The Houston Texans are back in the building this weekend, after getting a week off to lick their wounds and reset mentally. With their record sitting at 2-5, there are no shortage of wounds to lick and no shortage of mental torture that must be eradicated. So, as they like to say pretty much any time of the season, the bye week came at a good time!
The bye week is also a time to address injuries and football issues. Injury wise, the Texans are hopeful of getting running back David Montgomery, safety Jalen Pitre, and safety Reed Blankenship back off the injured list for the game against the Chargers this week. (Well, I say that they’re hopeful, but the backups for Montgomery and Blankenship might be better options, but I digress.) Losing wide receiver Jaylin Noel to a toe injury for the season in the Giants game hurts badly.
From a football execution standpoint, the Texans’ mental reset hopefully puts them in a better frame of mind to practice and execute these four key elements of football more effectively. These are four things that the Texans have been atrocious doing this season:
4. Tackling
Tackling is a tough thing to improve through practice in-season, since there is a limit on the number of padded practices a team can have, and even in the padded practices, teams don’t full-on tackle, they just bump into each other really hard. The Texans’ tackling issues were on full display in overtime for the Giants game, when two running plays of 42 and 30 yards sealed the win for New York. These Texans, according to ESPN, have missed 70 tackles this season, 7th worst in the NFL.
3. Penalties
This season has just been one giant bad look for head coach DeMeco Ryans, and perhaps the worst part of the coaching debacle is the Texans’ undisciplined level of play. Entering the bye week, the Texans accrued the second most penalty yards in the NFL (508 yards) and the fourth most penalty flags with 58 accepted penalties. The really exasperating part of this is that a majority of them are just mental issues like motion penalties, offsides, illegal shifts, and illegal formations. Oh yeah, and they have a couple penalties for too many men on the field. Again, COACHING.
2. Communication
The Texans’ defense, which was getting attention for its elite potential in numerous preseason articles, has been atrocious. In particular, the secondary is 27th in passing yards allowed. The defense has allowed the highest number of explosive plays of any defense in the NFL. Keep in mind, this is a secondary where three of the guys made the Pro Bowl in 2025! The players have highlighted communication issues as the problem. I would suggest they stop playing so much zone defense and use the elite cover guys they’re supposed to have on the back end in more man to man.
- Figuring out optimal offense
Let’s start here — C.J. Stroud has been everything you could have asked for in his “prove it” season. He is among the league leaders in passing yards and has thrown just one interception all season. Stroud has walked off the field late in the fourth quarter of five games, having handed his defense a late lead. The Texans have won one of those five games. (Their other win was a blowout of the Titans.) In short, Stroud is great, so why not lean into him more heavily? Offensive coordinator Nick Caley’s insistence on using a very predictable “jumbo” offense for a third of the game is maddening. The team just got Tank Dell back and traded for Marvin Harrison, and for whatever reason, Caley has some weird fetish for using a sixth offensive lineman. Caley is on notice.
