Nick Caley thoughts: I don't know if he's good yet and neither do you

The major things that stuck out to me about Nick Caley’s press conference with the Texans are as follows:

• He wants to identify what the players do best and build the scheme around that. (“We’re not pounding a square peg into a round hole.”)
• He wants to establish the run game based on “what we do best.”
• The Texans are going to be a game-plan offense and won’t fit into a box of “scheme” as answered below:

Here’s what I take away from that right now: Nothing. Literally nothing.

Talking about the need for better offensive line communication and how important it is doesn’t really matter. We all saw last season that everyone needed to have the same pair of eyes. They didn’t do that as pass blockers no matter how much it was discussed. Getting them to do that goes beyond talking. Dropping Dante Scarnecchia’s name? I love it. If he’s not the offensive line coach here, that doesn’t matter.

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Talking about how you want to use your best players to do the things they do best is great, but unless you identify and do it in a game? It doesn’t really matter. Talking about being a game plan offense? That’s cool, but if you don’t game plan well, it won’t be a good offense.

My point isn’t that I think Caley is a bad hire or that his inexperience will doom us all, it’s simply that, well, I don’t know what I don’t know. He didn’t sound out of place as an offensive coordinator, and the insights he offered are about on par with what I’d expect. Until we see the proof of the pudding and C.J. Stroud drops back 30 times without getting hit while Joe Mixon runs pin-pull plays for eight yards a pop, I’m going to be a little reluctant to get high or low on Caley.

I suppose if I had a review it would be that Caley is able to say nothing well — that makes him a culture fit with this team. I don’t say that as a bad thing either, there are times where saying little is the right option. But listening to him talk for roughly 50 minutes in a few places after being hired, I didn’t come out of the experience thinking that he was dropping McVay-esque nuggets that made me feel pumped up that he’s going to push the right buttons.

That’s okay, coaching is an action business. We don’t have a lot of the action yet. All we get in February are the words.

Show me a really physical run game and I’ll show you really physical tight ends