NO EXCUSE NOT TO EXCEL.
Bill O’Brien readily admits 9-7 is setting the bar too low, and there’s no reason Texans can’t be ‘a big-time winner’
This is my last memory of Bill O’Brien’s Texans. Humiliation. Embarrassment. Devastation and destruction. It said 30-0 Chiefs on NRG Stadium’s DOA scoreboard. It felt and looked even worse if you were one of the unfortunate souls who publicly supported the Texans way back on Jan. 9.
I called for an official end to Bob McNair’s quarterback blues that day.
The bossman rose up, handed Rick Smith his open checkbook, and a franchise that has rarely had a real quarterback made Brock Osweiler a $72 million man in March.
Things change. Stories evolve. And now is the time for O’Brien’s Texans to take the next step.
This annual barely average stuff just won’t cut it. O’Brien knows that and has ever since he got the job.
“We understand that 9-7 is not the bar,” O’Brien said. “We feel like we’ve made some really good strides here in the past two years with our football team.”
In the season after Gary Kubiak, Wade Phillips and Texans North won Super Bowl 50, it’s super-critical that the reigning AFC South champs prevent a backward fall.
There has to be progress. There must be forward movement. It’s a year of no excuses. And if the Texans disappoint us and fail again, all eyes will point toward O’Brien.
Make the fan base happy
No pressure, coach. Just create the team you’ve wanted since you began crawling your way up the football ladder, bouncing from school to school and state to state, all in the belief that you could win at football the right way if someone gave you a shot.
Thanks to an offseason of change, this is the best team O’Brien has had since Kubiak was axed. So this is the year we have to get more out of a coach who started his initial two seasons in a combined 5-9 hole, then dug out the Texans with his heart — and QBs pulled from the couch, a deer blind, etc.
In a league designed for 8-8 every year — the financial virtues of parity; paying fans streaming through the pearly gates as long as a promise of the playoffs remains in sight — there’s no reason the Texans can’t at least go 10-6 and giftwrap McNair a second consecutive division banner.
“We’ve overcome some adversity. We have a mentally tough team. … But we know that the 9-7 bar is too low,” O’Brien said.
Smith received a four-year extension into the next decade because the Texans finally modernized their offense (on paper) and Andrew Luck was hurt.
I’m not as gentle as that and, obviously, neither are you.
You showered NRG in boos the last two years, every time the Texans rolled out an inferior product at QB. (You also screamed in approval when Matt Schaub was hurt. But, hey, no one’s perfect and we all learn.)
The Texans are 97-127 all-time and have only reached the 10win mark twice since their 2002 inception.
So, yeah, we all want a little more.
“The expectations in Houston are always going to be high. … The fan base deserves a winner here, a big-time winner,” O’Brien said. “That’s one of our motivations. We know when we play at home, we know how much it means to our crowd. We know how much it means on Monday morning, when people go to work talking about the Texans games and how it’s so important for our fans that we win.”
Blake Bortles’ Jaguars should finally be better this year. The Titans might be and have Mar- cus Mariota. Those darn Colts still have Luck.
But I dare you to pull out an AFC South roster and try to prove that another team is better from top to bottom. And with Tom Brady on a (Roger Goodell) paid vacation, Peyton Manning selling pizza and the Raiders seen by many as a good bet to ascend, there’s no acceptable reason for the as-is Texans to slide downward in O’Brien’s third year.
4-1 start within reason
George Godsey can’t be conservative. Romeo Crennel shouldn’t need a few weeks to tighten up the Texans’ D. There’s enough new blood to keep the Texans hip. There are enough veterans still remaining from the franchise’s 12-4 peak in 2012 to know the canyon that separates 9-7 hangers-on from true Super Bowl contenders.
“This team needs to build off of the way we finished last year and take that another step further,” said J.J. Watt, who received legit superhero status from Marvel and DC Comics due to the ridiculous speed of his offseason recovery. “We have no excuses. There’s no reason for us to start slow. There’s no reason for us to have a hiccup. We should be out here playing our game, doing our job every single day.”
The Texans won’t have to face Teddy Bridgewater and Brady in two of their initial five games. If Osweiler is for real, I could envision 4-1 when Luck returns to Houston for “Sunday Night Football” on Oct. 16.
The schedule gets rougher then. The road tests crank up. But good teams win those, too. And if O’Brien is going to crack the double-digit victory mark in Year Three, he should have this campaign slogan plastered along NRG’s hallways in an election year: No excuses in 2016.