Houston Texans Defense and Teams With Widely Dispersed Talent
By Jason Lisk
Brian Burke discussed this in regard to single point failures in the passing offense. Chase Stuart did the same in regard to defenses being like chains. This isn’t baseball. You can’t hide your worst hitter at the bottom of the lineup, or use your worst reliever only in low leverage situations. The opponent gets to dictate where they will attack, and who. Sure, you can do things to counteract that, the game within the game, but it still creates weakness. You’ve got a bad cornerback or linebackers who can’t drop into coverage, and the opponent can largely ignore the star corner on the other side.
In Houston’s case, it is weakest links, plural, and I don’t see any great strength across units within the defense, even though Mario Williams is still a very good player. The defensive line is definitely the strongest phase, as they are about average as a group. The linebacker group has been without either Brian Cushing (suspended to start the year) or DeMeco Ryans (season ending injury) all year, and the replacements are not as strong. The secondary has no strengths, featuring two young corners in Glover Quin and Kareem Jackson, a strong safety in Bernard Pollard who is much better in run support than operating in space, and a 30-year old Eugene Wilson. The starting safeties have no interceptions this year.
What I saw was multiple failures in the back seven, particularly with the interaction between the safeties and linebackers. The very first play was a deep pass down the middle to Jackson where there was way too much space between the safeties and linebackers. The Eagles were able to successfully hit multiple deep crossing routes in this same area. Philadelphia then played off that, and Houston tried to compensate by dropping the linebackers deeper, by hitting McCoy for big plays on screens, which is why he ended up as the leading receiver. On the first drive and again in the fourth quarter, Philadelphia got a big play on a screen to the left side to McCoy that he cut back across the field. In both cases, there was such a gap between the four rushers and the back seven that the Eagle linemen were able to get 10 yards downfield before needing to block. In both cases, poor technique also turned a good play into a huge one, because the one unaccounted for defender missed the play. On the first drive, it was Glover Quin, lined up in an outside linebacker spot pre-snap, who missed McCoy by going to far inside (where the other blockers and defenders were) and letting McCoy get outside him and down the field. In the fourth, it was linebacker Zac Diles who was unblocked and missed McCoy.
Those plays show that one miss can turn into big plays. Houston was trying to compensate for other weaknesses by dropping linebackers quickly, so that those plays were already destined for success, and then the one player who could have held it to a 10-yd gain missed as well, turning them into the kinds of plays this defense has given up all year.
[photo via Getty]