After spending the better part of the previous three years rooting for perhaps the worst teams in their respective sports, in the Texans and the Rockets, while having all of our championship hope attached to the Astros, the one word I would use to describe 2023 in Houston sports is “transformative.”
Of course, the Astros continue to win at a high level, although not the highest level like the year before, but now they’ve been reunited with the Texans and Rockets in the land of sports relevance. Thanks to a couple home run head coaching hires, along with the rapid development of some young talent, our football and basketball teams are bringing hope back to their fan bases.
So, as you’ll see, the hopeful future is a big theme in narrowing down all of the huge Houston sports stories to the five that mattered most. Here we go:
5. Rockets hire Ime Udoka to oversee Phase 2 of rebuild
When James Harden asked for, and received, a trade away from the Rockets back in 2021, the Fertitta family had to make the hard decision to strip the franchise down, accumulate draft picks, and rebuild things from the ground up. They broke the rebuild down into phases. Phase One involved a ton of losing and a ton of draft picks, and by creating a young core of players, they ostensibly accomplished the mission of Phase One. The team moved on, thankfully, from head coach Stephen Silas, and brought in Udoka to oversee Phase Two, which is to get back into the postseason and eventually move onto the phase of competing for titles, which Udoka did in his one season as head coach in Boston, getting to the NBA Finals in 2022. The team is far more competitive this season, particularly at home, and the seeds of a solid contender have been planted.
4. Astros engineer reunion with Justin Verlander
The Astros have been no stranger to taking big swings at the trade deadline before, but in 2023, it felt like they needed a jolt just to get into the postseason, let alone win a championship. So they reached back into their trade deadline bag of tricks for a repeat performance. In 2017, the trade for Justin Verlander proved to be the move that put the team over the top. In 2023, they again traded for Verlander, who’d departed in the offseason to the Mets. While the Astros had to give up two top prospects in order to reacquire Verlander, they did get the Mets to pay a massive chunk of Verlander’s salary, making him an affordable (near) ace for the next season or two.
3. Astros cough up 3-2 lead in ALCS at home to Rangers
In the end, though, acquiring Verlander was not enough to put the Astros over the top. They were unable to defend their 2022 championship. What’s worse is that the hated Texas Rangers ended up winning the World Series, and they got to the World Series by defeating the Astros in Game 6 and Game 7 at Minute Maid Park, and they did so in fairly resounding fashion. While this run of Astros baseball has been, far and away, the greatest period of sustained success for any Houston team, the black marks on the era will be major failures at home in the 2019 World Series (0-4 versus the Washington Nationals) and the 2023 ALCS.
2. DeMeco Ryans leads Houston Texans turnaround
The Texans took a lot of heat and ridicule after firing Lovie Smith following the 2022 season. Experts wondered if anyone would want to take the Texans head coaching job, knowing what a circus the team had been going back to 2020. As it turned out, the circus pretty much left the building the day former EVP Jack Easterby was fired, and they had no problem filling the head coaching vacancy with a franchise legend and the top candidate on the market, former All Pro linebacker DeMeco Ryans. The fan base and former players immediately became reengaged, and behind the Ryans-driven culture shift, the team can make the playoffs if they win their final two games.
1. NFL Draft night fireworks
While the Ryans hire has proven to be transformative in its own right, no NFL franchise in recent history reset the trajectory of their franchise more than Ryans and GM Nick Caserio did with the Texans on draft night. With the second pick, the Texans found their QB of the future, likely Offensive Rookie of the Year, C.J. Stroud, and then one pick later, Caserio traded up big to take Alabama edge rusher Will Anderson, who’s showed a ton of promise in his rookie season. It was quite evident that Caserio and Ryans were looking for tone-setters on each side of the ball with these moves, and one season in, it appears they’ve hit.
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This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
