Defensive end J.J. Watt’s release, which was announced Friday morning, won’t be the last of the Houston Texans' troubles. Star wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins was traded before last season, head coach Bill O’Brien was fired mid-season and star quarterback Deshaun Watson is likely the next to go. All this turned a 10-6 playoff team in 2019 into a 4-12 trainwreck the next year.
The Texans are in a tailspin with no end in sight. The team’s coaching, draft capital and young talent are lacking across the board, and they are at a point where 4-12 might be the standard for years to come.
The future of the Texans is bleak. With no picks in the first two rounds of the NFL Draft and no first-round selections the year before, the team will be hard-pressed to find young talent in the first year of an attempted rebuild. The Texans would have had the 3rd overall selection if they had not traded it away to Miami in a deal for offensive tackle Laremy Tunsil.
Following a season where they gave up nearly 30 points per game, the Texans’ defense will continue to trend downhill without young talent and its long-time leader and former Defensive Player of the Year J.J. Watt.
On the offensive side, the Texans will likely lose its best receiver in Will Fuller and Watson. A four-win team losing a top-five quarterback in the NFL is not a recipe for future success.
Watson has been vocal about wanting to be free of the Texans organization. The franchise quarterback reportedly wanted a larger say in the organization’s future — including in the decision to hire a new head coach after Bill O’Brien was fired — because he thought ownership had made questionable decisions in the past, including trading away his No.1 target DeAndre Hopkins.
After some speculation, Watson officially requested a trade in late-January. He will now most likely end up on the New York Jets, Miami Dolphins, Denver Broncos, New England Patriots, Washington Football Team or the Chicago Bears, based on odds from FanDuel Sportsbook.
Eric Bieniemy, the Kansas City Chiefs’ offensive coordinator, was Watson’s preferred candidate to be the Texans next head coach. After Bieniemy’s Chiefs offense led the NFL in yards per game, he was a popular candidate to land a head coaching job around the NFL but was passed up for the second straight season.
The Texans not only passed on Watson’s preferred candidate, but they decided to make the worst head coaching hire of the offseason without his input, according to NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport.
Their new coach is David Culley. The Texans chose the 65-year-old passing game coordinator of the Baltimore Ravens, whose passing offense ranked last in the NFL last season.
Culley will step into a catastrophe of a team that just lost all of its leaders. The Texans will struggle for years to come in a rising AFC South.
The division has two playoff teams in the Indianapolis Colts and Tennessee Titans. Jacksonville will have a generational talent at quarterback in Trevor Lawrence, the most cap space in the NFL, and a proven coach in Urban Meyer who signed with the team in January.
When an organization implodes in the way the Texans have, the effects are not temporary. Once Watson is gone, the Texans will be one of the worst teams in the NFL with very few options to get back on track.
