What the f*** are the Texans even doing?
And the best teen shows on TV that will help you survive Pro Bowl weekend.
Houston had a head start on everyone else in the NFL. The Texans were the first team to fire their head coach in the 2020 season, kicking Bill O’Brien to the curb after a decent run as sideline general and a terrible stint as fill-in general manager. That came on October 6. They still haven’t officially found his replacement.
That door will soon close when the team names an assistant from a playoff AFC squad its new head coach. Is it Eric Bieniemy, the Chiefs coordinator who pushed Patrick Mahomes to greatness and his team to back-to-back Super Bowls? No, dear readers. That would make too much sense for the Texans.
Will it be Brian Daboll, the man who helped Josh Allen rise from derided draft pick to MVP candidate? Also no! Though both were available, neither team CEO Cal McNair nor executive Jack Easterby — the low-rent Tyrion Lannister to McNair’s overgrown King Joffrey — opted to bring them to Houston.
Instead, the Texans new head coach will be Ravens passing game coordinator David Culley.
It’s another confusing decision for a franchise that’s come to be known for them. In the span of 365 days, Houston has now traded away perennial All-Pro DeAndre Hopkins for a broken down running back and a second-round pick, given Laremy Tunsil a contract that shattered the earning curve for offensive linemen because the team was too stupid to extend him before trading for him in the first place, and alienated the greatest quarterback in the organization’s short history to the point where he may never play another snap for them.
Houston’s inaction saw candidates like Robert Saleh, Arthur Smith and, huh, Urban Meyer all get hired away by other teams. While the bulk of this year’s new coaches were announced before Super Bowl LV was set, the Texans languished. Fortunately for them, there were still a handful of needle-moving targets who would be well received in Texas. Unfortunately, McNair, Easterby, and new GM Nick Caserio’s choice is not one of them.
David Culley’s resume doesn’t scream success
Culley has a lot of experience under his belt. The 65-year-old has been coaching in the NFL in some capacity since 1994. He got his start on the sideline coaching Austin Peay State University’s running backs 16 years before that.
In all that time, he’s failed to rise to a position higher than quarterbacks coach or assistant head coach at the pro level. He recently led Andy Reid’s wide receivers for four years in Kansas City, but that was in the pre-Patrick Mahomes days when his biggest challenge was drilling seven-yard routes for Alex Smith to repeatedly lob passes at.
Culley spent the 2017 and 2018 seasons with the Bills where, to his credit, he helped turn Tyrod Taylor into a capable starter. But Taylor’s aversion to big, risky plays gave way to rookie-year Josh Allen, whose portfolio was pretty much only big-armed throws and scrambles where he furiously searched for someone to lateral to. It ended poorly, and one year later he was the Ravens’ passing game coordinator in 2019 and 2020. This suggests he can bring the mold that built Lamar Jackson into a revelation to an even better downfield passer in Watson — but the Baltimore passing game is also coming off a season in which it dropped from first in the NFL to 17th in passing DVOA (per Football Outsiders) and threw for fewer yards than any team in the league.
This leaves lots of questions! Culley was wideouts coach for a Chiefs team that had zero touchdown catches in a full season. His offenses, especially last year’s Ravens, have typically been the opposite of Watson’s 2020, in which he led the NFL in passing yards and threw the ball nearly 10 times more than Jackson did. And if you want to throw in the lack of receiving personnel as a caveat to his underwhelming stops in the past decade, well, consider the wide receivers and tight ends under contract for the Texans in 2021:
Cooks had a bounce-back year, Cobb looked better than expected when healthy, and Coulter/Coutee have upside, but that’s a volatile group in need of star power. Houston can’t add those stars — which would include pending free agent Will Fuller — because it currently has negative $17.9 million in cap space and zero draft selections before the third round of the draft. Culley is a noted developer and offensive mind, but he’s struggled to get piecemeal operations to be more than the sum of their parts in the passing game … which is exactly what the Texans need right now.
