A Winter Of Stroud's Content: The Betrayal

The scene: A January Sunday in the outskirts of Houston, Texas. The writer is exhausted. He worked Saturday night in addition to having full childcare responsibilities while his wife was sick. The TV is on. He has sworn not to live-write about this game on social media because doing it with the Steelers-Texans game added additional anxiety that made it hard to enjoy. It's been a long season, and still he cares enough about the result that he can't help but stress-clean. The kitchen is getting into spotless shape.

Everything is fine – not well, too much anxiety for well – until this happens.

And the color left the writer's cheeks. It's a throw that C.J. Stroud has made about three times this year – once against the Seahawks, once against the Raiders, and now here – and it's a throw that is, frankly, inexcusable. The Texans were built to win with defense – they swallowed Drake Maye for much of the day – but that leaves the team with little margin for error. No team in the NFL's final eight can afford a random touchdown against them, but this team especially cannot afford a random touchdown against them.

The writer watched more. waiting for Xavier Hutchinson's hands to pop up a ball over the middle. Then he turned the TV off, went to bed, and took a nap. He won't see the rest of this game for two weeks. But he knew how it would end from here – how could you not? The Patriots score 21 offensive points. It's enough.

It's enough.

When I started this series about C.J. Stroud, I was really hopeful that he'd deliver the goods in a game like this. Despite the slide in production since 2023, I think he's generally played well. If he made the types of throws he made against the Chiefs in the 2024 Divisional Round against the Patriots, I think the Texans would be a Super Bowl team.

But he didn't, and they aren't. Stroud instead put the two worst games of his season together against the Steelers and the Patriots in the playoffs. I'd probably stack them up against the 2024 Vikings and Jets games as the four worst he's played as an NFL starter. And, you know, he's right. He did let a lot of people down. The ball did not look right coming off of his hands at points, and I don't think the weather alone is a good enough excuse for that. He also very rarely got to use his anticipation – his best trait in my opinion – to target open areas of the field.

If you look at the NFL as a trends league, it's a little easier to see why this is happening. The general trend of Patrick Mahomes' production dying is the idea of "two-high" – the return of two-high safeties – coming back. What the Texans have faced since 2023 is the defensive NFL's response to the Shanahan/McVay system, and that's quarters coverage that aims to take away the middle of the field by layering defenders and passing off the big chunk routes.

Look at where these throws are going now, as opposed to the wildly successful Stroud throws over the middle in his rookie season, and you'll understand how the meta has changed. The ones that did go over the middle – that Hutchinson one is the interception – arguably shouldn't have been attempted either. The Rams sort of "holistically evolved" into using 13-personnel all year to combat this, and every other offense in the NFL just simply decided to not be good. (Only a bit of an exaggeration: The Rams were the only team that finished better than a 17.8% DVOA last year.)

It has certainly been easy to blame the Stroud results on the Stroud supporting cast over the past few years, but these playoffs were the first time where I conclusively come down on it being a "this is a C.J. Stroud" problem. It's very easy (and very true) to say the running game didn't work at all, and Nico Collins didn't play. Dalton Schultz left in the first quarter. This game ended with 13 Xavier Hutchinson targets and nine Harrison Bryant and Cade Stover targets. But if Stroud plays mistake-free football, I think the Texans probably win.

The good news about that is we've seen two of those games in 48 career starts, and the bad news is that they are the last two games and they get to taint our perceptions unalterably for months. I say that even as someone who still believes that the Texans can win a Super Bowl with him – the fact that he laid the egg that he did here is profoundly disappointing and has me revising what the ultimate ceiling and floor can look like here.

I think Stroud improved in the 2025 season in two areas that didn't make much of an impact on the box score line. While the Texans improved their offensive line from 2026, I think Stroud took a leap forward calling protections at the line of scrimmage as well. You didn't see as many unblocked rushers. His sack rate was the lowest it's ever been.

