, WTF? Who wants to get involved in that disfunction. Even Jery Jones says DAMMMMMMMMMM that's ****ed up.
Agreed - except we already knew Belichick was very competent without Caserio and didn't really need his input for anything. So we didn't learn anything about Caserio from that - he could have been silent; he could have been giving helpful advice; he could have been giving poor advice that Belichick simply ignored. So here, we have no idea if Culley is competent, nor do know if Caserio is, so when they combine together to make a bad decision, it doesn't tell us anything on if either of them are competent. Was Culley making bad decisions and Caserio arguing against them? Were they both in agreement? Was Caserio making the bad decisions overriding Culley (least likely, obviously)? No one knows. My point is not that Caserio is an idiot - we simply don't know what role he plays on his headset. It's that when you have 3 people - none of whom are qualified to be a head coach and all trying to give head coaching input in real time - then when the head coaching sucks, you don't actually know why because the underlying system itself is FUBAR. Maybe Culley made bad decisions because two people were in his ear the whole time and when you have to make a split second decision, they were a constant distraction. My point is that we simply don't know because of the dumb system in place.
https://www.si.com/nfl/2022/01/17/mmqb-wild-card-weekend-kyle-shanahan-49ers-cowboys-rivalry Speaking of time, David Culley deserved more, but the way 2021 went showed that the union between him and Texans GM Nick Caserio would never be long-term. And maybe this sounds like “it’s not you, it’s me” breakup logic, but the fact is that Caserio’s Patriot–styled, relentless attention to detail just wasn’t there in the ’22 Texans, and the feeling inside the organization, over time, grew that the job was a little too big for Culley. Two examples really left a mark on the head coach, and they came early in the year. • Early in the second quarter of the Texans’ Week 2 game at Cleveland, on a third-and-15, Tyrod Taylor found Brandin Cooks for 13 yards. And as the ball was snapped, a flag came out—offsides on Browns DE Takk McKinley. So Culley then had the choice, either to take the 13 yards and go into fourth-and-2, or accept the penalty and attack third-and-10. Culley took the former and then punted, a decision that baffled some in the organization, without much explanation for it. • The second example is from Week 5, and the well-known case of Caserio telling Culley over the headset to let the Patriots score. The situation: The game was tied and, after Rhamondre Stevenson was stacked up on first-and-goal from the 6, the Texans used their final timeout. That left 1:56 on the clock and New England in second-and-goal. The Patriots scored on that snap, but an illegal shift pushed the ball to the 9 with 1:52 left. From there, the math showed New England could run the clock under 20 seconds, kick a field goal to take the lead and make it nearly impossible for the Texans to come back. Culley, by calling for Houston to try to get a stop, let that happen. Now, these could be seen as game-management growing pains that any new head coach goes through. And that’s fair, to give Culley that leeway in the moment. The problem, to me, is sort of separate from that. For a coach to match with Caserio, there was always going to have to be a detail-oriented approach in every facet of the operation—and seeing that stuff in-game was always going to be a problem for him. You remember how Judge’s third-and-long QB sneaks created a problem for him with Giants’ decision-makers? For different reasons, the above examples created a problem for Culley, and one he wouldn’t be able to overcome. And I think it’s why Caserio’s overwhelmingly likely to go get Brian Flores, Jerod Mayo or Josh McDaniels, with whom he knows he’ll be on the same page. And what’d be interesting about that? Seven of Bill Belichick’s assistant coaches have gotten a total of nine shots at being a head coach. But only once has one of those assistants been paired with an ex-Patriots exec/scout as GM, and the one time that happened (Scott Pioli and Romeo Crennel in Kansas City) it lasted only a year. The closest other example would be Jon Robinson and Mike Vrabel in Tennessee, though Vrabel only played, and never coached, for Belichick. So it’ll be fascinating to see, if it comes to pass, what having both spots arranged that way will add up to in Houston.
In his first year, I would argue yes. Whether he will long term, I think is up in the air. Several 3rd round QBs over the last 10 years ended up as career backups (Mannion, Glennon, Rudolph, etc). Some are out of the league after a few years. Russell Wilson is the only star. In most cases, 3rd round picks aren't ever asked to start in Year 1, so it's hard to really have much comparison data. Wilson was really the only one that did, and he's obviously a huge outlier. My guess would be in 3 years, Mills is a career backup, but obviously who knows. He seems to have a decent floor, which is ideal in a backup - but whether he has a high ceiling to make someone want him as a starter is in question. If last year's NFL QBs were re-drafted today, I don't think he'd be picked above Lawrence/Wilson/Fields/Lance/Jones and I suspect 3rd round is still where he goes as a project type QB. (edit: Nick Foles was also a 3rd round QB, so two have actually won Superbowls in the last 10 years!) The rest of the picks are backups on one of the worst and least-deep teams in football, which isn't hard to do. But late round picks are also not supposed to do much early so they are fine and still "to be determined" if they can develop into contributors on a decent team. In general, Year 1 is just too early to judge any draft picks, let alone lower round ones.
I think this is a good, fair article. But what it misses is: Why was he ever hired in the first place? He was a career WRs coach who had never been considered as an OC Everyone knew he wasn't some kind of genius. His key strength was that he was a positive dude. What exactly was Caserio thinking he was going to get? If he thought he was getting a details guy, that's a strike against Caserio on the talent evaluation front. If he knew he was getting a patsy he would fire a year, that's a strike on the Easterby "build a solid, honest culture with integrity" front because not only did they fire him (no big deal), they also threw him under the bus implying it was because he was a shitty coach - which is true, but also would have been by design.
I feel like to much tension with Flores and Caserio potentially bumping heads even tho they know each other well. You know McDaniels is my number 1 guy but I think it could be Mayo. I'm just waiting for the first bomb to drop that McDaniels is interested in other opportunities especially since belichick has already stated he’s still interested in coaching again next year. McDaniels could very well be the head coach in waiting in New England but he could be waiting a long time. And Mayo is very intriguing to me because he seems like a perfect mix of being a tough hard nose coach and also being an excellent communicator who knows how to talk and treat people.
Totally agree, but I was quoting someone that said the draft picks this year were underwhelming. I'm just trying to figure out what his expectations were for a 3rd round QB that was identified as a project since he had so little on field experience for various reasons. Because to me, Davis Mills was well above expectations for where he was drafted, and therefore should be seen as a positive for Caserio (to date, anyway). Obviously any player can have regression and turn out to not be the player we want, but if someone is arguing that Caserio's draft picks were underwhelming as a way to criticize him, I'm thinking they have an axe to grind.
Caserio wasn't in the headset that much. We KNOW what we got with Culley. I know, and you know, why the coaching sucked. I'm not saying Caserio should've been in the headset, I'm just saying that Culley showed us in his post game interviews that he might not have even been qualified to be a position coach, let alone a Head Coach. Caserio or not.
We know why he was hired. The Texans would never admit it, but they needed a stop-gap guy until they had the roster settle and could move for the guy they ultimately wanted. The 1st year of a rebuild = top-5 draft pick, and up and coming coaches don't want anything to do with that. I don't hold the Culley hire against Caserio or give him credit for it. I think he was making the best of a bad situation. His clock starts now, he's got draft capital, cap space, and a new coach. It's almost like year 1 was a mulligan and didn't count.
