Scouting The Houston Texans

The Houston Texans, at 6-3, have somehow had two separate seasons on both offense and defense. The offensive nadir came when Deshaun Watson was sacked six times and hit 10 times by the Carolina Panthers in Week 4. The defense lost Jadeveon Clowney before the season, then was incapacitated by the loss of J.J. Watt against Oakland in Week 8. 

Both of these, along with a slew of moves happening in training camp and in-season, have essentially turned the Texans into a team that’s hard to forecast on any given week. They have clear leans, but nothing that can just out-and-out be relied upon beyond Watson’s work out of the structure of the offense. 

(You can discuss this on the BSL Board here.)

1) RPOs and the tight end drag

For the first four weeks of the season, Watson was asked to read deep receivers behind an offensive line that, despite trading for Laremy Tunsil, wasn’t good as a group yet. When it worked, he looked spectacular. It did not work against either the Jaguars or the Panthers, so Bill O’Brien retooled the offense to more of its 2017 roots. 

A lot of what Houston is doing now revolves around run-pass options and read-options, two things that occupy extra defenders. At its base, the Texans have dragged a tight end along with Watson — usually Darren Fells — and asked (usually) a single force defender to deal with both of them. 

https://twitter.com/riversmccown/status/1184246459388104704

Things have revolved off of that and the Texans have a number of different concepts they run off of it. Most common is Levels — there’ll be players on a few different levels of the defense running routes and Watson can read short to deep. Here’s one example of a play off of the successful base:

https://twitter.com/riversmccown/status/1194401701421342720

So far, most of the teams they’ve faced have not been able to effectively fight the easy yards that the Texans create on this because of how good Watson is in space. It takes — as I’m sure Ravens fans are familiar with because of Lamar Jackson’s option plays — good, assignment-sound football. Even then, you’ve got to rely on Watson to actually make a mistake. 

2) The changing of the guard

We don’t have a huge sample size of what the Texans have done without J.J. Watt yet, but you probably can discern some kernels of what they’ll do against Jackson from how they treated Gardner Minshew. I’m not saying those two are similar players in any respect, but the Texans were not excited to let Minshew beat them with his legs and often rushed to contain rather than sack:

https://twitter.com/riversmccown/status/1194417308111912960

The Texans have, at times, played heavy man-to-man in cover-1 or cover-3 (Kansas City game) and also been heavy in zone, depending on the opponent. Crennel has massively upped his blitz rate, but I don’t think you’ll see as much of that against the Ravens because Crennel is mostly about not giving up big plays and they will want to limit the Baltimore rushing attack as much as they can. 

I suspect if there’s a game plan you could see emulated against Jackson, it will be similar to what they did against Drew Brees. Against a quarterback with Brees’ accuracy and coverage-reading, it was not all that effective outside of one interception.

https://twitter.com/riversmccown/status/1171849560102252552

However, against Jackson — who has made strides but is not Drew Brees — I can see the Texans trying to force him to convert intermediate throws and living with the results. It’s a far better strategy than blitzing themselves into Jackson running on their defensive backs. 

3) Throw it over the middle

The Texans are the worst team at defending passes over the short middle of the field by a long shot this year. The Browns have allowed a 39.5% DVOA to receivers over the short middle of the field. (If you’re unfamiliar with DVOA, just read it as a percentage of how much better than average a pass is successful.) That’s the second-worst rate. The Texans are at 85.3% DVOA, which means that all of Patrick Mahomes’ throws as a whole are about half as valuable as just throwing it to the short middle against the Texans.

If you want to see what that looks like in a more normal football form:

https://twitter.com/riversmccown/status/1189302756487630855

The Texans have a lot of new players and don’t do a good job passing off players over the middle. The way to attack them is with crossing routes over the middle.