HE TEXANS AT 15
Decade and a half later, city’s second NFL act stil l trying to find winning formula
If you’re really mad at the Texans right now, take a deep breath and think about something. When you were 15, did you have it together? Were your parents pulling their hair out and wondering when — if — you’d ever grow up and amount to something? Yes, they were. Of course, although football teams are corporations, they aren’t people. Maybe it’s a big stretch to suggest the Texans are simply unruly, unfocused, lost-balls-inthe-weeds adolescents (They do, in fact, have the youngest offense in the NFL, we’re told). And it’s a comforting analogy in a way because teenagers more often than not do wake up one morning and figure things out.
That can be the Texans, too. Remember how promisingly precocious they were at 10 and 11, winning left and right, thinking invincible thoughts and swaggering off to New England on that cold Monday night in December sporting their fancy new letter jackets? Hey, come on, admit it. It was cute. You wanted to give every one of them a noogie.
But today’s Texans, at 15, are testing our patience. Four seasons on from a hope-filled franchise-best 12-4 finish (that included the 42-14 bashing from the Patriots), they’re either going sideways or in circles. We’d have to ground them, but they’re doing a pretty good job of that on their own with Brock Osweiler’s bottom-of-the-barrel passing stats.
Despite having changed their key football-side components top to bottom — coach, quarterback, running back, wide receiver, et. al. — since the debacle of 2013, they still aren’t within realistic sniffing distance of the Super Bowl, a fact that’s especially sad now because the next one’s going to be played on their own field, possibly for the last time during any of their careers.
They won’t be going unless they score tickets. Oops, terrible choice of words because aren’t good at scoring anything, which makes things even worse. Being bad is bad enough. Being bad and boring at today’s prices should be intolerable except — show of hands, please — how many of you are ready to give up your tickets in disgust? Uh huh, I thought so.
In another day, teams like the Texans paid a financial and aesthetic price, the latter meaning stadiums that stayed two-thirds empty. Yet the Texans have never not sold a ticket they’ve printed so the incentive to be great doesn’t exist at an acute, visceral level. Owner Bob McNair might as well be printing money in his basement. Having said that, however, not for a moment do I think they aren’t working at least as diligently or with any less singleminded dedication than the other 31 teams to be great. They do play hard, as Bill O’Brien insists, doing his brokenrecord impersonation. In that respect anyway, the slacker teen analogy doesn’t fit. Others have been worse
But even the 0-12 Browns are probably grinding away to the best of their limited abilities. In Cleveland, management is 100 percent to blame. Terrible coaching and personnel decisions have made that team a laughingstock, and there’s comfort for
the rest of us to be found in the myriad mistakes made by the lake. The Texans look like overachievers by comparison considering the Browns have been to the playoffs only once since their re-founding in 1999, losing their lone postseason game. Over their first 15 seasons, their winning percentage was .363 (87-153), compared to the Texans’ .438 (103-32).
The Browns, however, did not get off to the worst start of any of the 10 modern-era (1960-2002) expansion teams. Not even close. The New Orleans Saints, founded by Houston oilman John Mecom in 1967, won just 59 times during their first 15 seasons. That’s less than four victories per year for a winning percentage of .277. At least they managed five ties.
Then there’s Tampa Bay. Their winning percentage was only .300 through 15 seasons after it stayed stuck at .000 for the franchise’s first 26 games (1976-77). However, the Buccaneers did somehow accidentally land in the NFC Championship Game after finishing their fourth season with a 9-7 record. That’s an aberration fans of other expansion teams find galling.