Best seat in the house
›› Practice squad player OL Chad Slade watches Texans games at home with his inspiration, son Braxton.
Chad Slade wants to yell at his television screen. While most fans watch the ball, he has his eyes locked on his fellow Texans offensive linemen and just saw Xavier Su’a-Filo get beat on a rush. He wishes he could shout “X, shoot your hands up!” so loudly that his teammate could hear it nearly 1,300 miles away in Green Bay, Wis. Normally, he might even try, because that is all he can contribute to road games, when he and the nine other practice squad members are left behind in Houston.
But he keeps his mouth shut. He has his 14-month-old son Braxton asleep against his belly.
“Never wake him up,” Slade said. “That’s the rule.”
In his two years on the Texans, the closest Slade has gotten to a game is the distance between his recliner and his television.
His job has been to prepare the starters and backups in practices. Not to play.
Although the practice squad role sharpens his skills, he mostly gets tossed around for the sake of others.
“You’re pretty much a crash-test dummy,” said Slade (6-5, 315 pounds).
He yearns to play, but staying behind on road trips offers him a break from the intense week.
Two weeks ago, while his comrades battled the Packers, Slade nestled into a new home.
The two-story brick house in a Pearland subdivision feels like a wintry cottage on this football Sunday. Christmas lights tangle in the walkway. Slade’s No. 62 Auburn University jersey hangs in a frame above a fireplace decorated with three red stockings.
Next to it, a 60-inch television illuminates the dim living room with the white light from snow flurries falling on Lambeau Field.
Slade called it a “dream” to own a house at age 24. It also is a big risk given his purgatorial position: The Texans could call him up to the active 53-man roster or cut him without warning.
“I think about it all the time,” he said. “I be like, ‘I’m not getting no play time. I’m not getting paid no active money.’ But you have to think about the bigger picture: There are like 100,000 more people that wish they were in the same spot as you.”
Making the best of it
Uncertain whether Slade is valuable or expendable, he and his fiancée, Taylor Simpson, embrace the situation.
“We’re still living life regardless of what his status is,” Simpson said.
After a morning of super- vising Braxton ride his tiny four-wheeler in the backyard, Slade settled into the recliner with him to watch the game. He occasionally hoisted a sleepy Braxton up to his lips for kisses.
“I gotta work for this little boy to have the livelihood that most people don’t have,” Slade said. “The fact that they kept me here tells me they see the potential that I have to be an NFL player.”
It took a while for Slade to believe in himself that way. He preferred baseball growing up. Then he moved to Moody, Ala., a city 25 minutes east of Birmingham with fewer than 12,000 people, where his stepfather explained this was football country.
Slade was so massive by third grade he was forced to play youth football with an older group. He hesitated despite his size.
“At first, I never wanted to hurt people,” he said.
Then his mom explained: “They’re going to come try to hurt you and you gotta end up doing what you need to do.”
She was harder on him
than anyone. She watched his practices from her car, and if she thought he did poorly, she made him run extra laps around the field afterward.
By high school he switched to the offensive line, which vaulted him from unknown to an Auburn scholarship athlete. He also fell in love with Simpson then.
Halftime is for toddler
At halftime of the Packers game, they showed Braxton how to shoot on a small basketball hoop in an upstairs den. A bookshelf nearby displays a game ball Slade received for the Week 2 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs. Even though Slade did not play, coach Bill O’Brien awarded the practice squad. “Everybody got up for this,” Slade said.
Slade returned downstairs to watch the Packers beat the Texans 21-13. Unlike most players, he does not view any other games. He seeks an escape.
He watched “Christmas Vacation” with Simpson and Braxton, ate dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings (where he blocked out the panorama of game telecasts) and wrapped more Christmas lights around his bushes.
Of everything in the threebedroom dream home he shares with his high school sweetheart, Slade points to one thing that shows how far he has come.
“I’ve never had stairs,” he said.
At night, he climbed them, carried Braxton across an Auburn rug in front of his crib and put the toddler to sleep.
With three games left, Slade seems likely to go another season without suiting up, but his commitments remain.
Role of the underdog
He would be the last person to bed and the first to get up, beginning another week of preparing his teammates.
He dozed off while watching “Creed,” a movie about an underdog boxer who fights valiantly but loses in the end.
Braxton fell asleep cradling a Batman doll.