From Mom's Basement

2009 in Review: The Offensive Line

This may surprise a few people who I haven’t really talked to in-depth about the issue, but I am not a four year college graduate.

I graduated with an associate’s degree from Houston Community College in 2005. I attended a University in Houston, which may or may not have involved red colors and cougars. When I transferred in, I was under the impression that my associates degree took care of all the lower-level prerequisites, meaning I’d only have to deal with upper level courses. I found out at the end of my first semester at the college that I was missing four credits: beginning and intermediate foreign language. I tried to take Latin with the help of a friend that next semester, but ultimately decided that it wasn’t an easy enough language for me to pickup on my own without immense tutorial help. There’s one semester down the drain.

I immediately went to summer school at HCC to pick up my first two credits. I wound up picking Spanish, because it was what I had some familiarity with in high school, although that was mostly gone. Those credits were not easy for me to earn. When I give my full effort and get immersed in something, I’m terrific at picking it up. When it’s something I actually don’t care about (like learning a foreign language), I am not quite so good, no matter how many hours I put in.

So, I go back to this certain University in Houston, and try to deal with 2301. Maybe it was the instructor, or maybe it was the material, but I could never get settled in the class. I felt completely overwhelmed and dropped it. I go back to summer school at this certain University, and quickly figure out why. The first words spoken in this class, by our blunt teacher, were that if we were transferring in credits, we might be behind by “a month or two” on the material. A month or two? Wow. I get home, crunch the numbers and hours, and it turns out that the only way to pass this course would be to spend about 6-8 hours a day on it. No wonder I felt so far behind in the courses. I went into what I thought would be my last semester of college pulling 4 classes, working as an editorial assistant for Gulf Coast magazine, and also interning for Football Outsiders. Something would get the short end of the stick, and that something was the Spanish. I wasn’t going to graduate on time.

Last year was just a disaster of circumstances and setbacks. My mother was in the hospital for heart (read: smoking) related circumstances on four separate occasions, the first of which was a heart attack. Not only would I have to pick up the slack at the home, but I’d also unsuccessfully try to get real jobs in my field with my associate’s degree and the worst job market in modern history. I tried to teach myself on the side and that didn’t really work due to distractions and my general lack of interest. I can get into it for a month or so, but I haven’t been able to STAY interested in it.

So, in a moment of self-defeat, I strolled over to said University last week for a talk with the counselor. After moving my “degree plan” to the “new degree plan” since I had been absent from the campus for a year, they proceeded to inform me that my first year Spanish credentials no longer counted because they’d been taken 3 years ago, which is absolutely ridiculous. I’d need to take the Spanish placement test before I could take a class again. The counselor was very soft-spoken about this, and my realization in this conversation played out like this:

Me: “So you’re saying that you won’t count my credits.”
Him: “Yes.”
Me: “And that I have to take the placement test that I was going to try and take anyway.”
Him: “Yes.”
Me: “So basically, you’re telling me that it makes much more sense to try to do good on the placement test then it is to go in unprepared to it and potentially end up in a class below where I should be.”
Him: “Uh huh, but…”
Me: “So I should just be trying to nail the placement test then, so I potentially have less classes to take. Costing the University money in the process.”
Him: “Well I guess you could say that, yeah.”
Me: “That’s pretty stupid.”
Him: “Yep.”

I’m not saying that I didn’t earn this trouble. I had some odd circumstances, sure, but I should’ve confronted this earlier. I guess I just feel sort of drained by the whole scenario, how much bureaucracy and effort have gone into forcing me away from the college and into trying to test out of things. I wish there was an easier way out of this, I really do. I just want the damn piece of paper, and to get it, I feel like I have to become an actor. An actor who really cares about learning Spanish.

2009 in Review:
Beyond The Tackle Box (WR’s and TE’s)
The Backfield (QB’s and RB’s)

Next week: The Offensive and Defensive lines.

Planning a non-football post here for either tonight or tomorrow.

Can be found here.

From this point on, all of my Texans related thoughts will be posted on Battle Red Blog, with a requisite link here. I will continue using From Mom’s Basement for other sports writing (and other writing period). I’m happy I was able to carve out my little niche here, and I’m looking forward to having BRB serve me with a bigger base of readers for my football stuff.

I’ve charted a lot of bad halves of football this year, but this one gets the honor of being the absolute worst. Not only was it 27-3 at halftime, but it probably wasn’t as close as the score indicated. This wasn’t the Dolphins being a sneakily bad team, they just couldn’t do anything right. Their backup linebacker couldn’t cover Joel Dreesen in the flat. Their defensive backs completely blew an assignment in a rush to double team Andre Johnson. Their defensive line could not get penetration against the Texans’ mediocre offensive line (Vonta Leach is not an o-lineman). This is the side of the ball where they probably looked better over the course of the half, by the way. How bad was it? I charted a broken tackle for Chris Brown.

