Is it still a panic button if you were always worried?

Nick Caley's offense is not off to a good start. The Texans were, frankly, lucky to crack 19 points on Monday night. They needed a huge Jaylin Noel punt return and a blocked punt to get the short fields to get there.

I'm not panicked about the state of the team currently because I don't know that I saw the offense beyond the probabilities, and one of those probabilities was always going to be that last year's problems were here in the front seat reminding us of their existence daily. That's certainly the one that has come to pass so far.

Scrub Nick Chubb's 25-yard touchdown run from the record and the Texans had 32 rushing yards from their backs on 14 attempts – that's not going to be consistent enough to get them to where they want to go. I'm a little disappointed that the Buccaneers were able to run so effectively on the Texans – and that's something I trust to get addressed because DeMeco Ryans won't stand for bad run defense no matter what he has to do to fix it – but otherwise this is a top-five NFL defense and a great special teams unit that have lost two close games against perennial playoff teams.

There's an offense on the team too. What's the emphasis? I don't think we know yet. It's a series of half-measures.

Nick Caley doesn't trust the offensive line – nor should they – so they add an extra blocker often. They have 57 dropbacks and per TruMedia, 21 of them have come with six or more blockers. The Buccaneers absolutely dunked on these in Week 2. The nine dropbacks were worth a total of -7.5 expected points added. Two of them came on the fabled goal-line stand.

One of my main points off watching this back is just: It doesn't have to look this hard. The easiest offense I've ever seen the Texans run (loathe as I am to give this duo credit in the year of our lord 2025) is when Deshaun Watson took over as Texans starter in 2017 and Bill O'Brien was running the show. Look at this play:

DeAndre Hopkins is one of the best receivers of our time, I get it, but look at how quick he was out of the stance and on to the route, then compare that to what we see above. Caley out-thought himself for a lot of that stand, including whatever the hell the fourth-down call was supposed to be:

The problem with involving the backs and tight ends in pass protection in this offense is a classic push-pull, and something that Bobby Slowik struggled with last year.

Houston, at it's core, wants to run the football and win by imposing it's will. They suck at it. They've sucked at it for almost the entirety of the time I've written about the NFL now, and I started in the Arian Foster golden years! The only offensive line they've ever had that has gelled well enough to run the ball consistently in the last 10 years was when Carlos Hyde was a 1,000-yard rusher in 2019. Nick Caserio's offensive line acquisition track record is ghastly – and I'm not saying Aireontae Ersery can't work out, but am I getting nagging feelings of anger every time I read a fawning piece about Josh Simmons? Yes, reader, yes I am.

So the pull from that is "we must involve more side blockers," and the problem with that is: The Texans don't have many good blockers! It's why Robert Woods got so much run last year. This year, the Texans have gotten solid contributions from Harrison Bryant in that area. (See: The seal he got on the Chubb touchdown run in Week 2.) Dalton Schultz is currently carrying a good PFF grade in run blocking but was awful at it last year – maybe I'm missing some good carries from this week since I focused on the pass offense but I haven't seen a lot of Schultz run blocks that I think are jumping off the tape at me.

And when you involve said side backers in pass protection and give them real roles in that – see Schultz in Kansas City playoff game – they get beat and you look like an idiot.

I'm just an idiot who watches this stuff, but my preference for this offense developing would be to get away from so many non-linemen blocking. You drafted a quarterback second overall, and he's good by any objective measure of the word – I understand some people will drop by and say he's not, and that's fine, it wasn't a good game yesterday for sure. So if the strength of the offense is the quarterback, let's give him five routes every time. Let's back him up into empty or the gun and let him pick things apart while he has easy hot routes. Heck, if you need to stay married to the bigger personnel, how about a block-and-release route for Schultz that nobody will see coming?

This is one of the most static offenses in the league, and while the Christian Kirk injury has some knock-on effects on this, they are limiting themselves with their personnel choices. 82 of 111 offensive plays so far with three or more wide receivers, except so many of them are Xavier Hutchinson and Justin Watson that the offense is prayerless. I don't think motion is the end-all, be-all, and I don't think play-action is a "push for offense" button, but the lack of those to help better define routes are telling as well.

I learned a long time ago that you can never write off a unit after two games, but when you combine last season, a training camp that was by all objective accounts bad, and what we've seen so far ... it's hard to shake the assumption that this is going to be a bad unit again. The burden of proof is on Caley and Stroud to turn that perception around.