NFL Week 18 overreactions: 14-team playoff field is set with endless possibilities
Mackenzie Salmon ‘overreacts’ to the biggest storylines from Week 18 in the NFL.
USA TODAY
Lovie Smith wasn’t the problem with the Houston Texans. Just as David Culley wasn’t.
It’s easier to fire the head coach, however, than acknowledge who’s really responsible for the train wreck. Which, in the case of the Texans, is a general manager in over his head and an owner who’s incompetent.
Smith was fired Sunday night after coaching the Texans for all of one season, just as Culley was a year earlier. Neither firing came as a surprise – let’s be honest, both Smith and Culley were hired to be fired, fill-ins for coaches the Texans really wanted but couldn’t get – but the reasons given by both owner Cal McNair and general manager Nick Caserio were laughable.
“While we understand the results have not been what we had hoped for, we are committed to building a program that produces long-term, sustainable success,” McNair said on Twitter.
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“It is my responsibility to build a comprehensive and competitive program that can sustain success over a long period of time,” Caserio said in his statement. “We aren’t there right now, however, with the support of the McNair family and the resources available to us, I’m confident in the direction of our football program moving forward.”
Well, that makes one person.
The Texans have had one winning season since McNair became CEO in January 2019 following the death of his father, Robert. During that time, they’ve also had a former team chaplain as a de facto GM and enabled a sexual predator (Deshaun Watson). They gave away one of the team’s best players for the equivalent of a bag of footballs and parted ways with the other in an acknowledgment of the team’s dysfunction.
There was the awkward backing away from Brian Flores after he filed a lawsuit accusing the NFL and some of its teams of racial bias.
And don’t forget giving serious consideration – not once but twice! – to hiring Josh McCown as head coach despite the former quarterback having zero experience. At any level. (Ask the Indianapolis Colts how well that’s going to work.)
This isn’t a solidly run franchise that has hit a temporary rough patch, like the Pittsburgh Steelers. No, the Texans are led by people who don’t have a clue what they’re doing but are certain they do. When things go south, as they inevitably do, they look to put the blame elsewhere.
And how convenient that, for the last two years, at least, they have had Black head coaches so desperate for an opportunity they were willing to take the job knowing full well how it was going to end.
“What are the Texans doing?” Tony Dungy, the Super Bowl-winning coach who is now an NBC Sports analyst, asked on Twitter. “What kind of operation is this where you don’t have any convictions about supporting the coaches you hire. Who is going to want to coach there if you only get one year to implement your plans.
“Two years in a row is ridiculous,” Dungy added, referring to both Smith and Culley being one and dones.
Extreme as the NFL’s win-now mentality is, that usually means two or three seasons. Not one. You have to be spectacularly bad – hello, Urban Meyer! – to get canned before that, and neither Smith, who took the Chicago Bears to the Super Bowl, nor Culley, a well-respected assistant, qualify.
At least Smith got the last laugh, though.
In a reflection of both his coaching acumen and the respect his players have for him, Smith led the Texans to an improbable late win Sunday over the Colts that cost the Texans the No. 1 pick in this year’s NFL draft.
The beneficiary? The Bears, the team that gave Smith his first chance as a head coach.
To say that Smith wrecked McNair and Caserio’s plans would suggest the dynamic duo had one, and nothing that’s occurred in the last few years should give anyone confidence that’s the case.
McNair’s decision to hire Jack Easterby, a one-time team chaplain for the New England Patriots, as vice president of team development struck many as odd. But Dan Campbell talked about biting kneecaps and look what he’s managed to do with the Detroit Lions.
Easterby, though, alienated players and team officials alike as he tried to amass more and more power, and he was fired in October.
Caserio is now looking for his third coach in as many years, and all he has to entice him with is a decent amount of cap space, a few good players and the No. 2 pick in a draft without any surefire difference makers.
So, no, the Texans aren’t a coach, a player or an any one thing away from making the Super Bowl. An extensive rebuild is needed in Houston, and it’s going to require someone with vision and savvy to pull it off.
Someone the Texans don’t have.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on Twitter @nrarmour.
