The Houston Texans fell to 2-5 this past weekend, with one of the most catastrophic losses of the DeMeco Ryans, a 27-21 loss to the New York Giants in overtime, in a game where the Texans were a 10.5 point favorite at home. The Texans not only lost the game, but lost the challenge to their manhood, as the Giants rushed for nearly 200 yards on the ground, and broke what felt like about 100 tackles.
While 2-5 is not a mathematical death blow, it is certainly more than just a mere flesh wound to a team’s playoff chances, especially a team doing as many things poorly as the Texans are doing right now. Their defense is in the bottom quarter of the league in Expected Points Added per play, and the team has committed more yards worth of penalties than every other team in the league.
The math of a 2-5 start, and where it goes from here, is further discouraging, as just 7.1 percent of the 146 teams who’ve started 2-5 the last 25 seasons have made the playoffs. For what it’s worth, the computers don’t see the Texans as your standard 2-5 teams, as most of them still give the Texans a 20 to 30 percent chance of playing postseason games in January.
What does that path look like, though? How many games are actually considered supremely winnable for the Texans at this stage of the season? Here are the look ahead betting lines for the Texans’ remaining ten games of the 2026 regular season:
WEEK 9: at Chargers +2.5
WEEK 10: at Browns -4.5
WEEK 11: vs Colts -5.5
WEEK 12: vs Ravens -1.5
WEEK 13: at Steelers -1.5
WEEK 14: at Commanders -1.5
WEEK 15: vs Jaguars -3
WEEK 16: at Eagles +2.5
WEEK 17: at Packers +2.5
WEEK 18: vs Titans -7
Okay, here are a few observations on the betting market for your 2026 Houston Texans:
The path is there, the Texans are favored in most of their games
As of this week, the Texans are favored in seven of their remaining ten games. None of those seven games featured a betting line as massive as the 10.5 points the Texans were laying against the Giants this weekend, but we saw how much that line meant, if the Texans decide to commit ten penalties and don’t tackle. The biggest line is the season finale, a home game against the Tennessee Titans in which the Texans are favored by seven points. Thus, merely taking care of their business, winning the games the lines say they SHOULD win, would get the Texans to nine wins. The three games in which they are underdogs all have lines of less than a field goal, +2.5 points at the Chargers, at the Eagles, and at the Packers.
By record, the lines on their next two games feel backwards
Speaking of the Chargers, they remain the only winless team in the NFL, sitting at 0-6 after their bye week in Week 7. They play the Rams at SoFi Stadium this weekend, and are technically the road team in that game, even though the Chargers play their home games in that stadium. Meanwhile, the Cleveland Browns, led by Deshaun Watson (remember him?), are 5-2 on the season. The Texans play those two teams, on the road, after the upcoming bye week. Oddly enough, the winless Chargers are favored by 2.5 points over the Texans, while the Browns, currently first place in the AFC North, are 4.5 points underdogs at home versus the Texans. You could have flipped those two lines around, making the Chargers a 4.5 point dog and the Browns a small favorite, and I’d have believed that. Honestly, I probably would’ve believed that scenario more than the actual truth!
The final push includes two of the “underdog” games
Aside from the Chargers, the other two games in which the Texans are underdogs, are in Week 16 and Week 17, in cold weather, prime time games at Philadelphia and Green Bay. The game against the Eagles is actually on Christmas Eve night on Thursday Night Football, so the Texans go into the devil’s lair on a short week, the day before Jesus’ birthday. The game in Green Bay is in January, on the first Monday night of 2027. I’m mildly surprised the line on the Eagles hasn’t moved (it was 2.5 points before the season) since Jalen Hurts went down for the season with blood clots in his lungs. The line on the Green Bay game might actually go up between now and Week 17.
