What creates a Houston Texans, AFC South Champions? Well, it's the rest of the AFC South

The Houston Texans have their annual 3:30 PM game on Wild Card Saturday and the general public reaction is somewhere between disinterest and contempt. Nobody wants to watch Bobby Slowik’s offense after 17 games of ruination, and nobody believes in them as a real contender for the conference title after watching the Chiefs and Ravens sit on them for a national audience. I don’t say this to shame the public — nobody would rather these facts be different than me, but I can’t deny what this has looked like. I can’t tell you I believe things are going to be different on Saturday.

What I can tell you is that the main reason the Texans are here is that their division, as usual, sucks out loud. Five of Houston’s ten wins came against their fellow AFC South brethren, and the only objectively good team they beat all season was Buffalo.

There were storm clouds gathering for the AFC South, a lot of turnover forecasted in all the NFL insider/sourced pieces that were published. Angry ownership groups. But at the end of the day, not a lot has changed. Ran Carthon was dismissed a few minutes before I started writing this piece, the Jaguars will have a new coaching staff, and the Colts will, uh, get rid of Gus Bradley via contract expiration. That’s about it.

I wanted to briefly touch on these situations because it sure does seem like three owners just endorsed the Houston Texans to continue winning the AFC South by default.

Indianapolis Colts

If you look at the material that has come out about the Colts in the last week, most of it revolves around in-fighting over effort on defense. (Well, I’m not going to talk about Pat McAfee, but you can read that weird stuff if you’d like as well.) Here’s the thing: The defense was the good part of the Colts last year. Yes, the sacks fell, and yes, the pressures fell from 2023 to 2024. The Colts were 19th in defensive DVOA, a slight drop.

But (nervously looks around for remaining film winners) the Colts defense did not make Anthony Richardson lose his starting job, ask out for a play in a violation of football toughness norms, and continue to get dinged up with what he himself called a “chronic” back issue. They did not make Shane Steichen try to turn the entire direction of the offense into chucking it deep at Alec Pierce. They suffered because GM Chris Ballard played the “I trust our development” card after it worked in 2023 on the offensive line, and ran into the year with a cornerback group that looks like this:

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