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.

The first subject I want to address is the failures of the Texans run game and the long-term prospects of Steve Slaton. The following are some run-game observations:

-Overall, like last week, I didn’t think the offensive line was to blame. I wouldn’t say they were steady, I wouldn’t say they were great, I wouldn’t say they were bad. They were there, they didn’t do too much wrong, but nobody made any huge plays run blocking. The interesting thing is that the zone blocking scheme will often send someone to the second level, but the blockers that the Texans send to cover the slack are often guys that just aren’t good run blockers. Vonta Leach can hit with the best of them, even if he did have an off-game in Tennessee. Owen Daniels is a liability as a blocker, and I am less than impressed with Joel Dreesen in that area as well.

The other thing is that often, the Texans will motion a wide reciever under the line, squeezing him in off-tackle. Naturally, this is not Andre Johnson. I have seen this move at least 9-10 times in two charted halves and have only seen it not be a run once. On every one of these plays, Andre Davis or Jacoby Jones has been completely overwhelmed. I think Kevin Walter’s return will boost the Texans in more areas than you might think. Also, the net result of these plays has to be either low single digits yards or negative yards. The most yards I’ve seen them gain on one of these plays is 4.

- I addressed Slaton’s weight in the comments at Houston Diehards, but despite the fact that I hate the idea of making him gain weight, I don’t think he physically is looking or doing anything incredibly different. He definitely looks a little slower on film than he did last year, but he’s also having to make a lot of cuts behind the line of scrimmage. More on this in a second. I also don’t buy his sudden fumbleitis as a concern; history is littered with backs who have seen their fumbles come in a small stretch and it ended up being a small sample size fluke. To put it another way, as a fantasy football owner, I think he’s a decent buy-low. Then again, since I picked LaDanian Tomlinson, my fantasy season is already pretty much over.

- Since the BESF’s were actually sending 4 at Schaub most of the time, giving him time to breathe, the play action pass was a HUGE weapon for the Texans. They ran it 6 times in the second half, and here were the results: The sideline Andre Johnson catch that was mistakenly ruled out of bounds, the one yard TD to Daniels, the 40 yard coulda been bomb/pass interference to Johnson that had Cortland Finnegan beating his chest for little reason, the 45 yard Jacoby Jones catch on a blown coverage, and two plays where Schaub was hit in motion on the throw that were incompletes. Usually though, if you get burned on a PA or three, you make an adjustment and the run game opens up, but it never really did. Which leads me to…

- This is the part where I start coming off as a little paranoid, but follow me for a moment here. I think there’s a chance that the Texans are tipping run to the defense, or at least they were last week. Between the WR under tackle numbers, which I am inclined to not believe are purely coincidental given the number of plays they were defeated on, the fact that the BESF’s seemed to have sniffed the run out completely on a few plays where they brought all three linebackers up to the line, and the fact that play action was so successful, I think you can build a pretty compelling case for it. I didn’t specifically see any giveaways on the tape, but I wasn’t actually looking for them because my paranoia wasn’t fully built until the fourth quarter. The reason this is plausible to me is that I actually have charted it happening before to the Gary Kubiak-run Texans, back in 2007 against the Jaguars. Rashean Mathis read Andre Johnson like a book; when his hands were down, it was a run. When his hands were up, it was a pass. Thus, a cornerback somehow finished with 8 tackles and the Texans gained 61 whole yards on the ground.

If I were running the Texans offense, I’d start next game up with a heavy dose of Slaton screens and runs off-tackle and away from Owen Daniels. If Slaton can’t gain yards off those, then I’ll officially be worried. Either way, they need to get a lot less predictable in the run game.

- Defensively, Alan Burge took care of me describing the one touchdown I’d have to describe charting-wise. I’m gonna come out and say that I just don’t think the Texans scheme is a good match for it’s personnel right now when they bring nine or ten guys up to the line of scrimmage. First of all, other than Mario Williams, DeMeco Ryans and maybe Xavier Adibi, the Texans don’t have anyone who moves well enough sideline-to-sideline to recover from a blitz call and go get a tackle. Secondly, the closer you move the guys who rely on quickness for their tackles to the line, the less time they have to get by a blocker. Thirdly, there is not a single sure tackler in the entire secondary, so you’re just begging for results like the 91-yarder. Even John Busing, who I was starting to think highly of in that area, took a few poor routes in this system. If the Texans had better tacklers in the secondary (read: actual safeties), I’d consider this a lot smarter than I do right now. As it is, it’s more akin to Russian Roulette. And don’t think Maurice Jones-Drew is going to handle it any differently than Chris Johnson did if they keep it up. It’s especially vulnerable to the spread draw, and the BESF’s would’ve easily converted their 3rd and 4 in the fourth quarter with it had BESF guard Eugene Amano not been pushed right into Johnson’s face by Antonio Smith.

Has Frank Bush made the defense more aggressive? Yes. But this is reckless aggression. The Texans keep blowing coverages in it (both Stuckey’s TD and the Invisible Chris Johnson play came out of it). In fairness to Bush, his regular blitzes have been pretty impressive, except for the parts where he makes Mario Williams play a short zone. If he took out 75% of the big fronts for overload five man rushes, I think he’d be on to something. I also don’t expect him to change his ways, so you’d better get used to that ulcer in your stomach. [Waits.] [Waits.] [Decides against political commentary.]

- Kasey Studdard did not show well on the second-half tape and the interior line is now down to zero players I’d consider trust-worthy. Before he got kicked out of the game, Tony Brown ate him alive on both runs and passes. As much as I hate to say it, I think any five man rush is going to stifle the Texans unless Slaton can pick the free man up, because between those three guys, you can rely on them blocking only two players. Prediction: One way or another, Antoine Caldwell will be in the starting lineup after the bye if he’s healthy.

- Okay, lets hit some more positives before everyone wants to torch my house down. Brian Cushing is already the best run stop outside backer the Texans have. If you give him space, he’s going to deliver a blow. Antonio Smith and Fred Bennett continue to get waaay too much blame for the Texans problems, Smith in particular had a great second half. Dunta Robinson, despite being a huge tool for his shoe stunt, has backed it up pretty well thus far. Although it’s not like shutting down Justin Gage makes you a $10 million a year man. I’ll be very interested to see how he plays against the Cardinals in Week 5 since that’s arguably the next time the Texans will face a wide receiver that can burn anyone. If you want to pick on poor defensive performances, I’d stick with the NT rotation, Zac Diles, and the non-Eugene Wilson safety.

- Alge Crumpler is not a tight end, he’s a mini-van.

- I was very impressed with David Stewart’s run blocking. He had a few plays where he was able to seal his man off for countless seconds. On the other hand, Ahmad Hall actually got so out of position pass blocking that he let Zac Diles beat him on a second-effort push.

While this was an awesome game for the Texans to win, this is a little bit of the opposite of last week. The Texans got all the fumble luck, barely won a game that they had countless reasons to have lost, and because it was exciting people are riding high on it and thinking things like “I thought we’d be 1-1 after the first week, but I didn’t think we’d be able to take down Tennessee! This is even better!” Not so much. While I was talking everyone off the ledge after last week, I’d like to remind you all this week that wins are not made equal and that was a pretty lucky win. I think it’s likely that the Texans come out of Sunday’s game 2-1, but any time John Henderson versus Chris Myers and Maurice Jones-Drew versus Frank Bush’s scheme are key matchups, I wouldn’t feel too assured of a win. Especially given how close the Jags and Texans games usually are.