If @cmoak1982 wasn’t impressed with Stroud throwing 400 yards, I wonder how he feels about Young’s 150.
Aw, so you’re like Dillon Brooks. “I’m not impressed unless you give me 400!” “…I gave you 384.” “That’s NOT 400!”
Nah. Let’s do math. Stroud threw for 2.52 times as many yards as Bryce Young this week. If Stroud averaged 384 yards a game, that would equal a 6,500 yard season, shattering the record by 1k yards. Yet, you described his game as “average to solid.” But hey, I’m the one who “exaggerates” things. It’s not you who is pedantically looking for flaws.
It was a good game where there was little to no chance of winning and putting up big numbers in a game that was over in the first. Calm down, it was a solid game. It wasn’t a good or great game. Numbers in a one sided loss mean something now? Weren’t you one of the ones hating on Mills for doing the same thing?
If you’re not impressed with a rookie throwing 384 yards in a loss, I can’t imagine how you feel about Young’s 152.
Why is this on Nick? 4 of the starting ol are hurt. What do you expect? Also the safeties are hurt and Ryans is in total charge of the defense in terms of acquiring talent and running the defense. I can guarantee you that the guys brought in on the defensive side of the ball were guys Ryans wanted. Ward, Ridgeway, Perryman, WA etc.,.
https://www.espn.com/nfl/insider/in...ngals-chargers-eliminated-playoffs-super-bowl The Texans have not needed an excuse to be bad in recent years, but they have one amid their 0-2 start: injuries. During Sunday's loss to the Colts, they were without their starting safeties (Jalen Pitre and Jimmie Ward), both starting offensive tackles (Laremy Tunsil and Tytus Howard), their starting center (Juice Scruggs), and one of their two starting guards (Kenyon Green). During the game, they lost another safety (Eric Murray), while rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud played the entire game with a painful right shoulder injury. You can decide whether playing behind four backup linemen helped his shoulder improve. Stroud already has taken 11 sacks in two weeks, which is an inauspicious start for a rookie quarterback in an organization that famously failed to protect its first franchise passer. Eleven sacks across a rookie's first two starts are the third most suffered by a quarterback since the turn of the century. No. 1 is former Houston passer David Carr, who took his 15 sacks on just 64 dropbacks in 2002. Stroud has dropped back 104 times for his sacks, but he plays in an era in which quarterbacks get taken down less often on the whole. It's difficult to evaluate Stroud in a situation where most of his best offensive linemen have spent the season on the sideline. One positive has been his work out of quick game on throws under 2.5 seconds. There, his 71.6 QBR ranks 13th in the league and his 7.2 yards per attempt ranks sixth. One way to mitigate when the offensive linemen are all hanging out without you is to get the ball out before the defense can take you down. New coach DeMeco Ryans doesn't have the superstars from his defense in San Francisco, but the former Texans linebacker has Will Anderson Jr. and an ability to create pressure. Houston's 32.3% pressure rate ranks seventh in the NFL. Anderson has a sack and three quarterback knockdowns in two games. Most of that pressure came against Lamar Jackson and the Ravens in Week 1 in a game in which Baltimore had its first-string offensive line on the field for most of the game before late injuries to Ronnie Stanley and Tyler Linderbaum. Those are the positives. The negatives? The running game is averaging 2.5 yards per carry, the offense has scored one touchdown on seven trips inside the red zone, and the secondary can't stop anyone. Opposing quarterbacks are posting an adjusted completion percentage of 85.8% against Houston, a figure that removes throwaways and drops and adjusts for the depth of target. Only the Raiders have been less effective, and those two teams have posted the worst adjusted completion percentage marks allowed over the first two weeks of any season in the past decade. The Texans weren't expecting to compete this season -- and they'll be better as they get healthier -- but if there was one game we were going to circle as a likely win on their calendar, it would have been at home against the Colts in Week 2. Despite Indianapolis quarterback Anthony Richardson leaving the game in the first half with a concussion, the Texans lost by 11 points and needed 10 points in the fourth quarter to get even that close. With their 2024 first-round pick on the way to the Cardinals at the end of the season, the Texans have nothing to tank for if they continue to lose. Until they get their offensive line back, it's tough to imagine them standing up to the likes of T.J. Watt in the weeks to come.
