We’re in the middle of November, and three surprising things are true:
1. The Texans, 5-4 and an AFC Wild Card team as of this morning, are the story of the year, and have an exceedingly manageable schedule in the last eight weeks.
2. C.J. Stroud’s running away with Offensive Rookie of the Year. He’s in the discussion for MVP. (At least on my ballot, he is.)
3. DeMeco Ryans is my 10-week Coach of the Year.
Let’s go to Cincinnati, where the Texans were seven-point ‘dogs Sunday, where Stroud built a 27-17 lead and with 3:41 left in the game was just trying to run out the clock. This was, in Vitalespeak, Lock City. Texans’ game. Then, in one of the few glaring mistakes Stroud has made in this boffo rookie season, he underthrew rookie wideout Tank Dell on third-and-two, and his old Big Ten buddy, Cam Taylor-Britt, picked it off.
Stroud’s 22 going on 32, and after the game sounded like he’d been in this situation 63 times before, and he wasn’t too upset about it. There is a sense of calm in Stroud’s orbit, the kind of calm a 22-year-old kid should not have.
“I mean, this game, it’s a players’ game,” Stroud said from the Houston locker room. “I’ve had a lot of respect for Cam Taylor-Britt over the years. He’s a player. Made a hell of a play. Of course, I just should have taken the sack there and punted. But the type of person I am, a one-play-at-a-time guy, that’s not gonna kill me. And my teammates on the sideline helped me a lot. Just telling me, ‘You’re good bro.’”
Within two minutes it was 27-all, and the crowd in Cincinnati ruled the place. With 42 seconds left, third-and-six at the Texans’ 29, Stroud had four plays, maybe five, to get into field-goal range. Play clock ticking.
In the huddle, Stroud did not sound 22 years old.
Stroud told me: “I just told them boys, ‘Let’s go win this game. We got everything we need in this huddle right here. Somebody make a play.’”
With the game on the line, you want to take four seconds to tell your guys you believe, so they should believe. That also means you’ve got to be quick at the line, and as the play clock wound down … :05, :04, :03 … Stroud urgently but not nervously clapped his hands four times to prod center Michael Deiter, “Snap it! Snap it now!” When Stroud got the ball, he waited, waited with calm feet and good protection till he saw tight end Dalton Schultz, running a seam route from the left slot, with his friend Taylor-Britt (Nebraska corner when Stroud was the Ohio State QB) in coverage.
Throw it high. Throw it high so Schultz, with a 6-inch advantage, could leap and get it but Taylor-Britt could never reach it.
The ball traveled 32 yards in the air, and it could not have been thrown to a more perfect location. This is what the Texans have noticed through nine games: The pressure, the moment, doesn’t get to this guy—he throws it in the game-deciding moments just like it’s practice. Like this throw … complete to the leaping Schultz to the Cincinnati 46-yard line. Two more completions got the Texans in place for a chippy 38-yard field goal by Matt Ammendola to win it, 30-27, at the gun.
“I made this game a little harder than it needed to be, turning it over [three times, uncharacteristically],” Stroud said. “But it in this league, it’s hard. It’s hard to get wins. We’re all good. Today, I loved the attention on us. Everybody’s watching to see if the Texans can come to a tough place and win. I love that. I love the attention. I love the pressure. That’s the thing about our team—I’m telling you, we don’t go into any game thinking we can’t win, we won’t win. I’m not made that way.”
Stroud’s ended two straight games with 75- and 55-yard drives to beat the Bucs and Bengals, respectively, in the final seconds. Who’d have thought the game of the year in this division would be Jags at Texans, Thanksgiving weekend, with more pressure on Jacksonville than Houston? That’s the sort of impact C.J. Stroud has made on the Houston Texans, and on the AFC playoff race.
***
How do you watch Stroud play and think he either is a poor decision-maker or slow to process crucial information? When word leaked that he bombed the S-2 Cognition Test—which is supposed to measure the speed and smarts to process vital information quickly—a whisper campaign started against Stroud. No matter that the tape spoke chapters about Stroud, and in his five games against Michigan, Georgia and Michigan State in his last 13 months as a college player, he completed 73 percent of his throws for 377 yards and four TD passes a game. He was a bad “processor.”
