Texans Thursday on a Friday: The process and the offensive line
It's a learned helplessness
It was Christmas Day and I was, in my own head a little bit, thinking about process. Not necessarily what process was good or what was bad, but just how people get stuck in their processes. I was texting with a friend about the Cowboys process, which for the last few years has mostly been “we’re going to pay everybody at the last minute.” And from the outside it’s a bad process for winning football games. But it persists because every billionaire has their own different process, and the Jerry Jones process is to create drama and manufacture attention while paying the top of the market price so that you don’t get stuck paying for someone who is hurt early.
That ironically backfired a bit this year, of course, as Dak Prescott tore his hamstring. But everyone has their own process that they follow. I’ve employed several processes over the years when it comes to my own employment. The one that has stuck with people strongest for whatever reason (lack of available alternatives at one time, the various machinations of legacy media dying out, etc.) was “Houston Texans writer Rivers McCown.” When I came back to writing after my year off raising an infant son, I came back kind of wanting to dabble in everything. But here I remain in this lane because, well, writing thrives on attention. And when I did work on Texans things, people paid attention. I tried the different processes this year and the form they were presented in did not work as well as I’d hoped. I will have to go to the drawing board, as always.
And so it was Christmas Day, a day I had hoped to fully spend with my family, watching my son open presents for the first time. And C.J. Stroud dropped back to pass. It was third-and-4. The Texans ran a hurry-up offense.
Neither guard Kendrick Green (Houston’s third-string guard) nor Jarrett Patterson (by process of moving guys around, their second-string guard) picked up looping rusher Kyle Van Noy on a stunt. Stroud was sacked, the game wasn’t over but it was over.
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Nick Caserio is a man who believes in process. But the more time you spend with something, the more I believe you reach a stage of “form to leave form.” What I mean by that is, as the most accomplished Final Fantasy 4 speedrunner on the planet, I have played the fights enough to know when something is feeling wrong. I know when I need to abandon the fight script — the process — and instead play to save the fight. I also know when something is running so well that I want to press the issue, maybe skip a healing menu, because I want to grind an optimal time out of a segment.
Caserio has had control of the Texans since 2021, he has literally always had control of the roster written into his contract. (I think you can make an argument that Jack Easterby created some circumstances that had him bringing in certain players in 2021 and 2022. Regardless!)
During this time, Laremy Tunsil has consistently been an All-Pro caliber left tackle. (Random aside: It’s been interesting to see him talking about a Hall of Fame legacy and trying to square that with how the rest of this offensive line has looked for his entire Texans tenure.) Tytus Howard has been a bookend right tackle when Houston hasn’t made him play guard for incredibly stupid tragic situations that befall the team literally every season. I don’t think Howard has been empirically or visually great, but he’s been good enough to where I can say the Texans have never been put in a Titans-esque situation where one side of their line is so terrible that it sinks the entire offense.
Despite what I’d call a good level of talent and investment in the offensive line, the Texans have never had a good offensive line output under Caserio. They’ve literally never run the ball well. That had already become a bugaboo in 2020 for the team — don’t worry, I won’t write about David Johnson today. It remains one to this day, even after adding Joe Mixon, drafting a guard and center in the first- and second-rounds, adding Shaq Mason in a trade and signing him to a long-term extension. They’re 27th in rushing DVOA. They were 30th in rushing DVOA in 2023. They were 32nd in 2022 and 2021. Chris Strausser has been the offensive line coach each of the last two seasons, George Warhop was the offensive line coach in 2022, and James Campen ran the unit in 2021.
What we thought C.J. Stroud had overcome in 2023 with sacks has become a major bugaboo in 2024. The Texans have the sixth-worst adjusted sack rate in 2024, barely ahead of the Titans and Patriots. They were 11th-worst in 2023.
The names change. The talent levels have fluctuated wildly. The processes employed — competition versus paying versus drafting — have fluctuated wildly. The results remain the same.
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When you design a process that’s not working, you can abandon it. But what this failing is pointing to is something deeper than paid guy, drafted guy, rookie guy. It comes down to the fundamental evaluations of who these linemen are and what the team looks for. Matt Weston, former offensive lineman and departed Texans blogger soul of the past, would succinctly sum it up as: “Caserio doesn’t believe in getting an ass-kicker” when I asked him last year about running poorly in 2023.
How to fix the output of the Texans offensive line is a question that I simply don’t trust anybody to answer unless they work enough hours or have a big enough staff that they don’t need to be commenting on the internet. Scheme has a hand, Stroud’s comfort has a hand. But ultimately where I come down is that the process of finding and training these lineman — something that sounds so easy on paper, something that so many other teams in the NFL can simply do — is impossible for the Texans. A majority of these pressures and missed run blocks are not about getting overpowered or dominated at the point of attack, but about just not picking up a looper, not understanding the point of the blitz that the defense brings, or failing to get a good double-team.
The process has failed at a fundamental level. In speedrunning terms this would be like if Caserio didn’t understand a common trick. He knows that he needs to throw this weapon here and how to get to it, but he fails run buffering and the enemy’s turn pops off first.
Assuming he plays in Week 18 — I wouldn’t let him — Joe Mixon will almost certainly become the first Texans running back to have a 1,000-yard season since Carlos Hyde in 2019. But that’s largely about what Mixon can do on his own. He has had to fight tooth and nail to create the explosive yards that this offense lives on since Week 1.
And that is the destiny of this team on offense until whatever doomed processes are used to put this offensive line together are fixed. They are swimming against the current, hoping the individual talent of Stroud, Mixon, and Nico Collins can create enough big plays to keep the pulse alive. It is a current that will almost certainly drown Strausser this offseason. It is a current that threatens to drown Bobby Slowik.
But are those firings the process that will fix the fundamental problems this team has blocking, or are they just more cogs to spin?