Houston Texans are just as close to ruining CJ Stroud as they are to taking advantage of his championship window
Of all the dreadful AFC South seasons in 2024, Houston’s was the hardest to stomach.
The Houston Texans’ championship hopes are technically not dead yet. But it’s not hard to see that for this frustrating team, falling short is a question of “when”, not “if”.
In 2024, the AFC South has been a division of embarrassment and broken dreams. The Titans had hopes of flipping the switch quickly out of the Vrabel era, spending big in free agency and banking on Will Levis. But it fell apart spectacularly.
The Colts expected to be able to roll with the same roster from 2023 with a big year from Anthony Richardson to raise everybody up. He spent part of the year benched.
The Jaguars got regression from their nine-figure quarterback and their head coach is a fired man walking. That attempt never got off the ground.
And then there’s the Texans. They won the division without breaking much of a sweat. They have a championship-caliber defense. And yet, there’s a very strong argument to be made that Houston has had the most disappointing and painful season of anybody in the division.
This isn’t about wins and losses. This is about expectations vs. reality. It’s about opportunities that have been squandered. It’s about the Texans offense, and how infuriating and depressing a unit they are to watch. Which shouldn’t be the case, because CJ Stroud is on this roster!
Many have taken to social media in the past month to poke fun at the purported decline of Stroud's sophomore NFL season. And he’s been far from perfect this year. There’s no doubt he didn’t take any kind of meaningful year 2 leap, and may have in fact taken some steps backward. But the fundamental problem the Texans have is that their entire offensive game plan often boils down to asking Stroud to be perfect on 3rd down.
Offensive Coordinator Bobby Slowik has in the past year gone from head coaching interviews, to probably needing to update his LinkedIn. Far too many problems with the Texans offense point back to him and his scheme.
He is a below-average play caller and play designer, full stop. With every passing week, he appears to be more and more of a simple CJ Stroud merchant. His quarterback makes him and his offense right far more often than he’s making his quarterback right. That’s bad news for any team, but especially for one in a clear championship window that’s trying to stand on the shoulders of its second-year franchise man. The amount being asked of Stroud, in some very poor positions, is simply unfair to any young passer. And it’s the kind of thing we’ve seen ruin exciting young QBs far too often.
Houston is a mid-at-best group offensively. Their offensive line has individuals who vary from proven commodities or young players with a lot of potential, but the unit as a whole is borderline irredeemable. Stroud is under more pressure this year than he was in the already tenuous 2023 season.
The Texans offense can be boiled down to this: two wasted runs with Mixon, and then begging CJ Stroud and Nico Collins to bail them out on 3rd and long.
When I say “wasted runs” and “3rd and long”, I mean it: Houston is 31st in the league in run success rate in games that Joe Mixon is healthy. And they’ve been tops in the league all year in 3rd and long rate. They’ve even spent chunks of this season averaging just over 10 yards to gain on average on 3rd down. In other words, they tend to move backwards on 1st and 2nd down just as frequently as they move forward.
Then on 3rd down, it’s time for Stroud to bail them out. And too often, the concept he’s given to try to do it with looks something like this: a confusing or pedestrian mess.
Now, Stroud does bear some of the blame for their offensive woes. It’s fair to wonder how much of his regression is him simply coming down to earth as a talent vs him cracking under the impossible expectations this offense is putting on him, but the cracking is happening nonetheless. His miss rate is amongst the worst in the league through 16 games, and the number of missed yards he’s left on the field is the most in the NFL by far.
But the magic is still there. Sometimes he manages to rise to occasions and create under subpar circumstances, and that’s largely the reason this team has managed to scrape by with a winning record this year. Stroud is amongst the best QBs in the league when it comes to creating when the play breaks down. He’s often a plus player when his team needs him most.
The beauty of the NFL is that it truly is an any-given-Sunday league. And all you have to do is get into the postseason for the rules to change: you don’t have to be the best team to win. You just have to execute better for 60 minutes, and you advance. Nothing is given. But for these Texans, it seems impossible to wrap your head around them being able to compete against elite offenses 4 games in a row on their way to a Lombardi Trophy. They’re infinitely more likely to exit on Wildcard Weekend with a whimper than they are to win it all. And with this roster in an ever-fleeting Super Bowl window, that’s a massive failure.
Derrick Henry on verge of NFL history by accomplishing a feat only he has been able to pull off before
King Henry needs one more vintage December performances to cement himself as a 1st Ballot Hall of Famer.
Former Titans great reveals truth behind back-breaking moment in loss to Colts
It seemed like Jarvis Brownlee Jr. messed up big time, but that’s not what happened.
