As if there was any doubt, Rams coach Sean McVay ended it Monday. McVay announced that Matthew Stafford will indeed start the season opener against the Texans.
A week ago, McVay said Stafford was on track to start Week 1 barring a setback.
Stafford participated fully in practice the past two weeks after missing training camp with a disc injury in his back.
Stafford, entering his 17th NFL season, completed 65.8 percent of his throws for 3,762 yards with 20 touchdowns and eight interceptions in 2024.
Jimmy Garoppolo took the first-team reps with Stafford sidelined. He is expected to be the Rams’ backup quarterback in 2025 with Stetson Bennett the team’s No. 3.
Texans safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson suffered a knee injury in early August, but he avoided a torn ACL or anything else that would have caused him to miss most or all of the season.
Now it looks like Gardner-Johnson won’t be missing any time at all. Head coach DeMeco Ryans said at a Monday press conference that the team expects Gardner-Johnson to play against the Rams in Week 1.
The Texans acquired Gardner-Johnson in a trade with the Eagles in March and he was immediately installed as a likely starter in the secondary, so the health update is a significant one for the defense in Houston.
Wednesday’s practice will bring the first injury report of the season for the Texans and provide the next update about the veteran being in line to play in the opener.
The Dallas Cowboys are no longer America’s Team. There’s a chance they aren’t even Texas’s team.
Three years ago, the Houston Texans had a very similar situation to the one the Cowboys just resolved. Quarterback Deshaun Watson had requested a trade. He had sat out an entire season, with pay. He had more than 20 civil lawsuits pending.
Texans G.M. Nick Caserio worked the situation masterfully, creating a four-team competition between the Saints, Panthers, Falcons, and Browns that allowed Caserio to name his price to each of them before they were allowed to even talk to Watson.
The Cowboys could have done the same thing with linebacker Micah Parsons. But, as they often do, they waited too long to make a decision.
More broadly, the Cowboys all too often seem to lack clear strategic vision. But, hey, that’s what happens when the General Manager never should have been the General Manager in the first place.
Yes, the owner has the ability to give himself any job he wants. And, when Jerry Jones bought the team in 1989, he gave himself Tex Schramm’s job.
Jones had no objective qualifications for Tex Schramm’s job. And here’s the biggest irony about the state of the team, nearly four full decades into Jerry’s run as G.M. While the front office under Jones has done a very good job of drafting and developing talent, they’ve mismanaged the one thing Jerry brought to the table when he bought the team — knowing when and how to do good deals.
They built their team that won three Super Bowls in four years before the salary cap era began. Even since the spending limit was put in place, they’ve bungled big deals. They’ve waited too long to get guys extended. They’ve extended some of the wrong guys.
Most recently, they blew the ideal window to get the most for Parsons.
It’s a simple proposition. If they were going to trade Parsons, they should have made it known in early March that he would be available. Before teams spent their cash and cap allocations for 2025. Before they signed, or re-signed, pass rushers in free agency. Before they drafted young pass rushers.
On Thursday night, Jones admitted that he was thinking about trading Parsons months ago.
“This trade was not just thought about today,” Jones told reporters. “This trade has been going on in our minds and our strategies and being talked about — it’s been going on all spring. It culminated today and it came quick, but that’s the way things go.”
Did they have trade talks before the draft?
“We had them,” Jones said. “But we didn’t have them with anybody else.”
They should have. If they had, they would have gotten more.
Jones could brush that off as pure speculation. It’s more accurate to call it fact. More teams would have had the cap space in March. More teams would have had interest in March. More teams would have come to the table in March.
If Jones had handled it the right way, it would have unfolded as another Deshaun Watson-style competition. While it’s hard to imagine Parsons getting more than the compensation package he received from the Packers, the Cowboys would have gotten more than a 2026 and 2027 first-round pick and a soon-to-be 30-year-old defensive tackle who has made the Pro Bowl three times in nine seasons.
Beyond the volume of picks, the Cowboys would have acquired selections that could have been used in 2025. As explained last week, they could have emerged with someone like Travis Hunter or Abdul Carter. And they could have gotten more than that.
As it stands, they got a player whose prime will soon be ending (if it hasn’t already), a pair of future first-round picks that likely will land late in the round, and the cash and cap space saved by not paying a player who deserved a giant pile of both.
No, the Cowboys will never admit that they made a mistake. At some level, they know. They screwed this one up, in multiple ways. Above all else, they waited too long to make Micah available.
If they’d done it in March, they would have gotten more.
Maybe, in hindsight, they should have hired Nick Caserio to be the G.M. before the Texans did.
One of the veterans the Texans released will shortly be back with the club.
According to multiple reports, tight end Harrison Bryant is going to re-sign with Houston.
Though no corresponding move has been reported, Bryant’s release was an apparent procedural move given that he’s a vested veteran who did not require waivers.
Bryant, 27, appeared in 13 games for the Raiders last year, catching nine passes for 86 yards.
A 2020 fourth-round pick, Bryant spent his first four seasons with the Browns. He has 98 career receptions for 877 yards with 10 touchdowns in 78 games.
Texans running back Joe Mixon spent all of the preseason on the non-football injury list and he was moved to the reserve version of it as the team set its initial 53-man roster this week.
Mixon will miss at least the first four games of the regular season as a result of the move and the Texans have not shared any kind of timeline for his expected return to action from what’s been described as a foot/ankle issue. That did not change at a Wednesday press conference when General Manager Nick Caserio was asked about Mixon’s status.
Caserio said they’ll evaluate Mixon at the end of that four-game window without offering any assurance that Mixon is expected to play at all this season.
“We’ll see, we’ll take it one day at a time,” Caserio said, via Jonathan M. Alexander of the Houston Chronicle.
Nick Chubb is the No. 1 back on the Texans’ depth chart with Dameon Pierce, Dare Ogunbowale, and rookie Woody Marks also on hand.
