As you may know, from reading my content through the years, I am a big fan of the HBO series Hard Knocks, the award wining series which covers one NFL team in training camp each summer. It’s an incredible, immersive, admittedly curated look at how the sausage is made, “sausage,” of course, being a metaphor for an NFL roster.
Since the inception of the Hard Knocks franchise, the NFL has noticed something crucial — people can watch, talk, and consume anything football-related year round. As a result, they invented two more variations of the Hard Knocks franchise, with an in-season version that lasted a few years, and is now defunct, and an offseason version that had just one season, back in 2024, before being shut down.
The offseason version in 2024 followed the New York Giants in March and April, handling free agency and the draft, and it was fascinating. The team’s GM Joe Schoen came across as duplicitous and not all that smart. It wasn’t shocking that the offseason version of Hard Knocks was shut down after one year, because I’m guessing no team wanted any part of fans seeing how their front office actually operated, even the good teams.
Well, as it turns out, the offseason version of Hard Knocks will only stay defunct for a two years, because it was announced recently that it will be returning! Perhaps as a way to cushion the intrusiveness on participants, rather than following one team, the offseason edition will follow a whole division’s worth of teams. Thus, if you’re hoping to see the Houston Texans on this program, you’ll need to root for the AFC South to be the choice of the show’s decision makers.
The mere thought of the Texans being part of something like this got me thinking — which Texans transactions or decisions made over the course of the Nick Caserio Era (est. January 2021) would have been the most fascinating to see on a behind-the-scenes style show like Hard Knocks? Here would be my five:
5. The Texans’ side of the Will Anderson trade
If the Deshaun Watson trade (more on that in a moment) is the signature trade of the Caserio Era, then the deal to move up in the 2023 draft and select Anderson is the sequel to the Watson deal, particularly since it was a pick acquired in the Watson trade that is the main seedling of the deal for Anderson. The Cardinals put out a video showing their side of the conversations surrounding that deal a few days after the 2023 draft, and they made it look like their GM Monti Ossenfort pulled a fast one on Caserio. I’d like to see the Texans’ side of those talks, mainly so I could witness the truth — Caserio got over on the Cardinals.
4. The entire C.J. Gardner-Johnson Era
We were given a reminder this past weekend about the ethos of former Texans safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson, who came to town with his new team, the Buffalo Bills, and did plenty of trash talking, on the field and in the runway after the game. Of course, Texan fans remember how it ended with Gardner-Johnson here, with him getting cut after the 0-3 start to last season. Reportedly, he clashed with teammates and went into business for himself on defense on multiple occasions. I know this one isn’t technically an offseason saga, but it started with the trade for Gardner-Johnson in March 2025, and I’d just want to see the story through to the end.
3. Watching Jack Easterby slowly lose power in 2022
The king fu grip that Easterby, the former pastor-turned-executive, had was peaking around 2021, when he’d managed to clean out practically everyone in the front office and business office who he saw as an enemy, and extended into early 2022, when he almost got Josh McCown hired as the team’s new head coach, despite McCown never having coached in his life. Somehow, some way, reportedly spearheaded by Lovie Smith, the organization finally saw the light, and saw Easterby for the charlatan that he was, and he slowly saw his power dwindle until he was fired in October 2022. This is one uber-villain saga in which it would be very gratifying to see every phase of the fall from power of the antagonist.
2. The discussions that led to hiring David Culley
Undoubtedly, rock bottom for the Texans franchise was the aforementioned 2021 season. Sure, they’d gone 2-14 a couple times before, gone 4-12 multiple times, but that 4-13 season in 2021, in which Easterby had a chokehold on the franchise, Deshaun Watson was getting sued by 24 women (and was inactive every week), and the roster was in shambles, that was the worst. The icing on the cake was the selection of Culley, who’d never even been a coordinator before and who was clearly overwhelmed and underqualified, as the head coach. I’d have paid thousands of dollars to get to watch Culley’s interviews for that job. He was a nice man, but far from head coaching material. He was fired a year later.
- The Deshaun Watson trade
Someday, if the Texans win a Super Bowl (could happen) and Watson becomes the centerpiece of the most lopsided trade (done) and worst contract in NFL history (done), they’ll do a documentary on this deal. When you consider Watson’s legal entanglements, the utter despair that the Texans franchise was in, The auction environment Caserio was able to create, and the haul the Texans received in return, not to mention how the whole story has played out — Texans are a Super Bowl contender and the Browns remain a dumpster fire — this is one of the most fascinating transactional stories in NFL history. The Hard Knocks treatment would be cinema, as the kids say.