At the same time, he reworked his body to become more mobile. Despite the fact that the box score line (48/209/1) was essentially unchanged (52/233/0) from 2024, I think that overlooks how often he was asked to sneak for first downs in third-and fourth-and-short in Nick Caley's offense. He managed 18 first downs or touchdowns on those carries, and added 15.04 EPA. I tend to imagine that Justin Herbert is the gold standard of quarterback athleticism as far as the non-superstar MVP quarterbacks of recent renown. Stroud outgained him in rushing EPA. He outgained Bo Nix too. And Drake Maye. That isn't to say that he's as good as those guys on the ground or anywhere near their athletic equals – but it was a sizeable statistical improvement from 2024's minus-8.99 EPA.

You'll have to forgive me for conflating my two hobbies again but I think it's an easy and fair comparison: An NFL passing game is a lot like a video game speedrun. And in this case what Stroud was working on last year was technically impressive and helped his floor, but not necessarily something that was going to boost his personal best ceiling.

While Stroud is now walking the path of redemption, well, who isn't among the NFL's young quarterbacks these days? Sam Darnold walked it to a Super Bowl. I think Maye is (rightfully) ahead of Stroud in the young quarterback pecking order and also has a lot to atone for from his playoff performance. So does Herbert. (Again.) Caleb Williams' highs are so incredibly high, and also he was wildly inconsistent in the playoffs. Josh Allen got his head coach fired with his own four-turnover playoff game. Trevor Lawrence threw away his playoff game. Jordan Love watched the Packers defense get Williamsed and couldn't rally. The only young quarterback who didn't fumble away the playoffs is Bo Nix, and the only reason he didn't is that he got hurt instead. There were no real games this season that ended where the story was "ah, the third-year quarterback just crushed it but his defense couldn't hold up." The defense was the reason these teams were where they were.

And, well, good news, the NFL is a cyclical league and young quarterbacks that performed the way that Stroud did don't always have to be remembered by it. From Mike Sando's column in the aftermath:

I don't exactly think Stroud is walking the Hall of Fame path at this point, but I think the gist of what Sando was going for is that this doesn't have to shape the entire discourse. And when you add on how many other good young quarterbacks are looking at disappointing ends to their season as we turn the calendar to 2026, I don't know that the logical part of my brain feels worried about it yet. The id? Oh man, you don't want to hear from the id right now.

This is the biggest offseason for an offensive staff in Texans history. Neither Nick Caley nor Stroud looked great in 2025 – I think they did some decent stuff under the hood, but I can't find you an empirical reason to believe something incredible is hiding. I think Stroud improved on the margins, and I think Caley improved by cleaning up the easy areas of emphasis such as "actually picking up a tackle-end stunt" and "showing a pulse with formational diversity." But they both drowned against the current defensive meta. Had they actually made the Super Bowl, it's hard to imagine how they would have done better than New England's 13 points without major defensive help. I contrast this to an outfit like the Jaguars that actually seemed to have answers down the stretch, and I see that there's a lot that needs to be fixed.

I think Houston's passing game corps is completely set. They might draft a wideout because of the way the board falls, but between Stroud, Collins, Jayden Higgins, Jaylen Noel, Tank Dell, and Xavier Hutchinson, I don't think the room is easily penetrated. I don't expect a major free agency pick-up. They could theoretically move on from Dalton Schultz, maybe this will be the year Brevin Jordan is actually healthy or something like that, but unless they want to take a major stab on Isaiah Likely I don't think there's a second-contract upgrade out there at tight end.

So the resources – what little cap space there is – I expect to head to the running attack. And what that means is that, barring a Tank Dell miracle comeback to 95% of what he was in 2023, the Texans are going to have to improve as a passing offense holistically. They'll need Stroud to take major steps forward in his quarterback play, and they'll need Caley to take major steps forward in play-calling sequencing, and in creating an identity. The only easy clean-up area is this team's almost-impossible-to-shake ability to commit illegal motion penalties.

It's comforting, in a way, that there's not much to be done. If you believe the right guys are in place, then they will simply take another step forward in 2026 and the team will compete for a Super Bowl.

And it's discomforting for me because – whatever that sort of improvement looks like, we will never see it until the instant it happens. It will remain a lingering, unanswerable question until training camp.

(It's only a silly little thing like "the entire destiny of the team" at stake, haha, no worries, right?)