On Friday of draft weekend, I went to Houston and talked to him about it. He wasn’t altogether bitter—just a little edgy about it. “The film speaks for itself,” he told me. “If you turn on the tape, you can see, you can answer the questions. I can process very, very fast. The film, you can see me going from first option to second and then back to one and then to three to four if I have to. I can check down. I can use my feet.
“But, you know, everything happens for a reason. I’m not upset. I’m actually blessed, I’m super blessed to be a Texan. Number two overall pick in the NFL draft, man. A little kid from the [California] Inland Empire. All smiles, man.”
This team was 11-38-1 over the previous three seasons. GM Nick Caserio settled on DeMeco Ryans as his coach and they agreed on Stroud as their quarterback of the future. “This is what life is about, working to build something good,” Stroud said when he was introduced to the Houston media and asked about going to a bad team.
It helped to surround Stroud with a coaching staff—including position coach Jerrod Johnson, senior assistant Shane Day and coordinator Bobby Slowik—who brought cutting-edge ideas to the Texans. “They’re so good at isolating matchups and attacking defenses like they haven’t been attacked very much,” said former longtime NFL backup quarterback Chase Daniel, who knows Slowik and played for Day with the Chargers the last two seasons. Daniel is working for the 33rd Team, NFL Network and The Athletic in his first year out of football.
That crucial throw to Dalton Schultz in Cincinnati in the last minute is a great example of that. The coaches know how accurate Stroud is, and they knew with Schultz’s height advantage downfield he’d win any competitive high ball, and he did. Stroud said he and Slowik have meshed well because, “we have open communication. There’s a lot of honesty. He trusts me and I trust him. That’s one of the biggest relationships that needs to be built with a quarterback, it’s been good. I know he trusts me to make plays.”
That throw to Schultz also illustrated one of Stroud’s strengths this year: downfield passing. He’s thrown for 1,513 yards on passes of more than 10 yards beyond the line, tops in the league, per Next Gen Stats. Even more impressive: Stroud leads all quarterbacks with 9.6 yards per attempt against the blitz this season, per Next Gen. (Brock Purdy, at 8.7 yards per attempt, is second.) Rookies usually struggle against blitzes while they’re getting their feet wet in the league. Not Stroud. No rookie in the eight years of Next Gen’s stat-keeping is within a yard of Stroud’s 9.6-yard performance.
Backyard football ‼️ pic.twitter.com/hzBUot0cj9
— Houston Texans (@HoustonTexans) November 12, 2023
Think of that and think of the “book” on Stroud entering the draft, and what poppycock it was. Blitzing forces quarterbacks to accelerate their thought processes and decision-making, obviously, and Stroud, as a rookie, is the best by far of any quarterback in the league—and 2.6 yards per attempt better than Patrick Mahomes.
And Stroud is ascending. He’s thrown for 826 yards in the past two weeks in wins over Tampa and Cincinnati. He’s thrown two interceptions, an NFL-low; his 2,626 passing yards is second in the league. “He’s a rookie quarterback putting up these numbers, and he doesn’t look or sound like a rookie quarterback in anything he does,” Daniel said. “He’s not playing well for a rookie—he’s playing well for any quarterback.”
Houston lost to Carolina, so Ryans won’t have any trouble getting his guys to take any team seriously. But the Texans, a game behind the Jags in the AFC South, do have a schedule edge in the last eight weeks. Five of their last eight games are home, including a three-game homestand (Cards, Jags, Broncos) starting Sunday. Their lone game against a division leader is the Jacksonville game, and Houston won their first matchup by 20 in September.
Every year, some team in the league shocks the world and plays like a top-10 team. That’s Houston right now. When’s the last time we thought Houston’s fun to watch? The Texans sure are now.
Read more in Peter King’s full Football Morning in America column.