The Houston Texans won the AFC South last season with an 11-5 record, but a dysfunctional offseason could give another team an easy opening to unseat them.
Since the Houston Texans won the AFC South last season and the second-placed Indianapolis Colts lost franchise quarterback Andrew Luck to retirement, Bill O’Brien’s squad should be the easy favorites to grab the division crown in 2019. But after the team traded Jadeveon Clowney to the Seattle Seahawks for essentially nothing, the Texans’ place atop the AFC South doesn’t look quite as solid.
It all started when the Texans tried to hire Nick Caserio from the New England Patriots, seemingly confident they would able to coax Bill Belichick’s protege into joining them. Predictably, this blew up in their faces. They were even hit with tampering charges.
But it wouldn’t have been such a disastrous move if the Texans didn’t fire their actual GM before reaching an agreement to hire Caserio from a conference rival. So this left the Texans without a GM, and instead of trying to put someone with tangible experience making personnel decisions in charge, they decided to make Bill O’Brien their head coach and GM.
O’Brien would be in charge of a Texans organization with two critical issues. Firstly, the Texans failed to sign or draft a franchise offensive tackle, instead choosing the perennially woeful Matt Kalil to protect the blindside of their franchise’s one and only hope, Deshaun Watson. The same Deshaun Watson who was sacked more than any other quarterback in the league.
Meanwhile, the Texans also had a precarious contract situation with Clowney, who was an unsigned franchise player. Instead of tagging Clowney as a defensive end, the Texans tried to save a couple of million dollars by tagging him as an outside linebacker, knowing full well that Clowney would be upset and get the NFLPA to file a grievance on his behalf. And because of his grievance, Clowney didn’t have to sign the tag or show up to mandatory offseason activities.
Basically, the Texans had to trade Clowney after antagonizing one of their best players, simply because they wanted to save a couple of million dollars. Instead of having an experienced negotiator and executive to navigate this situation, perhaps even rebuilding the burned bridge, the Texans had O’Brien.
And what did O’Brien do? The obvious decision would have been to trade Clowney for an offensive tackle, specifically prior to the franchise deadline so that Clowney could potentially get a locked-in deal with his new team. But because this occurred after the deadline, Clowney had all the leverage, as he could veto his landing spot.
This had huge implications for the Texans, because they could have acquired 25-year-old left tackle Laremy Tunsil, who still had multiple years left on a team-friendly rookie deal, from the Miami Dolphins. Clowney, however, had all the leverage and vetoed a trade to a team with no hope of contending.
So the Texans were forced to trade Clowney to the Seattle Seahawks. For a third-round pick, Barkevious Mingo and Jacob Martin.
That’s right. Bill O’Brien, who sent what could be a third-round pick to the Cleveland Browns for their backup running back, traded one of the NFL’s best edge defenders for two backup linebackers and a third-round pick (e.g. a starting running back).
The Clowney trade caps off an absolutely abysmal offseason from the Texans, which has featured incompetence at all levels of the organization from ownership to the executives to O’Brien himself. And since O’Brien has come under fire for uninventive play-calling, it’s safe to say that he will be on the hot seat if it looks like the Texans won’t win a division that no longer has Andrew Luck.
Since the Jacksonville Jaguars’ defense looks as good as ever and they made an upgrade at quarterback, Houston should be extremely worried that their head-scratching offseason decisions will quickly haunt them.