I agree with much of what has been written here. My thoughts about the game were:

1. The offense is really bad. Hop and the rest of the WR struggled to get open, just like they have all season. There were times when Oz had no where to throw the ball, and when he had throws, he either missed them, or the pass was dropped.

2. Special teams is a unit that just can't get fixed. How long has this plagued us?

3. This defense can be truly elite if Watt comes back. There are a few adjustments that need to be made, and they have to stay healthy, but they have a chance.

4. Oz was Oz. A few times when I was watching the game, I couldn't figure out what he was thinking. Inaccurate and poor decision making.

I'm leaning towards Chuck's assessment here in that Dhop has in the past been very good with other QB's and what is different this year is the QB. I think we all agree the QB sucks and the 90% of the finger pointing should go Oz's way. Yes, Dhop can get better. Although still relatively young, he's reaching the point where he's pretty much getting as good as he's going to get. He won't get faster or quicker..... perhaps he becomes more wily, more experienced....

A good point was made about the timing of the passes. Also, an accurate QB can place the ball where only his receiver can catch it. How many times have Brock's INT's looked like he was throwing to the DB and not Hop? A bunch, I'd say.

As far as laziness goes, I'm just not seeing it. I will say, as a receiver, if your job is to run an intermediate or deep route and the ball never comes your way, you're less likely to go 100% because you get tired of running the sprints and in the back of your mind you're thinking, "he's not throwing it my way".

Over the last few games, I've seen Hop kinda hanging near OB on the sidelines and become involved in some the sideline conversations with Godsey and the QB group. An apathetic guy wouldn't be doing that....

On Oz's last INT, it was an inaccurate pass where Hop threw up a hand and deflected the ball into an INT. Hop kept moving and was in on the tackle.....

I agree with everything your saying.

I believe what made DHOP such a standout was his catch radius. Not his speed or quicknesses. Hes never really been a speed guy.

No matter how off target or LATE Fitz or Mallet was, Hopkins was making acrobatic 1 handed disfigured catches. It wasn't that Fitz was so great...it was DHOP was SO GREAT and made Fitz look OK.

The difference in my opinion is that he is not making THOSE plays at the rate he was the last few years. The pass he tipped for the pick, just last year he made...I have the picture on my screen saver.

Can we expect him to do that ALL the time...NO. But when there's a drop off its noticeable...like this year...and yes a large part goes to Brock. But like you mentioned he's gonna have to develop more of those veteran nuances that non speed guys like Fitzgerald developed. Especially if we are gonna continue to put subpar QBs in the starting lineup.

Overall, Hopkins is a stud with the POTENTIAL to be hall of fame. He just needs to continue working and he will be fine.

Brock on the other hand is one more hit away from being a lost cause.

Yes, those are all good points.

I tell ya, if it wasn't for the horizontal passing game, Oz's stats would really suck. His completion % would be abominable.

Brady is like the master of the vertical passing game. Yards in big chunks. Texans really do need to find that guy that put the "vertical" back in the Texan passing attack..... Drop Brock and get Romo and the Texan offense would become a lot more interesting.........

DeAndre is a hands guy and not a speed guy. We all know that. Can he get better running routes? I guess so. But again, in my view it's foolish to spend any real time trying to uncover player deficiencies, especially when you're talking about the team's best offensive player, when your quarterback play is historically bad. I think you'll see DeAndre suddenly improve quite a bit when he plays with a decent quarterback in the unlikely event that that happens in Houston or wherever his next stop will be.

Osweiler is so bad it almost defies description. I know all of you have seen every Texans snap he's taken. But if you isolate some numbers his ineptitude is just shocking. For example, it is incredibly uncommon for a passer with 40+ attempts not to pass for at least 200 yards. Since 1950 a single player has accomplished that twice in a career something like three times. Osweiler did that FOUR times this year alone!

So anyone's complaining about Nuke, my own complaining about Chris Clark (really, you can't find a practice squad guy who's better than that?) is ultimately just a waste of time.

What I really want to know is why did Osweiler regress so much between what we saw last year and the absolute debacle this year. Or did he? Was he this bad last year and no one really noticed?

I've been saying for months that with average quarterback play the Texans could beat any AFC team other than the Patriots. Well, men, I was wrong about that. It turns out they could beat the Patriots, too.