Offensively, the Dolphins running game had some booms, but they really missed Jake Grove up front. Vernon Carey had an awful half, getting schooled by Brian Cushing and being unable to hold up on some key blocks up the gut. The passing game was completely out of sync. There was a miscommunication route at the end of the half, where Brian Hartline went inside and Chad Henne threw to the sideline. That throw was typical of this half for Henne: when his receivers weren’t dropping the ball (3 of them), the throw was ending up nowhere near them. He even overthrew some checkdown passes. Had the Dolphins not gotten a very fortunate spot on their 4th & 1 attempt near the end of the half, as well as a pretty questionable offsides call on Connor Barwin, they wouldn’t even have gotten that ugly sequence of events to give them a field goal.

Given the abrupt turnaround in the second half, I find it really difficult to draw meaningful conclusions about the Dolphins from this. This was by far their worst quarter of football of the entire season. One thing that struck me as odd was their end of half offense. The Dolphins had routinely gone with 3 or 4 wide receivers earlier in the half, yet instead of stretching the field at the end, they brought in two tight ends (Anthony Fasano is almost always on, but Joey Haynos in a situation where you’re driving 70 yards?) and it mostly eliminated the intermediate throws. The Dolphins run a versatile offense that can bring in solid-to-average players for any of it’s packages, but I question the usage of that particular one at that moment.

For the Texans, this was a breakout game for Jacoby Jones, who proved over the last few games what he had been proving in limited time all year: the offense is much better when he is out there. Yes, he’s going to make some dumb mistakes, and yes, he’s got a definite dose of Diva Receiver. But his combination of size and speed makes him an ideal deep threat, and he makes more guys miss in the open field than anyone else on the team. Even Johnson. When you pair Jones and Johnson on the same play-action pass, where opposing defenses basically have to commit multiple men to Johnson (and even that doesn’t work sometimes), you’ll often get Jones one-on-one against a corner, which is a total mismatch. Such was the case on his score in the second quarter, where he beat Sean Smith to the spot, broke his tackle, then juked by Chris Clemons in the open field on his way to the end zone. This is no slight on David Anderson or Kevin Walter, who are both great at what they do (and I think Walter should be kept around), but Jacoby stretches the field in a way that they simply can’t.

Ready for the words I can’t believe I’m about to type? Chris Myers played a CREDIBLE center this half, especially in the run game. He routinely got lower than Paul Soliai and drove him 3-5 yards past the line of scrimmage. No, it doesn’t make up for the fact that he’s been routinely bad for the rest of the season, but it’s nice to see that he’s not a complete donut. Antoine Caldwell looked worse than anyone else on the line. He missed a couple of key blocks on runs and looks a step slow when pulling. I wonder how much of that is him being used to center and thus knowing that he controls the timing of the snap, and how much of that is just him not being very quick. I still think he can be a key cog in the middle of the line but he didn’t make a great account of that in this half.

As big an Arian Foster fan as I’m quickly becoming, I think Ryan Moats is a perfectly acceptable change of pace back. I know there has been some talk about needing to “fix” running back, but between Moats, Foster, and Steve Slaton, I don’t think the Texans are bereft of options. You don’t need a goal line running back as much as you need an offensive line that can create a push. That’s where the Texans should be focusing their efforts on fixing things in the run game this offseason.

Aggressive defensive coordinator Frank Bush sent the troops on a grand total of four blitzes this half (okay, that’s trolling, he was working with a sizeable lead). Here is the interesting part about this, and the part that I would pray carries over to next year: three of them came during the two minute drill. Yes, instead of sitting back in the carpet zone, Frankie finally decided “well, it’s 27-0, lets see what it’s like not playing scared in the last few minutes of the half.” Yes, the Dolphins still scored, but it took them 19 plays to do so and chewed up a ton of clock, which is what I think the zone defense is supposed to do in the first place, theoretically, when run by teams that are not the Texans. Also, the three blitzes led to these results: 7 yard dumpoff completion in the flat, incomplete, incomplete. Without having charted the second half, I’m going to guess that the majority of the plays that turned this into a close game were also not blitzes.

Cushing’s interception was one of the strangest plays I’ve seen all year. It’s a very simple dumpoff pass to the running back, but Ricky Williams somehow manages to tip it up all by himself. It’s not abnormal to see a ball tipped up like this, but usually it’s a crossing route, or the receiver is being tightly defended and the ball gets pushed up because he’s being hit as he catches it. For this one, Williams was completely uncovered, standing perfectly still, and somehow still managed to miss the ball and tip it up as a floater. Cushing may not be able to cover Dallas Clark one-on-one, but he’s got terrific instincts and reaction speed, and thats where the majority of his interceptions have come from this year. Even if this one was a pretty big fluke.