Have we been too hard on Bill O'Brien, Texans GM?
O'Brien hasn't been shy about dealing away star talent for questionable returns. But it all makes sense. Kinda!
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Bill O’Brien is not a bad NFL head coach.
The man who helped rebuild Penn State has guided the Texans to a winning record in five of his six seasons in Houston. He has a pair of postseason victories to his name. He was smart enough to elevate Deshaun Watson to a top role one week into his NFL career and watched him post a 24-13 record as a starter.
By most measures, Bill O’Brien is a decidedly above-average head coach. And that may not be enough to make the Texans a Super Bowl contender, because even an above-average head coach would struggle to overcome the roster changes Houston’s general manager has thrown in his way.
A general manager who is … also Bill O’Brien.
O’Brien officially took over the team’s GM role last January after handling team-building duties as the position went unfilled through the 2019 season. In two years playing architect, the coach’s tenure has been defined by his willingness to wheel and deal the biggest assets in his portfolio, even in the face of immediate blowback.
The Texans have made eight trades since August 2019, not counting draft-day pick swaps.
In that span, the Texans have shed Pro Bowl talent like Jadeveon Clowney, D.J. Reader, Tyrann Mathieu, and DeAndre Hopkins through either trades or free agency. In their place have come players like Laremy Tunsil, David Johnson, Eric Murray, Brandin Cooks, Tashaun Gipson, and Randall Cobb.
So while Watson — newly signed to a $156 million extension — and J.J. Watt remain, the rest of O’Brien’s roster is fluid. Will the changes he’s made the past two years be enough to put a division contender in range of an AFC title? Will they even be enough for him to keep his job as general manager?
It’s been so, so easy to dunk on O’Brien’s roster moves
Let’s start with the obvious one..
On March 26, O’Brien traded Hopkins and a fourth-round pick to the Cardinals for David Johnson (3.6 yards per carry since 2017) and a second-round selection. The four-time All-Pro receiver went from “pretty good” to “holy crap” with Watson as his quarterback, upping his catch rate by double digits across the 2018-19 seasons — two seasons in which the Texans, not coincidentally, won the AFC South.
Less than a month later, O’Brien used the money saved by not adjusting Hopkins’ contract to retain a high-profile acquisition from the start of his tenure as GM. Instead of resetting the offensive line market with a modest raise, Laremy Tunsil BLEW IT UP with a three-year, $66 million deal.
The Texans had no other choice but to meet his demand or risk letting the player for whom they traded two-first round picks and more leave as a free agent. His $22 million salary over the next three years is a full 22.2 percent higher than the league’s next highest-paid lineman (Lane Johnson at $18m/year). That’s a massive outlay in an NFL where the salary cap is likely to shrink in 2021 and possibly beyond.
These were merely the world-building sequels to a trilogy of questionable O’Brien trades. The first came before the 2019 season when he traded a franchise-tagged Clowney to the Seahawks for a late third-round pick and two backup linebackers.
Those are the headliners, but O’Brien was also at the helm for moves like:
Trading a second-round selection for Cooks, coming off the worst season of his pro career and is only a year younger than Hopkins.
Signing a 30-year-old Randall Cobb — who hasn’t had more than 66 catches in a season since 2015 — to 2020’s richest free agent wideout deal (three years, $27 million).
Allowing Mathieu, Reader, and Kareem Jackson to leave in free agency
In a vacuum, these moves are tough to defend. A 26-year-old Pro Bowl pass rusher and a 28-year-old perennial All-Pro — the key to Houston’s passing offense — were replaced with off-brand versions of the real thing in service of savings. In the same timeline, a top-10 tackle got paid like the second coming of Anthony Munoz. And, thanks to the high prospect cost of luring Tunsil to Texas, there aren’t many reliable, instant-impact rookies who can keep Houston churning.
That’s the 10,000-foot view of O’Brien’s roster building. But once you get a little closer to his machinations, they begin to make sense.
Maybe O’Brien’s derided personnel decisions haven’t been so bad
Time has softened the sharp edges on a few O’Brien decisions already.
