Most of whatever has happened negatively, on the field and off the field, can be traced back to early April of 2019, when the Texans brought in former New England Patriot character coach Jack Easterby to ... well, honestly, I'm not really sure what he was actually HIRED to do. What I do know is that, at the peak of his power within the Texans' organization, it felt like Easterby was either running or attempting to run EVERYTHING.
And it got bad. Really bad. And finally on Monday, the tweet we all thought would never come, from ESPN.com's Adam Schefter, came:
It was one of those tweets that you had to double and triple check, and make sure it wasn't a fake Adam Schefter account trying to hoodwink the internet. Indeed, it was not. Glory, hallelujah!A significant shakeup in Houston: Texans are parting ways with their executive vice president of football operations Jack Easterby, sources tell ESPN. Houston hired Easterby in 2019 and he had a major voice in the organization.
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) October 17, 2022
Easterby arrived in 2019, and within two months, general manager Brian Gaine, who'd been on the job for barely over a year, was fired. That should have been the warning sign. Then came the Texans attempt to swipe Nick Caserio from the Patriots that summer, to become the Texans' GM, an attempt that ended in the Patriots accusing the Texans of tampering. The alleged tampering took place in a ring ceremony at Robert Kraft's home, a ceremony that Easterby attended because he was part of their franchise during the 2018 Super Bowl run.
Still, throughout the summer of 2019, Easterby was more a cheery curiosity than anything else, bouncing around practice, high fiving a lot of folks and retweeting motivational quotes. Seemed harmless enough.
But then, the coup began. After the aborted attempt to get Caserio in 2019, Easterby and Bill O'Brien wound up as sort of a two headed GM, and collectively they were the worst GM in the history of the NFL. Bad contracts were handed out to bad players like Halloween candy, draft picks were thrown away in trades like single dollar bills at a strip club, and DeAndre Hopkins was traded for a ham sandwich named David Johnson. Eventually, O'Brien took the fall, and deservedly so, but Easterby actually gained MORE power after O'Brien was fired.
Behind the scenes, good people were fired or left the organization. In January of 2021, in the search for a new GM, Easterby did an end around on the entire selection committee, which included then team president, the late Jamey Rootes, and ended up helping secure Caserio. Second time was a charm! The Caserio hire, I think, will actually work out well for the Texans, but the way it came about further fractured the organization, and led to Rootes' voluntarily leaving the Texans after two decades. Friends say Rootes, who committed suicide in August, never recovered from that.
Look, it's going to take more than just this one post to do a complete autopsy on the damage — roster damage, back office damage, public relations damage, actually human damage, psychological and otherwise — that was caused by Easterby and his three year reign of "toxic positivity" terror. That will come.
For now, though, the Texans have finally executed the one move that can bring back the most jilted of fans and season ticket holders. To be fair, the McNairs have made great strides in TRYING to reconnect with those folks in recent months. They knew they had a problem, and they're trying to fix it. On Monday, they took the biggest step by severing ties with Easterby.
Jack Easterby loved the catchphrase "It all matters," his cheesy way of citing attention to detail as a virtue, I guess. Well, NOTHING mattered more than this — the Jack Easterby Era is, mercifully, over
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