Culley’s offenses in Kansas City, Buffalo, and Baltimore were all decidedly run-heavy, which is another problem. Houston’s hopes of a rejuvenated (and healthy) David Johnson fizzled, as the former All-Pro ran for only 691 yards in his 12 games. Duke Johnson, who averaged only 3.1 yards per carry, was even worse. It’s possible both will be jettisoned this offseason in order to cut costs, which would leave the NFL’s 32nd-ranked rushing offense to build from scratch under a new regime. A reset isn’t a bad idea, but going run-first with the Texans’ offensive line and an underpowered backfield feels like a blueprint for falling all the way to the top of the 2022 NFL Draft.
This isn’t to say an outside-the-box hire is especially unusual or decidedly bad. Zac Taylor got the chance to succeed Marvin Lewis in Cincinnati by standing close enough to Sean McVay for a couple seasons. Brian Flores called plays for the Patriots defense, but his official job title never ascended higher than linebackers coach. Joe Judge was a special teams coach and recent Lions hire Dan Campbell was Sean Payton’s assistant head coach and tight ends sage.
But none of those guys were 65 years old with coaching jobs in six different decades and exactly one — from 1989 to 1990 — as a coordinator. There’s a chance the decisions of the guys ahead of him put a governor on his growth. In the past 20 years he’s been an assistant under offensive coordinators like Anthony Lynn, Brad Childress, Doug Pederson, and Greg Roman who have all either gotten head coaching shots or are expected to in the future.
He’s also got the Andy Reid coaching tree working in his favor — so hot right now — after spending 18 years in the reigning Super Bowl champion’s employ. That’s worked out great for guys like Sean McDermott, John Harbaugh, and Ron Rivera … but not as well for guys like Matt Nagy, Brad Childress, Pat Shurmur, and Todd Bowles.
How will Deshaun Watson react to this hiring?
Watson’s biggest complaint, per reports, is that he was promised input on the team’s hiring process, but was shut out when it came to bringing Caserio on board. In fact, Sports Illustrated’s story indicates the whole deal was an elaborate heckle on the rest of the team, executives included, orchestrated by McNair and Easterby. It’s easy to understand why Watson wouldn’t be happy!
Bringing Culley aboard won’t fix that ever-widening rift:
It’s unlikely the QB had any input on the hiring, as Culley wasn’t interviewed until late in the hiring process and Watson, reportedly, has had zero contact with Easterby or Caserio since the season’s end. Hiring an oft-overlooked assistant when Bieniemy — reportedly Watson’s top choice thanks to his work developing Mahomes into a superstar — was still available feels like a statement from the Houston brass. They aren’t going to cave to their quarterback, no matter how important he may be.
There’s still a chance the two sides can work something out, but it grows slighter every day. While the Texans think they’re playing four-dimensional chess, the rest of the league sees them as the kid in the back of the classroom, sneaking bites of glue stick and thinking no one has noticed. Hiring Culley may as well be a starter’s pistol for Watson trade offers to roll in — and with the way this offseason has unfolded for Houston, there will be a lot of lowball, “are they stupid enough to say yes?” deals coming Caserio’s way.
***
There are good things about the Texans landing on Culley. He’ll give the league another minority head coach, which is important. He understands how the league works and helped set the table for successful offenses in a long career as an assistant. Andy Reid and pretty much everyone else he’s ever worked with give him glowing reviews. He was a four-year letterwinner at Vanderbilt in the 70s, so he understands how to wade through a swamp of abject misery in order to advance a larger goal.
But the negatives outweigh the positives, and the largest is that Culley isn’t an olive branch extended to the most important player on the roster (and possibly in the history of the franchise). Instead, Houston seems to be moving on without Watson and into the unknown with a four-win team, very little spending money in free agency, and the NFL’s least impressive draft chest. Good luck.
