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When news got out in late July that the Texans had signed cornerback Johnathan Joseph and safety Danieal Manning, football fans in the city of Houston got giddy.
For those who have followed this franchise since inception, signing a near elite-level cornerback and a solid veteran safety within a few hours of one another made for a benchmark day.
The Texans have been so deficient in accomplishing mundane, obvious tasks in free agency and hiring that other NFL teams' normal is the Texans' extraordinary. Recruiting and signing big-name free agents to fill needs, drafting players who are known quantities that also fill specific needs, hiring coaches outside of the head coach's circle of drinking buddies — these are things that real NFL teams do.
In 2011, the Texans finally appear to be acting like a real NFL team.
If the Texans make a move from mediocre also-ran to playoff team this season, it will be the hiring of defensive coordinator Wade Phillips and the infusion of his ideas and his personnel expertise that will be the game changer, to the point where it should piss off most Texan fans that this didn't happen a lot sooner.
What, you mean hiring an experienced, respected defensive coordinator to steer that side of the ball is a better idea than promoting one of your inexperienced buddies from within? No way!
Former defensive coordinator Frank Bush was awful in every way, and his ineptitude only served to make Kubiak look like an idiot for hiring him and an even bigger idiot for sticking up for him. At one point during the 2010 season, after another opposing offense hung 30 points on the Texans, Kubiak made the mistake at his Monday press conference of saying he "believed in Frank Bush," which was laughable because at that point not even Frank Bush could possibly believe in Frank Bush.
(This statement, by the way, spawned one of the greatest Twitter hashtags in the history of social media — #Kubiakbelievesinyou. Among the items tweeters had Kubiak believing in were New Orleans's levees, Charles Barkley's golf swing, jorts and Jar Jar Binks.)
You get the point — Frank Bush sucked.
They say that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and while I'm far from the only one who overthrew the target on expectations for 2010, I am willing to admit that the reasons the Texans didn't get to the playoffs were actually sitting right there in front of us during training camp last season.
Inexperience in the secondary, Brian Cushing's four-game suspension to start the season, the subsequent shell of Brian Cushing that played in his place the remaining 12 games, inconsistency on offense, and pedestrian return units on special teams. None of these concerns were unknown when 2010 started.
So at the very least, if my playoff prediction gets derailed this season, let it be known that (short of an injury to Matt Schaub) it will probably be because of one of the following:
1. Arian Foster's hamstring. Because this article is going in the print edition of the Houston Press, I have to submit it to editors a good week before it hits newsstands. Seriously, how in the hell do I account for Foster's hamstring for the next week (and beyond) when making a prediction? The team says he will be fine, but we're talking about a muscle that through a month of training camp has been about as predictable as a coked-up Charlie Sheen. By the time this hits newsstands, Foster's hamstring could be back to full strength. Or it could still be nagging him. Or it may have moved in with two porn star hamstrings and announced that it's going on tour to do hamstring stand-up comedy. There's no way to know.
(NOTE: To my unpredictability point above, in the time between submitting the article for print and your reading this, Foster actually tweeted out a picture of his strained hamstring to his 70,000 Twitter followers. So the Sheen analogy strengthens. I can't wait until Foster's hamstring has its own Twitter account, gets 2,000,000 followers in the first week and starts tweeting out pictures of Bree Olson's hamstring.)
2. Depth on the offensive line. Throughout training camp, the first unit of the offensive line has looked fantastic. Duane Brown, Eric Winston, Wade Smith, Mike Brisiel and Chris Myers are as solid a five-man unit as you'll find, especially in the scheme Kubiak likes to run. The problem is that after those five, they're dropping like flies. The second and third units have been hit hard with injuries. Add to that the general talent drop-off between the first and second units, and you realize how precarious things are in the trenches.