I don't think anyone thinks it is hops fault, but he has had separation issues this year, whereas last year year he seemed to get more separation. There is a part of me that is questioning if he is a true number 1, but there is no doubt he is our best weapon. I think the biggest thing I see is that the coaching on the offensive side and special teams aren't noticeable. I can tell how much the D coaches have had on player development, all across the board. The offense is terrible, and it doesnt appear that they are being coached up.

Does anyone really think NFL players don't make business decisions? Do we think we can start a QB who is awful but keeps playing because of his contract, and it doesn't affect how hard guys play for him? We screwed over Hopkins financially and then saddled him with a career draining albatross at QB. In a year he needed stats to get paid, we gave him Brock and a handcuffed offense. In response he has made business decisions (like sliding more than our QB).

In my initial post I put this more on the coaching staff. I put little on Hopkins. I think we were a fraud and I maintained that since BOB's 4th down punt 6 weeks back in a game we still had a shot at winning. Somehow drawing Oakland fooled many of us into forgetting how make believe this whole thing was. We are the worst team in the entire NFL at the most important position in the NFL. It ruins many facets of our offense, and many of the players it touches.

And Chucks a redneck NRA member.

When I was ten or so my grandfather bought his grandsons NRA memberships. It is entirely possible that they were lifetime memberships and if so, I am indeed an NRA member.

I grew up around guns. I am from Texas, after all. I got my first gun when I was in kindergarten. My dad was an avid hunter and at some point he found himself doing some sort of real estate business with Carter from Carter's Country. I want to say his name was Jim Carter. Anyway, my dad was forever bringing home guns of all description for my brother and me.

I don't think I've been hunting since I was in high school. But I found out not too long ago that I am still an excellent shot. A New York City living friend came to Houston and demanded to go out to a range and shoot. It must have been a Saturday and the place was packed with the sort of neck who wears camouflage to church. You know the ones. Anyway, I smoked everyone out there. My friend could not believe it.

I used to work with a guy who lived across the street from NRA headquarters. He was a bit of a gun nut and would often go to the range in the building's basement. How he managed to get a handgun permit in 1990's Washington, DC, is anyone's guess. One day he got questioned by the police. The range had been robbed. Yes, some enterprising individuals knocked off the NRA gun range. They questioned my friend because he had a queer habit of exchanging his paycheck for stacks of two dollar bills. He'd wander around town paying for everything in two dollar bills, usually in sequence. He became fairly notorious for it. So the authorities realized that they could get a pretty good idea of the serial numbers of the stolen twos. I wonder if they were ever caught.

I shot a gun once in my life, I am from Massachusetts after all. I come from a family of hippies who have aged into old hippies. I don't think there's a single thing about me that qualifies me as a redneck...well, except for my thoughts on Deandre Hopkins. Those make me a redneck and a racist.

Well, there are rednecks by nature (birth) (me) and by nurture (you).

BT apparently believes that being African American disqualifies one from being a redneck. Why, I am proud to tell him that he is mistaken. I was once driving around in Palm Beach, FL, and at a light I came upon a brand new pickup truck that, along with an impressive array of after-market lights and whatnot, was desecrated with every and all manner of NASCAR sticker. You know those hippy chicks who drive around with seven hundred stickers plastered all over their Subaru, some of them going back to the Al Gore campaign? Coexist, Visualize World Peace, Human Rights Campaign, Ani DiFranco? Well, it was like that, just NASCAR. I can't wait to have a gander at this neck, I thought. Imagine my surprise when I rolled up along side and saw an African American fellow sitting there. And it wasn't even that idiot from Hootie.

Bill Carter is the guy's name, by the way.

Newsflash: The Texans' season is over and they lasted just as far as the Cowboys did! Yee haw! Guess I'll put down my banjo, put in my teeth and have a great big slice of possum pie!

Holler at the outhouse and tell momma that the vittles is ready.

I certainly hope you took the feet off of 'em. Wolfgang Puck takes the feet off of everything nowadays, you know.

Nothing gets wasted. We pull off the toenails and wash em so that the children have toothpicks. Whatever can't be eaten/used, we take them out to the swamp to chum up the gators.

So glad (relieved?) Dallas is not coming here for the Super Bowl. (yes, you were wrong, John McClain).