Texans wide receivers Robert Woods, Nico Collins and Tank Dell approached their first-time play-caller at halftime and playfully implored him to keep throwing them the ball. It wasn’t a revolutionary request considering the Colts led 28-10, considering offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik had little time left to create a comeback, but the passing game’s expanded success in an eventual 31-20 loss suggests a run-oriented offensive system could be better served shifting its tendencies at least while its injury-riddled offensive line heals. Houston’s run game is so far defective by every metric. Through two games, the Texans average the NFL’s fewest rushing yards per attempt (2.5), which diminishes significantly in the red zone (0.7). The run game hasn’t produced a touchdown. It has produced only two first downs to the passing game’s 18, none when the offense must gain 4 yards or more. Dameon Pierce, an imposing runner who averaged 4.3 yards per rush in a promising rookie season, is now down to 2.7. The 5-10, 212-pound tailback forced 4.8 missed tackles per game in 2022, according to Pro Football Focus, but the abundance of defenders meeting him immediately at the line this season only fails to bring him down twice per game. Texans coach DeMeco Ryans said during training camp “for us to be a good offense, we have to have Dameon at his A-game, and for Dameon to have his A-game, our offensive line has to be on their game.” Nothing more simply states the lineage of this offense’s issues. A makeshift line with four potential starters on the injured reserve also lost star left tackle Laremy Tunsil to a knee injury before Sunday’s game against the Colts, and Ryans said Tunsil remains “day-to-day” this week as the Texans prepare for the Jaguars. “We can run the ball better,” Ryans said on Monday. “It starts with our communication up front, just leaning on the details again and communicating where we’re going, where we ID and just being on it. And also, just how we’re running it. Just staying after it, making plays. We have some plays there to be made, but there’s one guy free in the hole. Right? If we can make sure we’re on the right person and be where we’re supposed to be, there’s some explosive plays in the run game to be made.” It’s a resilient refrain those who’ve frequented the franchise’s facilities these last three seasons could very well commit to memory. Ryans, the team’s fourth head coach in four years, is the third straight whose offensive philosophy centers on the run game. The coordinators under former coach David Culley and Lovie Smith — Tim Kelly, Pep Hamilton — were both fired after fielding schemes that ranked among the league’s two lowest in rushing yards per game. General manager Nick Caserio, whose influence on a scheme that’s been philosophically consistent in his three seasons cannot be ignored, attempted to supply Slowik with the most resources yet to yield results. But a bad offensive line blemishes everything. Until the key components of the NFL’s highest paid line — Tunsil, right tackle Tytus Howard, rookie center Juice Scruggs — return from injury, there’s little evidence to suggest Slowik’s system will be the one to produce a productive run game behind a makeshift line that has been no better than the ones that preceded it. Effort sometimes masks obstinance. Hamilton deployed a two-quarterback system that slightly elevated a run game from 1.3 yards per carry in standard sets to 3.92 yards against the Cowboys. Kelly’s creative usage of unbalanced and multi-tight end formations prevented a cast of rebuild-era running backs — Mark Ingram, Phillip Lindsay, David Johnson, Rex Burkhead — from being completely futile at 3.4 yards per rush. But only when the Texans trailed 21-0 in the 2021 finale to the Titans, when Culley told Kelly to adjust to a more up-tempo, pass-first style, when then-rookie Davis Mills was 16-of-19 in second-half passing for 240 yards and three touchdowns, did Culley say “there were times that I should have used tempo in some of these other ballgames.” The 2023 Texans have supplied Slowik with evidence that suggests the same conclusion. Even with the injuries, they are not as devoid of offensive assets as they were in 2021. C.J. Stroud, the No. 2 overall pick, has delivered the league’s 18th-highest quarterback rating (91.2) despite being sacked the most often (11), and a receiver corps that was questionable due to its youth and injury history has thrived in up-tempo scenarios. In no-huddle plays, Stroud is 14-of-19 passing for 162 yards and a touchdown, an 8.5 yard per attempt average whose capitalization of defensive pressure manifested in a 23-yard touchdown reception by Dell against the Colts in which Stroud flung a 12-yard pass to the third-round rookie, who spun out of cornerback Darrell Baker Jr.’s grip on the sideline and scampered for the fourth-quarter score. Veteran receiver Robert Woods said “just a little bit of the tempo has been working for us.” The pace can secure an advantage by preventing a defense from substituting, fatiguing them, then eventually break a big play with rhythmic momentum. “Once we get going, this offense feels like the steam of a train,” said Woods, who has 12 catches for 131 yards in two games. “But once it stalls, it truly stalls, and I feel like that’s the thing we have to get better and more consistent on offense. Just sustaining our drives on offense.” There are indeed signs that there are still timing issues to sort out. Trailing the Colts 14-7 at the start of the second quarter, the Texans went no-huddle after a 2-yard run by Pierce. Stroud then shoulder-faked before dropping a second-and-8 toss too shy to Dalton Schultz that was tipped by leaping cornerback Dallis Flowers. Stroud threw a subsequent third-and-8 slant to Dell too far behind. The Texans punted. The Colts scored. The two-score lead resumed. Two games is too small a sample size to deduce the full direction of an offensive coordinator’s tendencies. Pierce said in training camp Slowik’s playbook was thick as a Bible. It’s then reasonable to believe there are more ways in which the passing game can take a more prominent role until offensive linemen return from injured reserve. According to the Chronicle’s in-game notes and review of 12 drives in which the Texans trailed by two scores this season, the Texans ran the ball 68% of the time when they deployed the fullback or double-tight end formations Slowik favors to establish the ground game. But the Texans average 4.7 yards per pass out of such formations, 2.7 yards per rush. The data set did not include a fourth-quarter drive against the Ravens in which the Texans were down 22-9, nor two fourth-quarter drives against the Colts in which the Texans trailed 31-20 — exclusions made because the offense operated exclusively in pass-oriented 11 personnel packages (1 RB, 1 TE, 3 WRs). But that the Texans averaged 4.7 yards per play on those drives is yet further evidence the offense functions better in those conditions. Slowik responded to his receivers’ suggestion in the second half against the Colts. Perhaps he’ll adjust for a full game against the Jaguars. “He’s definitely all ears,” said Dell, who’s totaled 10 catches for 106 yards and a touchdown. “If we say something to him, he’s down to dial it up. That’s good for us, and that’s good for him being the coach. He wants to be the one who’s gonna not just necessarily listen to you but like takes part of it, ‘OK, I understand what he’s saying. I’m going to try my best to get him the ball.’ That’s great to have that type of O.C. who’s gonna listen and open up for us and let us try to help him and him help us.”
Josh Jones is gonna get CJ hurt if he keeps letting everyone get past him. These sacks are happening far too quickly to not be concerned. I sure hope we spend big in the off-season for the best OL out there in free agency and use our top pick for the best OL we can get in the draft.
