Houston Texans: O'Brien's biggest mistake was not the time out.

Bill O'Brien not calling a time out with time dwindling down is the easy target and it was a mistake, but it wasn't his biggest blunder at the end of the game.  The biggest mistake that O'Brien made happened about 2 and a half minutes of game time earlier, when the team had the ball on the 18 yard line with 4th and 1.

The Texans had the lead and the ball, up 30-28 over the Patriots with around 3 minutes left in the game.  They had driven the ball down into the red zone and had a chance to put a dagger in the heart of the Patriots.  But they didn't.  They kicked a field-goal, giving them a 5 point lead and turned the ball over to the greatest quarterback of all time with 2:39 seconds left in the game and 75 yards to travel.

We all know the ending.

I said at the time, on Twitter, it's out there, that the Texans should go for it and I stand by that even after the fact. I get what the coaches and football people will say (the BOOK etc. "we trust our defense" blah blah blah) but the fact is this is Tom freaking Brady.  You give him the ball down 5 and "the book" says that you're going to lose a vast majority of the time.

And lose the Texans did.

And this highlights a bigger problem in the NFL, the coaches, and game strategy, or too conservative. That the 'book' doesn't take into account aggressiveness is part of the problem. I don't entirely blame O'Brien for kicking the field goal, because that's what mediocre teams and coaches do.  I don't think O'Brien is a bad coach per se but I don't think he's an especially good one either. He's the saltine cracker of coaching, just meh.

He's also probably tiring of his job, as his failure to call the time out showed.

The bigger point is that when you're on the road against the defending NFL champions the strategy has to be to take chances to win.  Kicking the field goal there was not taking a chance to win, it was playing not to lose.

This ignores the fact that the vaunted Texans defense, the unit on which most of fans' hopes relied, is NOT exactly distinguishing itself against competent NFL offenses and those holes that I mentioned preseason (LB, DB) are being exposed.

Still, Watson looks like he has what it takes to be an NFL quarterback in this league, a fact that brings up this question:

Given how good Watson looks now and how bad Savage looked in his debut, how in the world did O'Brien think the latter should have been the opening day starter?


Unless, as I posited, he's trying to get out of Houston.