The Gift

There was a play in Houston's Week 10 win over the Jaguars where I thought something that I think every week when I'm watching football: I guess they're just not going to be punished for it today. It came following this Trevor Lawrence throw:

It is not an uncommon thought to have in a parity-driven league where many flawed teams are in the realm of contention. In fact, I think it's one of the great things about the league. The Texans easily have one of the three worst offensive lines in the NFL, and they were without their best remaining lineman, Tytus Howard, in this game. I input transactions into Rotoworld's NFL database four days a week and I had no idea that Sidy Sow was even on the team, let alone in the conversation to be starting.

But not every team runs the sim pressures that seem to destroy the Texans, and not every team runs the correct stunts. Many teams are focused on just presenting their rendition of what football is rather than worrying about the other team. The greatest strength of the league sometimes lies in that core inability to understand the opponent.

And so even though the Texans have the best pass defense in the NFL, and even though Trevor Lawrence has multiple plays a week that make you wonder how he thinks he could play like this, he threw only one interception against the Texans. He tried – he really did – to create more of them. But it just didn't come together.

And that's okay because in the fourth quarter he completed no passes. He only even attempted one pass, and it was batted down in a disrespectful way by Azeez Al-Shaair:

You can't tell the story of the Texans winning the game without invoking the defense. The Jaguars scored 29 points, but seven of them were on special teams, and several of those points were abetted by crippling penalties or a fumbled kickoff. The Texans allowed 3.9 yards per play and the Jaguars converted 4-of-11 third downs. The Jaguars managed one total yard in the fourth quarter.

Sometimes when a defense sparks a comeback, it is just two or three major splash plays. A fumble here, a pick-six there, a key third-down stop where the receiver drops the ball. The Texans weren't able to find that splash play until the very end of the game. They didn't have a tough matchup – Parker Washington operated as the No. 1 wideout, Jakobi Meyers had been here less than a week, Jacksonville's offensive line was missing a starter and struggled.

What they did, though, was create the belief.

About midway through the second quarter, I was ready to watch something else. Fortunately (or unfortunately some weeks), I am actually paid to watch this game and recap it for Rotoworld. I was a captive audience.

I viscerally loathe watching Davis Mills play football. It has nothing to do with him really – he seems like a nice enough person – but I spent 2021 and 2022 Fully On Texans Beat and the discourse of the time trended heavily into "This Third-Round Quarterback Will Buck The Odds And Become A Star Because He Beat Trevor Lawrence" versus "No He Won't." It was soul-crushing and depressing to watch a bunch of otherwise rational people convince themselves that Chris Moore Mossing a Patriots defensive back meant the Texans were set up for the future. And, well, it was also soul-crushing and depressing to have to watch the 2021 and 2022 Texans.

There are football teams where injuries kill a promising season – think Washington this year – and there are football teams where enough of those injuries accumulate – think San Francisco this year – to where even a lot of otherwise good planning can only keep hope alive. The 2021 and 2022 Texans never had hope. They were anchored to the only coaches in the NFL that would work with Jack Easterby, and those coaches did things like look at young Derek Stingley and think "let's make him play zone." I'm sure this is old hat for the diehards that have read me for many years, for the rest of you, please reference this:

God, the names that walked through that door. They turned over an entire roster with special teamers. One of the most frequent criticisms directed at me over the last 10 years in this business has been that I'm too negative. And all this negative person really wants is to not have a reason to think about the 2021 and 2022 Texans again. So, Davis Mills' existence on the roster is, to me, a constant reminder that things can always be worse. I have to suffer slander every time I turn the computer on about how C.J. Stroud's pass-neutral numbers aren't as good as they used to be and how the fact that he's still doing TV ads in spite of this means he's a megafraud.

But: At least I'm not watching Davis Mills. Until these past two weeks, anyway.

And through the first half, Mills performed up to expectations. He got intercepted on his first drive:

He fumbled a snap that hit him right in the hands to create a punt on his second drive. He made an impressive move to shed a defender in the backfield, scrambled to the sideline as if he was suddenly Josh Allen, and hurled a ball into a crowd of two Jaguars defenders on the sideline. They made it to the red zone after a Woody Marks 21-yard run and a Jaylin Noel catch and that was where he did this:

So I mean, after that throw, I was captive – but I was done. Heck, even at the end of the second half when the Texans finally did manage a touchdown drive, it came because what should have been a sack on Mills was erased by a roughing the passer penalty. Mills never saw the pressure coming:

I promise I am not trying to dogpile the man who did what we'll see over this next bit of the article – I just want to establish why I believed this game was over. He was not playing particularly well, and that wasn't surprising. The Jaguars were staked to a huge lead. It felt like we were headed here. The Texans would fall to 3-6, and the season would be over.

