The Turf Monster: The Houston Texans are stuck in futility

Football is over. We have a champion. Andy Reid won his first Super Bowl and cemented his legacy as a Hall of Famer as Patrick Mahomes added yet another accolade to his incredible young career. We should be celebrating these amazing feats in an article like this, right? Wrong. That's not how we do things here in The Turf Monster. Instead, let's take a look back at the marvelous legacy that is the Houston Texans and their 2019 season.

Everyone knows the Houston Texans are used to disappointing playoff results, but what the Kansas City Chiefs did to this team in the 2020 AFC divisional round should be against the Geneva Convention.

They didn’t just crush the Texans. They gave them just enough hope for a first quarter to make them think they were all but Super Bowl-bound. Then, they scored on eight consecutive drives and scorched the frozen earth with record-setting offensive performances. The Texans didn’t just unleash a sleeping giant, they allowed them to rewrite the record books. Everything that happened on that fateful Sunday may just be owed to long-standing greatness on one end of the ball, but I’m here to argue it’s all owed to long-standing ineptitude on the other.

Let’s flash back to the beginning of the season. In the absence of a general manager, the Texans faced roster holes across the board, while defensive end Jadeveon Clowney had just been traded to Seattle after holding out for a new contract. Their young quarterback Deshaun Watson was a fragile centerpiece to this organization. He had been sacked a league-leading 62 times in the 2018 season. If such numbers had continued, it would have resulted in significant detriments to the development of their budding star.

Who stepped up in the organization to fix these issues on the precipice of a new season in 2019? Head coach Bill O’Brien. Coming off of the coaching hot-seat by authoring Deshaun Watson’s breakout 2017 campaign, which was cut short by injury, O’Brien more recently gained higher authority in the exec room, orchestrating numerous trades and roster moves.

The intention of these moves? Win now. That Jadeveon Clowney guy? Trade him for pennies on the dollar to Seattle. The tanking Dolphins supplied wide receiver Kenny Stills and standout left tackle Laremy Tunsil in exchange for draft hauls. O’Brien traded a good chunk of the Texans future for a patchwork of veterans, the sum of whom could not take the Texans where they wanted to go.

The most recent playoff loss only punctuates the issues O’Brien struggles with when coaching his on-field product. The Texans have fairly consistently made the playoffs in recent years, but rarely do anything with it. They take advantage of a weak AFC South and bow out to superior AFC competition. Deshaun Watson, in his never-ending benevolence, bails out the Texans on the field just like he bails out Bill O’Brien off of it.

I argue that if the Texans want to keep their star quarterback, they need to seriously revamp their organization. They need a better coach, an actual GM and some roster changes across the board. Will this happen? Nine times out of ten, when someone calls for organizational change, it doesn’t happen. We have wealthy and complacent franchise owners to thank for this. But this absolutely needs to happen: if not for the sake of a struggling franchise, then for the sake of a generational talent at quarterback with Hall of Fame potential.