When brute force fails: A Texans Red Zone study

There are 32 NFL teams. The Houston Texans are just about middle of the pack in total red zone trips – 18th in the league, with 39 trips. They are the only team in the league with that many trips and fewer than 20 touchdowns, at 17. The only team in the league that has converted a lower number of their red zone trips into touchdowns is the Saints. And per the advanced statistics from Aaron Schatz at FTN Fantasy, the Texans have the worst red zone DVOA in the league at minus-37.9%.

Outside of the Ravens – another confounding team – the Texans are the only team at or above .500 in this area code of Red Zone Problems.

It is easy to make fun of the Cade Stover tush push. It's easy both because it feels so monumentally stupid – Cade Stover? The backup tight end? You want the ball in his hands? – and because the results were empirically poor. But it's also easy because it falls into the real issue here: an identity crisis. The Houston Texans want to bully you on offense. They want to have the kind of offensive line that wins a brawl. They want to physically impose their will on the opponent. They want it badly enough that they have been a league leader in using six offensive linemen for most of the last month.

But they don't have that team. They won't have that team. They may want to have that team – and I'd say that's admirable, we all want things. I want people to pay me $1,000 every time I publish a post about the Houston Texans. The market speaks. We have what we have.

The Texans have one of the three worst offensive lines in the NFL by any objective measure – you can put the banged-up Chargers and down-bad Raiders behind them, but after that I have a hard time finding a team to argue is worse. And when I say that, it's actually not a complete shot at OL coach Cole Popovich, who has gotten the line to do a notably better job in blitz protection and on stunts. The only positive thing I can say about Nick Caserio's player acquisition strategy is that when you build the kind of depth he has, you can accidentally stumble into slightly better positions as you shuffle the line every other week. Trent Brown at 32 is not the ass-kicker he was at 27, but he can at least play one sometimes, which is more than you can say for the rest of this unit. Tytus Howard is one position switch to center away from qualifying for Bruce Matthews status.

The Texans have the second-worst success rate in DVOA's "power" runs (percentage of runs on third or fourth down, two yards or less to go, that achieved a first down or touchdown) and lead the NFL in "stuffed" rate, with 29 percent of their runs going for no gain or negative yards. If I split DVOA out to show us just red zone runs, it gets more grim. The average NFL team has a DVOA of minus-2.1 percent on red zone runs. The Las Vegas Raiders, in 31st place, have a DVOA of minus-41.1 percent on red zone runs.

The Houston Texans, averaging 1.78 yards per carry on 49 red zone runs, have a red zone rushing DVOA of minus-50.5 percent.

And, here's what really speaks to how bad the one-on-one blocking is: They have four rushing touchdowns in the red zone this year – every single one of them has been an outside run.

The Texans, hilariously since their next opponent is the Chiefs, need to treat their red zone plays more like Kansas City does. They need to use every bit of horizontal space they can. Power needs to be a change-up. That's not how they want to play it, but that is the hand that they've dealt themselves.

This is an offense with an accurate quarterback that needs to have finesse be the main pitch in the red zone. When the Texans do things like block-and-release, get pop plays going to Jaylin Noel, or otherwise get a defense off its initial read, they have much more of a fighting chance in a condensed space. Their most successful red zone game was against the Ravens backups in Baltimore, and aside from the fact that they were playing against backups, you can see that they also spread the field out and attacked matchups they liked with play-action. They generated clean middle-of-the-field looks to Nico Collins. That's the kind of stuff this red zone and short-yardage unit needs to start with.

But whether it was whatever happened in the Seattle game's third-and-1/fourth-and-1 stands (both just after halftime and in the fourth quarter), the Stover tush push, the British Brooks goal line plays in the Broncos game, the Davis Mills sneak attempt in that same Broncos game ... this team cannot line up and push their way to a yard. They simply cannot! It may be what they want to be built to do, but it is not the reality we currently inhabit.

I am willing to change my mind if someone donates $1,000 to me for this post.