For the Texans’ sake, I hope this is the right hire. For our sakes, too, because this is at least the fourth time they’ve been the main focus of this newsletter and no one should care about an imploding 4-12 team this much. — CD
A changing of the guard
Another thing that has to be said for the Houston Texans is that they’ve upended the NFL landscape. I mean, yeah, they’re doing that with the boneheaded move of choosing yes-man loyalty in the front office over a generational talent at quarterback. But that’s just a symptom of their larger push to reshape the league — they’ve now usurped both Washington and the New York Jets as the league’s most dysfunctional franchise, something I never thought possible.
A few years ago, it was the Browns putting themselves on the list of the NFL’s toxic superfund sites. Owner Jimmy Haslam’s truck stop company ran into some problems for ripping off truckers, and not with cheap chicken fried steaks, but with an elaborate fuel rebate scam. On top of that, he couldn’t hire competent people to run the team he bought in 2012, and, worse, he couldn’t keep his distance from the football operations. But that’s all changed. The Browns are a well-run football operation, one that wins games now. Another thing I never thought I’d see.
Washington has made its own improvements as well. They FINALLY changed the team’s racist name. And after a series of reports about sexual misconduct among front office staff and in the owner’s airplane, they did some house cleaning. Now, that’s not been enough to call it good, but there was at least some reckoning there. On the field, Head coach Ron Rivera has changed the organizational culture for the better too. The team is still owned by Daniel Snyder, so there will be further problems because he is a legit bad guy. (He’s still in an arbitration dispute with the team’s minority owners.)
The Jets showed some organizational maturity in firing head coach Adam Gase. I was shocked by that, to be honest. This team definitely has a type: arrogant jerks who’s main skill is pissing off players. That is not Robert Saleh, who did an outstanding job of pulling together a really good group of players with the 49ers and getting them all to buy in. Now, we’ll see if the Johnson family doesn’t somehow find a way to mess this up, but it’s the kind of move that could be the cornerstone of a new era.
And that brings us back to Houston. While the NFL’s worst teams all made strides in the right direction this year, the Texans chose to regress … and not just a little bit. Owner Cal McNair can’t get his team to a Super Bowl, but he did make them championship level pariahs. So, congratulations, I guess? —RVB
The best teen TV shows right now
Welcome back to our fun Fridays, when one of us uses this space to muse on a topic unrelated to football. This week, I’m here to discuss one of my favorite TV genres: teen shows.
I don’t rewatch TV shows very often anymore. There’s too much to watch, almost all of which is available at our fingertips, for me to willingly invest time into something I’ve already experienced.
But I’ve been a little tempted to this week now that Freaks and Geeks is streaming on Hulu. It’s not only a personal favorite, but F&G is also widely regarded as one of the best TV series of all time. I watched it as a teenager when it originally aired and then revisited it about a decade or so later when I was in my 20s. It hit differently 10 years ago, and I was able to appreciate and understand it in ways I didn’t necessarily when I was younger. I have a feeling the same thing would happen again in my 30s.
I’m not decisive enough to put together an actual list of my favorites shows ever, but if I did, I know others set in high school would be on there: My So-Called Life, Buffy, Friday Night Lights, and Veronica Mars. Before, I never really considered why that’s the case, other than because those are objectively great shows by any measure; the setting doesn’t matter as much as the characters and their stories.
My own high school experience was fairly ordinary, some good times and some bad. I don’t look back at it with much fondness, but I wasn’t traumatized by it either. For the most part, it just wasn’t very interesting. I grew up in a small town and went to school with pretty much the same kids from kindergarten all the way through senior year. That could feel stifling, like everyone had already decided who you were and you weren’t allowed to be anyone else even though you were still trying to figure it out yourself.