The entire experience of this fourth quarter was jarringly surreal. It had a lot of elements of things I've seen in football games before, but put into an order I've never seen them.

First of all, the elephant in the surreal room: The Texans don't win football games like this. They participate in them often. Every Texans fan can rattle off the true lowlights: 24-0 in Kansas City in the divisional round, The Rosencopter, The Q-Tip, wearing Letterman Jackets into Foxboro. The Houston Texans are an expansion team that never really grew up for 10 years, and when they did finally grow up, the adults yelled at them to go directly to the Saturday 2:30 CT Wild Card table and stay there. And they have.

The second surreal thing about it was: The Texans ran the ball nine times for 63 yards in the fourth quarter – eight for 49 if you want to take a certain Mills scramble out of it. One of this team's trademarks under Nick Caserio is poor run blocking, and they folded the Jaguars defensive line badly the entire quarter.

You can see Woody Marks is actually trying to turn this into a home run carry with his footwork – if he had just cut further to the right there were potentially more yards to be found. Jake Andrews wasn't able to fully seal off his man, but look at how much space the Jaguars vacate. That's something I honestly can't remember happening since the Deshaun Watson Era.

Finally, there was Mills ... and the thing is, he ripped three monumental throws in this game. The first was laying the ball directly into a spot where only Nico Collins could get it over the middle of the field. The second was the touchdown throw to Dalton Schultz in the back of the end zone – that was the first moment I believed that they could actually win:

But even on Houston's final offensive drive of the game, even with that running game, they started off threatening to go three-and-out almost immediately until Mills hits this throw:

He finally feels a little pressure here (the Jaguars did not send blitzes often) and has to, off his back foot, lead this ball into the vacated sideline. It's a touch throw to keep it out of the trailing defender's path, and it was placed right where Schultz could grab it.

If you've gone 1,000 words into a blog about this game, I'm going to assume you've seen the Davis Mills scramble that gave the Texans the lead. There are two contextual things that I think need to be added to the improbability of this happening. One is that the Texans actually start at first-and-goal from the 2, then have two different false start penalties and a minus-2 yard run. In my delirious The Texans Never Have Good Things Brain, I was almost positive that these were going to be death knells in another one-score loss (they were 0-5 in one-score games prior to Sunday).

The second thing is that the last time Davis Mills scrambled for the goal line, it looked like this:

I wouldn't say that Mills is unathletic, but he has that sort of goofy athleticism where you're left wondering if he's going to hurt himself somehow. I was just hoping he wasn't about to get injured when he ran forward, and instead I was left mouth agape.

Sitting here today, I can't tell you that the Texans are going anywhere. As I wrote last week, they have the underlying numbers of the best defense in the NFL and an offense that vacillates from horrific and unwatchable to competent until it finds the red zone. But I can tell you that without that win on Sunday, they were dead in the water.

When I do Sports Hater stuff, I tend to think of it mostly as kayfabe. I have a list of teams I fucking detest: The Atlanta Braves, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Tennessee Titans – these are mostly organizations that represent a robbed joy I never got to experience as a youth. But also they're just faceless corporations that have nothing to do with those moments today, and I'm angry at ghosts. No amount of Amy Adams Strunk dragging the Titans into the underworld will ever erase the Oilers leaving. No amount of Michael Harris Jr. collapsing will erase Kenny Rogers throwing ball four. And so on.

With Mills, it actually felt like a personal attack that he was still on the team. It was something I could only compare to Tom Glavine signing with the Mets. The ghosts weren't theoretical, they were actually in the room.

Mills on this roster is making me think of David Culley chewing on his tongue, Deshaun Watson being a healthy scratch for an entire season, and Lovie Smith "doing the Bears a favor" by winning the season finale against the Colts. He's making me think of Chris Moore and Chris Conley, eight comments I got about not being nice enough to the Texans for the Brandin Cooks trade, and Tyrod Taylor trying to throw a ball out of bounds against the Dolphins only for it to be intercepted because it wasn't pushed far enough. He's making me think of years of putting out some of the best material of my life about a team that nobody will ever give a shit about, a D drive full of (mostly) lowlights of two years of football I will only be able to relive with seven or eight fellow sickos. Of watching some potential futures for my career closing while I got boxed into being something that nobody will ever pay for and somebody without the kind of background that would get you hired to work for a major newspaper.

And now he doesn't.