Notes from Game Charting: Texans-Jaguars, Week 3, Half 1
– I consciously tried to spend a lot of time watching Duane Brown, because I realized last week that I’d said essentially nothing about him, which is a good sign. I think the Texans faith in him has been rewarded so far. Everybody looked bad against the Jets, so I’ll give him a pass there. He’s improved himself from a terrible pass blocker to (at worst) a decent one. I went back and looked at the BESF’s tape and he did limit Kyle Vanden Bosch pretty well. This half, there were no problems against the Jags, but the Jags don’t really have an edge rusher worth mentioning either. I’m very interested to watch him against Dwight Freeney in the later weeks of the season to see just how far he’s come. Am I really saying good things about Duane Brown? That’s what our season has come to? The one person I can say good things about is Duane Brown?
- Wish I could say the same for the interior of the line. Kasey Studdard joins Chris Myers as an atrocious pass blocker, while Mike Breisel is adequate at best. Whenever the Jags could isolate Studdard they beat him badly, one play in particular with John Henderson made Studdard look like a steer rider. The Jaguars learned from the Jets and brought many successful up-the-middle blitzes. Steve Slaton was pretty well this half in pass-blocking, particularly out of the shotgun, so he wasn’t to blame for the pressure. The one upside about the blitzes coming up the middle is that Matt Schaub can react and get rid of the ball instead of taking the sack: that is part of the reason the sack numbers are relatively low despite all the pressure.
- Run-wise, I just don’t understand the Texans gameplan. They spend a lot of time going off-tackle or to the guards, but Slaton isn’t a banger and the further away from the middle of the line they can get, the better the runs are going to be. Their center linemen are all proto-type zone blockers. You can say that running off the play action is supremely important to the Texans, but everything about their personnel right now says that you need to run more sweeps and screens. Kyle Shanahan has done a good job in the passing game, but when one of your top five runs of the season is made by Kevin Walter, that’s a sign you need to revamp the strategy.
- Amobi Okoye had the best quarter I’ve seen him play since his rookie year to start the game, then in the second quarter he was invisible again. Although at least that’s more than I can say for the Texans NT, who I have not recorded making a single play through three games no matter who is playing it. Thus my term, “Texans NT”, instead of an actual name. It exists only in theory. Which explains the run defense more throughly.
- I went over Fred Bennett on Battle Red Blog earlier this week, but one other thing I wanted to hit on about this that I didn’t think the piece made clear enough: just because I dig Fred Bennett, I am under no illusions that he is a tackler. And yes, my viewing of the tape pretty much coincided with how I thought he played; if you want some more statistical proof, FO has the Texans as 28th vs #1 WR’s, but 14th vs. #2′s. Perhaps all his mistakes were in the second half, or perhaps I’m not all that wrong. In other safety news, John Busing was the culprit of just about every big running play of the past two weeks. I don’t have a lot to add on the defensive side that other Texans bloggers and I haven’t already gone over: the team overpursues way too much and plays way too close to the line. But if the Texans had a real safety there, they might have held those to 10 yard gains instead of 40 yard gains.
- While the majority of the Texans blitzes I charted in this half were successful plays for the defense, they were still really slow and didn’t get much pressure at all. Garrard had all day to throw, but was undone by flukes (Dunta Robinson successfully defending a pass, Cushing tipping a ball at the line), and overthrows in the first half. You never really got the sense that Garrard was panicked, and I think a lot of that has to do with…
-Eugene Monroe pretty much shut down Mario Williams one-on-one in what probably made the difference in the game. As bad as the Texans defense is, they need Williams to make 4-5 big plays a game to have any prayer in hell of holding a team under 28 points. It’s not like he wasn’t getting pressure in the other games, he had his hurries. Monroe just outplayed him. Surprisingly, the only time the Texans really got pressure on the QB in the first half was with Connor Barwin. Not as much of a surprise: the fact that it came on an overload blitz that the Jags bumbled by sending too many protectors to the other side. I’m not sure what Barwin has to do to get more playing time, but there is no way he is appreciably worse than Antonio Smith as a pass-rusher (although Smith is okay) and if he’s bad at playing the run then it’s not like he’d be alone there on the Texans.
-I was really impressed by Terrance Knighton, who had a couple of pretty good stops in run defense and held up the offensive line at the point of attack for the most part. Unfortunately he was injured late in the half. Also, he plays for the Jaguars. Ah well, it’s fun to dream about good defensive tackles, right?
-Kevin Walter obviously was a big part of the offense and things ran much more smoothly with him back, but another part of the reason he drew so many targets was that the Texans were obviously targeting rookie Derek Cox, who would fit right in with the Texans secondary. Walter was also a huge upgrade in run blocking over Jacoby Jones and Andre Davis, which turned a few Slaton -2 yard runs into 2 yard runs.
I kind of feel like NFL fans are a more roller-coastery sort than others. One week everyone is back on the Texans for playoffs bandwagon after the BESF’s are beaten, the next, the Jaguars come up with a pretty remarkable all things considered. 9 times out of 10, Mario Williams gets a lot more pressure than he did this game. 8 times out of 10, a team scores on ____ & goal from the 1 instead of fumbling. I’m not saying that the Texans are supremely unlucky, or that they deserved to win that game, but merely that a few important things went the Jags way.
My reading of this team right now is starting to slightly decrease, mainly because Frank Bush has been so tremendously bad (and Kubiak so supportive) so far that I have little faith in the defense to figure out it’s real weak points. I came into the season thinking this was an 8 win team, and right now I’m leaning towards it being more of a 6-7 win team. If you want reasons for optimism, there are a few to be had. There is no way this team can maintain the split of how defensively bad it is on third down compared to the other two downs; FO doesn’t release those numbers to the public before book time, but trust me, it’s every bit as bad as it’s looked. They also probably can’t give up two 60+ yard TD runs every week. At some point, that will lead Bush to either get fired or find a safety who knows how to stay in a spot and can tackle. Whether that point is Week 6 or Week 8 or Week 12 could mean a win or two in the standings. Just by simple regression, the defense can’t stay THIS bad.
However, right now they are still really bad. And short-term, my gut feeling is to like the Raiders this week. Anyone who expects more than 3 catches and 40 yards from Andre Johnson against the almighty Asomugha is fighting some deep odds. It’d be one thing if the Texans were able to stack the box and force JaMarcus Russell to beat them, but with this teams track record of stacking the box so far this year I don’t even see how that gets them anywhere. The Raiders are going to rush for at least 150 yards, probably 200. In fact, if I were Tom Cable, I’d even consider just running the option with the big QB. John Busing’s knees would probably buckle on the sidelines just watching it. Walter and Owen Daniels will keep this game close but the Raiders running game is going to eat up too much clock and too many yards. I’d love to be proven wrong though.