I think there’s a little wistfulness to why I’m drawn to those shows, where the teenagers reside in a more exciting, dramatic, and broader world and they still have their whole lives ahead of them. More than that, though, I think there’s a universal understanding and catharsis in it. Almost all of us have gone through high school and come out the other side. I don’t know what it’s like to have to navigate social media as a teen, just like the generation before me didn’t have instant messaging (or even the internet), but we remember what it’s like to be that age, how everything is heightened and each triumph and setback feels like the biggest deal in the world. We can relate to the characters, so long as what their emotions are moored in reality even if their circumstances aren’t.
In this past year alone, I’ve watched several current shows centered on teenagers, a couple of which are set in middle school and not high school. If you’re looking to add anything in this genre to your queue, these are the top five I would recommend:
PEN15 (Hulu): Let’s start with a device that shouldn’t work but does: The two leads are 30-somethings playing 13-year-olds, surrounded by a cast of actual teens (who look like actual teens and not some overstylized Disney-fied version of them). It could be a cloying distraction, but you hardly ever really notice the actresses are adults because of how committed they are to the roles. I’m amazed at how well the show remembers the little details of being that age (and in the year 2000, which is when it takes place), and the embarrassing and weird things 13-year-olds can do. There’s plenty of humor and awkwardness in Maya and Anna’s seventh-grade adventures, but above all, there’s a poignancy to their experiences, as well as the supporting characters’.
David Makes Man (HBO Max): David is a gifted 14-year-old caught between two worlds: His academic life which holds the key to his future, and his home life where he lives in the projects and faces pressure from drug dealers and from the burden of caring for his younger brother and recovering addict mom. Some days, he’s just barely hanging on from all the responsibilities he has to juggle. David’s had to grow up faster than he should, but he’s also strong, resilient, and intelligent, resulting in a compelling lead who will both break your heart and make you cheer. The show’s dreamy, Moonlight vibes (both were created by Tarell Alvin McCraney) and richly drawn characters make it look and feel like nothing else on TV.
Never Have I Ever (Netflix): Like Angela Chase, Devi Vishwakumar is our 15-year-old protagonist who is ready to put her past self behind her and experience new things, sometimes clumsily and mostly endearingly. The My So-Called Life parallels don’t end there, either. Devi is also at the center of a love triangle with the guy she has the hots for who everyone calls by his full name (Paxton Hall-Yoshida) and the lonely nerd who knows her better than almost anyone else (Ben Gross).
NHIE is very much its own show, though, often funny and surprisingly touching. Devi can be prickly and kind of a jerk to her friends and loved ones, but so can all teenagers. And you never stop rooting for her or hoping she deals with her issues that she’s trying desperately to avoid.
Saved By the Bell (Peacock): The reboot’s tone is quite different from the original, despite the presence of old characters and numerous callbacks to the TNBC sitcom. It takes a couple episodes for things to really gel, but it eventually finds its groove. The new characters are mostly delightful and nail the metahumor, quick dialogue, and snappy jokes.
There’s depth in the storylines, too. The show deals with relevant, timely issues and treats them with care rather than preachiness. The first season ended on a strong note, especially as it finally figured out how to incorporate the original characters better, which bodes well for the recently announced second season.
Cobra Kai (Netflix): You don’t have to have any sentimental attachment to The Karate Kid movies to enjoy the follow-up series, set 30+ years later. But if you do, then you should also enjoy it because it’s not a cheap nostalgia ploy.
Johnny and Daniel represent different kinds of trauma and how that can follow you into adulthood. Johnny, who didn’t have the love and support of a role model like Mr. Miyagi, has struggled to get his life together. Daniel, who did have Mr. Miyagi’s guidance until his mentor’s death, has found success both at home and at work. Both can’t quite move on from the past and the bullying they endured, though. And their rivalry has found its way to the next generation.
There’s a genuineness to how the show treats Johnny and Daniel’s journey, even if Cobra Kai’s villains can be cartoony with unclear motivations. Sure, everyone is way too quick to resort to a karate fight, and you know that’s not realistic, but it’s easy to go along for the ride until we get back to the main characters, who are trying to prove to themselves that it’s never too late to learn from your mistakes. — SH
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