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In other news, Brock said in his press conference that no one is going to work harder in the off-season than he is to get better. So, it looks like we're going to be in good shape for next year! :thumbs up:

Say, Buford, that reminds me - how are you and your kin down your side of the holler planning to celebrate the holiday today? I reckon you'll break out some of pappy's corn squeezins and have one hell of a hoedown.

Seeing where Jerry Jones is trying to rationalize the loss while denying there's no such thing as a morale victory when you know he's saying yesterdays game was a moral victory for his team.
Hey Jerry you are one and done, end of story. Get over it.
And you know how they always show you Jerry yucking it up with his pals in his suite at the stadium on TV after his team scores, but I so wanted to see him after the Packers made that winning FG. That's the Jerry Jones scene I want to see on the tube.

Eheh. ;) Yeah, they won't show that.....

I do kinda like the replays where they show the reaction of the head coach/sideline of the winning team on a game winning FG and then show the reaction of the losing sideline....

Sometimes they kinda overdo it though, IMO. Like when a player does something bone-headed and the cameras will focus in own his face so close you can count the pores on his skin... Poor guy probably wants to crawl under a rock yet, he gets excess seconds of face time...

Classic thread is classic.

Ya know, all of the Texans' woes can be summed up in one word: quarterback. It's a damn shame you need one to be successful in the league now.

Actually, everyone knows this. Everyone but the Texans.

The long-term answer to the problem most likely comes from a high pick in the draft. O'Brien and Smith must ignore this no longer.

The Texans have drafted seven QBs in franchise history.

2002 - 1st round - David Carr
2003 - 3rd round - Dave Ragone
2003 - 6th round - Drew Henson
2004 - 7th round - B.J. Symons
2008 - 7th round - Alex Brink
2011 - 5th round - T.J. Yates
2014 - 4th round - Tom Savage

Here's another word to sum up this list: Yikes.

Want to win a Super Bowl? Finally invest an important draft pick in the most important position, and we can maybe then move on from calling each other rednecks every postseason.

Drayton McLane signed two high-priced free agent pitchers (Doug Drabek and Greg Swindell) which led him to conclude high-priced free agent pitchers were to be avoided at all costs. Season after season of watching his starting pitching fail to win in the postseason finally convinced him to try again in 2004 with the signings of Andy Pettitte and Roger Clemens.

I suspect Bob McNair learned from the David Carr fiasco that you can't succeed with a first-round QB instead of learning that rookie QBs need offensive lines to be successful. For years we took DL's because "we have to get to Peyton Manning" now we draft WRs because "we have to open up the offense".

This is not a good year to reach for a QB in the draft. I don't even like the ones projected to go in the top of the draft with the possible exception of Deshaun Watson. IMO, we need offensive linemen and I would start with Utah OT Garrett Bolles if he checks out at the combine from where the draft experts put him. He's lean and raw and can start out at RT or LG while being developed to replace Duane Brown.

Hopefully, Nick Martin makes a full recovery and we will be able to plug him into the line. We can't develop a young QB without blockers and whether we're doomed to another year of Osweiler or not, we can be building the line that protects the next QB as Dallas has done.

I don't know what to make of any of these quarterbacks, either. I want to like Mahomes but I don't trust guys coming out of a system like that. And the mocks I've seen have the various quarterbacks all over the place. We'll get some clarity after the combine but as always if the team has someone they like I'd be happy to see them draft someone high.

OL is obviously an area of need although in theory if some guys return healthy that should help a lot. I'm always reluctant to draft OL in the first round because I feel like a good OL operates as a unit and what you need are guys that are smart and work well within a system rather than an all-world Joe Thomas type necessarily. The Patriots have a first round LT and then a motley assortment of thirds, fours, fives and an UDFA. And this reminds me of a point that I meant to make earlier - when we saw Pats receivers running wide ass open all over the field a lot of that was the fact that their quarterback often had thirty seconds to stand in a perfect pocket completely unmolested and wait for a corner to get tired of chasing one of their little sand fleas all over the field.

The Utah guy seems to be about the only OL that people are saying is worth a first. And he might be there when the Texans pick. So who knows.

But I'm officially on the cut Osweiler draft a QB high bandwagon. BO is obviously not going to be a Texan in 2018 so why dick around with him next year when you could be grooming someone who will be with the team in 2018 and beyond?

I would also be perfectly happy with a multi-year rental of a Rivers or a Brees but I consider that so unlikely as not to even merit discussion.

Oh, and if they do draft a quarterback high I certainly hope he's left handed.