Houston Texans are screwed already, and it’s only Week 1

Houston allowed the Jacksonville Jaguars to come into town and embarrass two different quarterbacks — and the road doesn’t get any easier. 

No one thought the Texans were going to have a tough time against a Jaguars team that really never seems to get things together. What happened on Sunday was a beating so brutal that Houston might not bounce back until their bye week — maybe when they change coaches.

Jacksonville only managed 125 passing yards, but sacked two different quarterbacks 10 times (!!!) and drop kicked that Texans 29-7.

Things got so bad that after the game, the Jaguars changed its Twitter handle to ‘#Sacksonville’.

The Jaguars. The gross underbelly of the southern NFL scene and overall perpetual laughing stock of football. That’s who is making a joke out of you. That’s how bad things were on Sunday and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be getting any better.

Here’s Houston’s upcoming slate of games:

• at Cincinnati (Thursday Night)
• at New England (lol)
• vs. Tennessee

It doesn’t get that much better after that.

What compounds this bleakness isn’t just the schedule but the fact that no one knows what the quarterback situation is. Halfway through the shellacking, Bill O’Brien benched Tom Savage in favor of rookie Deshaun Watson.

It didn’t go well.

This is all par for the course in Houston, though, when thinking about the Bill O’Brien era. At no point in his now four years on the job have the Texans had any sort of consistency at quarterback. Brian Hoyer is a near-franchise leader in passer rating and O’Brien might have the quickest trigger of any head coach in America — from Pee-Wee to the NFL.

That quick trigger, in theory, is a throwback to tough love baptism by fire that forces a quarterback to toughen his skin and harden his skills. But at no point has that worked in Houston and it looks like it will once again do nothing more than set the Texans back.

O’Brien had a get-out-of-jail card in his back pocket in the form of Deshaun Watson. If things didn’t pan out this year, he could viably go to Rick Smith and lobby for one more year under the guise that he wants to see what he can do with Watson. Instead of sitting on that, O’Brien and his machismo hooked Savage and threw Watson to the flames to get roasted.

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The Week 7 bye would have been the right time to make a quarterback change, after seeing what Savage had over a decent period of time and allowing a raw Watson to watch. Now we might see a coaching change during the bye, as O’Brien’s leash seems to be getting as short as the one he gives his quarterbacks.