Notes from Game Charting: BESF’s-Texans, Week 11, 2nd Half
Like the first game these two teams played together, this one was won by the team that simply got the breaks at the end. Despite these teams going about things in a different way, they both seem to counter-balance each other out with strengths and weaknesses. If we watched them play ten times this year, you would probably see them split 5-5, although one of those games would finish with half of each team dead in a pool of blood.
On the Sisterf’ers last drive, they were a sure bet to be 2nd & 10 from the 6, which is a killer situation to escape, before they were bailed out on a very dubious horse collar call. After they false-started, taking it to 1st & 15 at the 19, they were again huge underdogs to make the first down. Chris Johnson, who had been bottled up very well the majority of the half, took it upon himself on the next play to see if he could collect a missed tackle from every Texan on the field, and that play broke the entire game open. In other words, they were pretty fortunate. The Texans were, likewise, just as fortunate when they played in Tennessee.
- Vince Young may win the games in the press box, but the real difference maker for Tennessee here was Texans defensive coordinator Frank Bush. In his infinite wisdom, Frank decided to Spy Vince Young one time in the entire half. To say that this was a deciding factor in the game would be like saying cheese is an important ingredient in nachos. I think there is an argument that Young has improved his technique in the passing game (I haven’t seen his other games, but if all his improvement is throwing the ball to whoever everyone elses’ Dunta Robinson is “defending”, I don’t know if that is much of an improvement), but it’s pretty safe to say that he is never going to be Drew Brees, or hell, even Matt Schaub, when it comes to pocket passing.
A normal strategy when facing an inexperienced quarterback is to blitz the hell out of him, rattle him, and hope that he makes some mistakes. This failed for two reasons: one is that Vince Young might be the best scrambling quarterback in the league, and the other is that the Texans have proven time and time again that the best they can hope for on a pass play is a coverage sack. The Texans have thrown out a fair number of blitzes this year, they threw out a fair number in this game as well…they just simply can’t get to the quarterback often. And when they do get to him, they can’t drop him.
So it was blatantly obvious that the Texans were not going to sack Vince Young from the beginning. Still, Bush brought blitz after blitz, and left Vince Young to win the game with his legs by not bringing up a spy. Do you want to know the horrifying truth? Vince Young scrambled 7 times in the half. He got first down distance on six of those tries, and on the other one he got a first down because Brian Cushing gave him a “late hit”. Meanwhile, through the air in the second half, Vince was 1-4 throwing on third down, for 5 yards. The Texans played directly into the strengths of Vince Young, and it cost them.
- The other battle that swung the game was Kasey Studdard versus Tony Brown. As someone who has watched the Texans all year, I have seen my share of terrible interior line play. This was the worst half I’ve seen any interior lineman play all year.
2nd & Goal from the 8, Studdard left his man to hit Kyle Vanden Bosch again, the pressure caused by this leads Schaub to throw too soon, and a manageable slant route was broken up. This turned 3rd & 3 or better (considering Andre’s slant prowess) to 3rd & 8.
2nd & 5, 9:40 left in the game, Brown embarrasses him and sacks Schaub, leading to a 3rd & long that the Texans wouldn’t convert.
1st & 10 from the 47, 3:55 left in the game, Brown stands Studdard 2 yards into the backfield on a run, then throws him aside to make the tackle and turn the Texans from clock-killing field goal drive mode to two downs to get ten yards.
3rd & 10 from the 47, 3:07 left in the game, the Texans send just about everyone past the marker, but because Brown just whips Studdard out of the way, Schaub has to go underneath to Slaton, who promptly drops it.
It’s rough when you lose your best two interior linemen for the year, but good teams have capable backups. The Texans have slogged this year away with, lets be honest, sub-replacement offensive line play from the middle of the line. It’s hard to say “Kubiak needs to move X in and forget about X,” because not a single one of them is playing well. On the bright side, even though he has played terribly, Studdard has fought the urge to wrote “Pay Me Rick” on his shoes. So there’s that.
- For a play that didn’t have much meaning in the long run, I thought the Kevin Mawae/Antonio Smith personal foul play was pretty fascinating. Mawae clearly chop blocked him on the play, ESPN’s guys of course did not see this and yammered on and on about how you have to be more disciplined and how he should be ejected and so on. Look, it takes a certain level of attitude to be able to play on the line of scrimmage to begin with. When someone comes low on you, if they get you in the right spot, your career is over. So no, I don’t have any problems with Smith reacting the way that he did, and I don’t think that is really all that undisciplined. Smith was unfortunate that he got caught reacting, but Kevin Mawae was taking cheap shots, as he is wont to do. I hate to play into the fansite meme of “x is a thug and plays dirty because he got away with something against my team”, but Kevin Mawae is pretty clearly a thug and was rewarded for it on Monday. Just to get back to impartiality, I’ll throw this out here: Duane Brown is sort of a thug too when it comes to chop blocking.
- One area that there was a clear difference in between this game and the first game was the Sisterf’ers play-action pass defense. Oh sure, the yards were there, but the Texans only struck deep one time in the second half, and it took probably the best throw I’ve seen Schaub make all season to fit it in there. The Texans ran 5 PA’s, and 3 of them wound up as dumpoff passes. Of course, Slaton ran one for 23, and Vonta Leach ran one for a first down, but they did an excellent job neutralizing the deep ball.
- The Texans continued to put weird wrinkles in the run game, even though it was mostly abandoned in the second half. This time, they ran with the wide receivers tight on one side and the tight end on the other. It was hard to gauge the effectiveness of it because there were so few runs, and because Chris Brown isn’t a very good running back anyway. In other blocking game news, James Casey looked pretty adequate out there on the edge blocking safeties, but I’d like to see him take on linebackers before I declare him a good blocker.
- I’ll leave the comments of this game with a controversial statement: Amobi Okoye has been much better than people have realized this year. The hype sort of caught up with Antonio Smith after everyone thought he was on track to replace Anthony Weaver after his first few games, and now he has plenty of good tidings for it. Okoye has looked excellent this year, and in the last few games, he’s been the only one generating hurries.
It’s easy to dwell upon the negatives of this team right now, considering the gut-wrenching losses and everything. But, I want to inject some optimism here. The Texans have 5 losses, but they have beaten the bad teams on their schedule very handily. They torched the Raiders and Bills, and were up 21-0 on the 49ers before the Red Carpet zone put that game in jeopardy. The Texans have been pretty unfortunate by the FO measures, which say that they should be 6-4 right now.
Keep in mind that what the team has achieved so far this season has come despite quite a bit of misfortune: two missed game-tying kicks, the loss of a Pro Bowl tight end, the losses of Pitts and Briesel, and perhaps most importantly of all, the complete disappearance of Mario Williams Beast Mode. The fact that this team is .500 despite a number of incredibly glaring flaws should be a source of pride, not something that leaves us saying “ugh, not again.” I’m not going to argue that the Texans should be 9-1 because they were totally screwed (with angry fan exclamation points!!!), but they have definitely elevated their play to a level that I didn’t expect them to reach this year. They have gone from thoroughly mediocre (-5 to -10 DVOA) team playing a 4th place schedule to legitimate wild card contenders (9.3 DVOA) that haven’t been able to take advantage of their close games. That in itself is worthy of celebration, even if the Texans record isn’t.
Make sure to hold onto those positive thoughts this week as John Busing’s reclamation of the starting safety job by injury combines with Peyton Manning’s utter disdain for bad defensive backs to make us wonder, for the third straight week, what we have done to deserve this.