Trading Clowney away for a third-round pick and a couple of rotational linebackers got O’Brien dragged at the time. In the year-plus since, the Seahawks allowed Clowney to leave as a free agent after an injury-filled three-sack campaign. The mercurial pass rusher lingered in free agency for almost the entire offseason before firing his agent and signing a one-year, $13 million deal with the Titans. All this suggests the Texans were right not to tie themselves to a massive contract extension, even if they fell from 20th to 29th in the NFL in sack rate last fall.
The Tunsil deal, as expensive as it was both at the time and after his record-breaking contract, stabilized a key position that had been in shambles since 2017. Julie’n Davenport posted a blown block rate of five percent in his pass blocking snaps at left tackle in 2018. Tunsil cut that rate exactly in half (2.5 percent, eighth-best among qualified tackles per SIS) and was called for only a single holding penalty all year.
The wound of dealing away a perennial All-Pro for a questionable David Johnson and a second-round pick is fresher. The Texans clearly thought this was the maximum value they could get for a star wideout who likely would have forced their hand with a holdout in 2021. Hopkins is now the league’s highest-paid non-QB because he’s playing for a club with a quarterback on a rookie contract and plenty of cap space. Managing the same in Houston while paying Watson and Tunsil would have been nearly impossible.
Will that be enough to make up for the drop-off in on-field production in 2020? Probably not, but maybe Brandin Cooks and Randall Cobb can surprise us!
This all may have been the cost of keeping Deshaun Watson
Then we get to the game’s second highest-paid player — the one suddenly downgrading from Hopkins to Cooks/Cobb. O’Brien paid dearly to retain Watson via a four-year, $156 million contract extension, but that’s an expected cost for a player with a 100.6 passer rating over the past two seasons and the scrambling ability that’s turned more than 36 percent of his NFL runs into first downs. The league is trending hard toward offensive leaders with Watson’s skill set, making him one of the game’s safest franchise quarterback bets.
Inking his extension before the 2020 season likely saved the Texans much-needed cap space in the near future. Locking him into a deal now protects the team from the rapid salary inflation tied to pricey contracts contemporaries like Dak Prescott and Lamar Jackson will sign in 2021 and beyond.
Mathieu, Jackson, and Reader would have been expensive to keep around. Instead of investing in them, O’Brien spread that cash to Watson, Tunsil, and recently extended linebacker Zach Cunningham. Now he’s got hand-picked bellwethers on each side of the ball whose star power can help make up for the lack of depth behind them. Rather than run things back with the group that couldn’t protect a 21-0 playoff lead in Kansas City, O’Brien is shaking things up while keeping the players in town who should make his team a playoff contender no matter what.
There’s a logic to O’Brien’s cost-saving moves, replacing expensive players with less pricey mid-round draftees and available free agents. It creates the latitude needed to retain the stars he trusts the most, stretch the remaining cash across the salary cap, and revamp a roster with a defined ceiling these past six seasons.
That logic gets undercut by baffling decisions like the costly inability to extend Tunsil before last season or the over-market Cobb contract, but Watson’s deal suggests the coach-slash-GM is learning from all this. O’Brien sacrificed his overall talent level for 2020 in order to keep his budding star quarterback happy and, ideally, upright. While Houston will likely take a step back from the previous season, it should still compete for the top spot in the often underwhelming AFC South.
And there’s still the chance acquisitions like Cooks, Cobb, and Johnson turn out to be the balm that heals a roster that’s been blistered by departures and criticism this offseason. If so, it could change the way we feel about the next head-scratching Bill O’Brien trade.
Thursday Night Football picks
We’ll be publishing Thursday picks earlier in the week than our Sunday/Monday prognostications. This week, no one is feeling bold enough to back O’Brien against the reigning Super Bowl champs. That includes our guest picker: seven-year NFL veteran and, more importantly, former SB Nation columnist, Geoff Schwartz. You can find him online at SchwartzNFL.com or on Twitter at @GeoffSchwartz.
