Is this a year where ceiling doesn't matter?

I've been thinking a lot lately about a specific subset of fans, one of whom is a BlueSky reply guy, where the train of thought is "the ceiling of the Houston Texans is not high enough."

And I think the best way to think about ceiling is to say: I don't know that there's a team out there that actually worries me in this regard in 2025. The Seahawks and Rams are the two best teams in the NFL by DVOA, the Texans played them both to one-score games on the road. (Yes, the Seahawks game does feel a little misleading to be labeled as such. Still.) Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, and Josh Allen are all having flawed years despite very impressive statistics, the wings on the Daniel Jones plane look to be faltering, and the Eagles barely seem capable of mustering a competent offense most weeks. There are years where the juggernaut team(s) has(ve) it all come together in a way that feels inevitable. This season doesn't feel like it has one of those teams, at least not yet.

When the Texans were at their most competitive, in that brief 2011-2012 peak, they were clearly less talented than the Patriots, Ravens, and Broncos once they got Peyton Manning online. The Bill O'Brien Texans were never good enough at anything to be a real contender. The 2023 Texans were a Good Story that won a playoff game.

I don't think the 2024 Texans were out-talented, but I think the lasting memory of a Ravens Christmas bleeds in to their story in a way that makes them feel like they were. They gave the Mahomes Chiefs all that they could handle in the Divisional Round – they outgained them handily, 336-212. The game should have been tied in the middle of the third quarter. Ka'imi Fairbairn, who missed the extra point that should have tied that game, also had two field goals turned away. The offensive line that had been an issue allowed eight sacks and (along with the helper blockers) absolutely burst into pieces in the fourth quarter.

Failure is a nearly inevitable part of any sports season. One team wins it all, and the rest do not. I have been alive for 40 years, and I've been an actual functioning sports fan of some kind for around 30 of them. Of the teams I've had some kind of rooting interest in, none of them have won it all since the 1995 Rockets, 30 years ago. (My decision, influenced by family, to become a Mets fan rather than an Astros fan is doing some real work – though at least I've never had to step foot into trashcan arguments with a real stake.)

The failures that hurt the most are the ones where you're at the table, and the 2024 Texans actually brought them there. The 2025 Texans are – you're not going to want to hear this, especially after they probably lose tonight – still at the table. They have the best defense in the NFL. It isn't the game that is exciting for a casual NFL fan to see, and they haven't actually addressed a single one of their offensive issues in a way that moves beyond game-to-game adjustment. But it doesn't matter. That defense can stand with any team, and if they string together 20 points they are going to win most of their games.

It is, to be clear, a failure that this team cannot reliably score 20 points. Defensive performance is incredibly volatile, and the mix that works one year does not always work the next as injuries, age, and attrition take their pound of flesh. For all we know, this could be the best year the Texans defense ever has under DeMeco Ryans. And it has been wasted so far because of bets that largely relied on "source: trust me bro" reasoning – the Texans did not have to trade Laremy Tunsil, they certainly did not have to create a world where Jake Andrews became their starting center, and they did not have to entrust the operation to a first-year NFL offensive line coach whose only relevant experience was watching this go down in flames last year.

What we're left with here down the stretch is seven games of football against mostly the AFC's best – Bills, Chiefs, Colts twice, and perhaps the Chargers if they can get off the same "no OL" mat the Texans are currently on. The Texans credibly need to win five of them to make the playoffs, and given the fact that the Bills and Chiefs are both potential wild card teams as well, they desperately need to win those two games in particular. The odds are not dire, but they've also made enough of a mess of their early one-score games – particularly Week 3 against the Jaguars, a game that is currently keeping them out of the seven seed – that it is an uphill climb.

I definitely think the Texans have a chance to win any given game, and I don't know that I'd go so far as to say everyone has to get fired either. There's still seven games left for major improvements from youth, (six games) for C.J. Stroud to get back and in an offensive infrastructure that I think has taken steps forward over the past six games, and for Nick Caley to prove he's better than he showed in the first month of the season.

In a year of survival, they have one weapon that nobody else has, and that's the ability to bring an opposing offense to its knees. Nobody has a higher defensive ceiling than these Texans, and while I read a lot of people lamenting how this is the end of the Stroud rookie contract years and how those have been wasted, to me, the bigger sin is wasting how this defense has played the last two years.

(At least until the Bills score 40 points tonight, anyway.)