The Texans are a legitimate Super Bowl contender versus No They Aren’t

Two Sunday nights ago, the Texans closed out the 2025 Kansas City Chiefs for all intents and purposes. The Chargers would finish the job, as Patrick Mahomes tore his ACL in Los Angeles’ narrow win at Arrowhead a week later, removing the biggest bogeyman in the AFC from the playoff picture. I have a lot of respect for Mahomes — especially considering how little I could have since his commercial life is inescapable and one of my selfish big factors in how annoying an athlete is comes down to how inescapable they are — and hated to see it go down like that. 

The Chiefs victory was the best I felt after a Texans regular season win since Thanksgiving 2012 — when they beat the Lions in overtime to move to 10-1. Everything was coming together at the right time between prime J.J. Watt, Johnathan Joseph, and Arian Foster, the last great year of Andre Johnson, and a stellar offensive line. And instead, that win over the Lions was simply the last game where Matt Schaub was ever good again. 

Schaub had completed 19 scores and nine picks in the first 11 games of 2012, with a 7.49 adjusted yards per attempt. In those final five games he completed just three touchdowns to three interceptions, had a 6.49 adjusted yards per attempt, and the Texans slid all the way to the No. 3 seed. They wore Letterman jackets to Foxboro and got rinsed, with the vaunted defense allowing 42 points. They traveled back in the Divisional Round and merely allowed 41. 

2013 was the year with all the Schaub pick-sixes (10 touchdowns, 14 picks, 5.25 adjusted yards per attempt), even though they drafted this kid by the name of DeAndre Hopkins. Gary Kubiak was fired after Week 14's loss to the Jaguars. The Broncos won it all with Kubiak and Wade Phillips a few years later. It is not exactly a radical rewriting of history to suggest there was a Super Bowl nucleus there if Schaub’s body could have held on 20-30 more games over the course of 2011-2013 – they were also looking like one of the best teams in football in 2011 before Albert Haynesworth gave Schaub a season-ending Lisfranc injury. Or if they had ever come up with a real backup plan. (As someone who was editing a lot of Matt Waldman at the time, I had become the annoying person begging for third round Russell Wilson in the 2012 draft to get a succession plan in place. The Texans instead picked DeVier Posey.)

So anyway, you can see why I am hesitant to bring this up. The idea that the Texans could ever have legitimate dreams of contention is something that has, at best, been a fleeting idle thought, quickly quashed. The only time I felt any optimism of this sort in the Bill O’Brien Era was when they held a 24-0 lead over the Chiefs in the 2019 Divisional Round. That didn’t even last a full half.  Got a lot of respect for Mahomes, as I said, he at least terminated things quickly, right between the eyes. The Ryans Texans have been a lot of fun so far – and after the Easterby years I no longer take "competent division-winning play" for granted – but this is their first real dalliance with “wait a minute, did this team actually take a real leap?”

So it is with a great reluctance that I inform you of this table:

Yes, those are the Houston Texans. The formerly 0-3, currently seventh-seeded, not-even-best-from-the-ashes-story-in-their-own-division Texans. And the DVOA numbers think they have roughly better-to-the-same odds of winning the Super Bowl as any AFC team not named the Broncos. To be fair — the fact that this year has no real “no thought” AFC super power is a big part of this. It is a year of parity. There’s also a reluctance to give Bo Nix his flowers for how he played against the Chiefs and Packers, and I know why, because as a Texans fan who watched Nix look downright awful for most of their meeting in NRG Stadium, I can’t say the fear of him has settled in on me either. Could be that Nix has taken a step since then, I don’t want to shortchange him. But I also am not entering a theoretical playoff game in Denver thinking the Texans need to get lucky bounces to keep it close or anything along those lines. 

Here’s the thing, and this is something Robert Mays mentioned on an Athletic Football Show a while back: Teams that don’t have good offenses? They have not had a real prayer at the Super Bowl over the past 10 years. If you segment it out, the overwhelming majority of teams that made the conference championships and Super Bowls of those years were top-8 offenses empirically. Last year's final four teams were the Bills (2), Commanders (6), Chiefs (8), and Eagles (12) – while to pick another year at random, the 2019 final four teams were the Chiefs (2), Titans (6), 49ers (7), and Packers (8).

The Texans aren’t a top-eight DVOA offense. (And neither are the Broncos.)

But … this is a special year. There are three AFC teams that have a top-8 DVOA offense currently. The Chiefs, who are drawing dead. The Colts, who are drawing 44-year-old Philip Rivers into the room and who have not looked the same for months. And the Bills, who have been bad at offense many, many times this season. Including against the Texans! The lead that the Rams have on the other major offenses right now is something I just can’t remember seeing in my 15 years dialed in to the league. And that also extends to defense:

Nothing speaks to the parity of the football in this league right now than the fact that 29 teams can’t claim they are 20% better than average on offense or defense. 

It is shaping up to be a really, really stupid year. And I am in no way suggesting attachment to the Texans is smart or that they even deserve to be favored against whoever they could possibly play in the first round. Hell, with how Texans history has gone, they may just lose out now that I wrote this and never be seen again. I am merely pointing out that in a year of few outliers, their defense is one of them. And they have played a ridiculously hard schedule, so being 9-5 isn’t exactly a wild place for them to have wound up — they still have yet to lose by more than eight points. 

The big dumb football team I root for is absolutely incompetent the second they get to the red zone. They scored 40 points against the Cardinals and one of their touchdowns was snapped through the quarterback’s hands and recovered as a rushing-fumble touchdown. Another came only because C.J. Stroud got bored of watching nobody come open and drifted to the left waiting for someone to ride a sideline. This team employs both a Dare Ogunbowale wildcat formation and a Cade Stover tush push package. On purpose. 

And yet … their win on Sunday was the first time I’ve ever had to reckon with the idea that the Texans might be contender-level good for multiple weeks. Like, for the first time in my lifetime. The offense is so bad empirically. And yet you can just watch many Stroud dropbacks over the last few weeks and think "it can be much better."

What a dumb league we have this year. And why wouldn’t a big, dumb team thrive in it?