Watson settles in behind Savage
Expect rookie QB to try to unseat Texans starter
“Every minute of the day when they walk in the building here it’s a competition.” Texans coach Bill O’Brien
Deshaun Watson reported to rookie minicamp, signed his contract and is digging into the playbook.
Time to already revise the Houston Texans’ depth chart?
Not so fast. Tom Savage, remember, is still the starting quarterback.
Coach Bill O’Brien said as much a few weeks ago, after Tony Romo spurned the chance to join the Texans and opted for TV. Now that Watson is in the fold, that’s still pretty much the company line. For now. After all, it’s the middle of May. Things can change, especially when it comes to who’s starting at quarterback for the Texans.
Quick, the only NFL team to start more quarterbacks than the Cleveland Browns over the last three years would be … the Texans. Call ’em the O’Brien Eight.
That’s some type of pressure for Savage, a fourth-year pro with two NFL starts and zero touchdown passes on his résumé. He’s the guy expected to get benched — by Week 1, Week 11 or maybe in 2018 — whenever Watson is deemed ready to crack the lineup for the chance to demonstrate whether he can be the long-term quarterback answer that has eluded the Texans. Even while Savage tries to do the same.
“Savage is the veteran guy. I’m a competitor,” Watson told reporters before Saturday’s practice.
That was a nice, respectful way to put it.
At the same time, Watson, last seen in a live game mowing down Alabama to win a national cham- pionship with Clemson, had no reason to concede anything.
Savage has the spot and three years’ head start in O’Brien’s complex offense, but in the world of pro football, competition matters. O’Brien knows. You don’t deal away next year’s first-round pick to jump 13 spots to draft a quarterback who would not want to compete.
“I want everybody thinking that,” O’Brien told reporters Saturday. “I don’t have to say that to Deshaun Watson. He’s a very competitive guy. I mean, look what he did in college. The guy has only lost five or six games since he started playing high school football as a starting quarterback.”
Really, some things just don’t need to be said.
“Every minute of the day when they walk in the building here it’s a competition,” O’Brien said. “Whether it’s in a meeting, which is lower-key competition because we’re not physical in the meeting, obviously, or it’s in a walkthrough or a jog-through or out at practice, it’s all about competition.”
There’s no reason to believe that O’Brien — with a locker room full of vets who undoubted- ly want to take another step and become a serious Super Bowl contender — won’t allow for a legitimate competition that might alter his plans based on results.
Watson’s progression on the learning curve along with Savage’s performance should ultimately dictate how legitimate of a competition there is.
Although it appears O’Brien is not looking to stage a competition that would split the training camp reps down the middle between Savage and Watson, there’s so much that can happen before the Texans open the regular season against the Jacksonville Jaguars on Sept. 10.
It almost seems certain, though, that with Savage’s track record and profile not quite in the Andrew Luck zone, O’Brien’s quarterback situation looms as one of the NFL’s most intriguing summer story lines.
Sure, there’s something to be said for not ruining a quarterback by expecting too much, too soon.
On the flip side, there’s no need to prematurely squash possibilities.
Dak Prescott was a fourthround pick last year who wound up winning Offensive Rookie of the Year honors. And a year ago, Carson Wentz was supposedly destined for a redshirt rookie year. He started in Week 1.
Watson surely is mindful of the buzz his presence sparks in Houston. But he also sounds like the type to check himself when it comes to handling the hype and its attached reality.
“It’s going to take the hard work and the grind,” he said. “You can expect a lot of stuff and want to be great, want to be successful, especially early, but it’s a process. It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to take long nights, early mornings to be able to put in the work and to get what you need to get in to be successful on the field.”
Some projected Watson as the best quarterback in the draft, but in a year with no consensus for the order of the top-rated passers, he followed Mitchell Trubisky (second overall, Chicago Bears) and Patrick Mahomes (10th, Kansas City Chiefs) off the board. Five years from now, the comparison theme could be robust.
I’m figuring Watson wound up in the best situation of any of the rookie quarterbacks. His new team is coming off back-to-back division titles. There’s the support of a top defense, a solid offensive line and weapons such as DeAndre Hopkins and Lamar Miller. And there’s O’Brien, too, even as his reputation as a “quarterback guru” is tested.
Why that formula didn’t work last year for Brock Osweiler, guaranteed $37 million, is a serious question. Yet it’s interesting that O’Brien allowed recently that he has simplified his playbook, which might have been the lesson for how to break in quarterbacks.
With Watson, there’s no need to rush it. The work at rookie minicamp began with elementary basics, like where to line up in the huddle with respect to field position, how to call plays while learning new verbiage. And those expectations? “Show up every day and get better,” O’Brien declared. “Simple as that. … There’s always going to be something, whether it’s a play call or footwork or some type of decision at the line of scrimmage, that maybe you made a mistake on the day before or answered a question wrong in the meeting or whatever it is, let’s fix that. Let’s get better every single day. It’s a progress league.”
And how fast that progress comes or not makes it a lot more interesting.