Jan 20, 2021
With four teams left, most of your questions were on the other 28. So let’s dive in …
Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports
From
T (@BucWild007):
Why do teams constantly recycle people (WFT and Hurney) versus looking at new blood or someone outside of the inner circle of retreads?
It’s a fair question, T Ron Rivera did run the search in D.C., and the names the team cycled through were all connected to him. Both ex-Panthers GM Marty Hurney and Titans exec Ryan Cowden worked with him in Carolina, while ex-Lions GM/current 49ers exec Martin Mayhew shares an agent with him. But, really, I don’t have a huge issue with that. I think any coach, charged with leading a search, would seek that sort of alignment.
Jan 19, 2021
While the NFL awaits the conference championship round and the eventual end to its improbable 2020 season, a far greater subplot that will affect a larger percentage of the league is brewing beneath the surface. As first reported by my esteemed colleagues, Jenny Vrentas and Greg Bishop, Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson has had enough in Houston. The Texans’ franchise is in tatters while a character-coach-turned-power-broker ransacks what was just a year ago a team in fumbling distance of hosting a conference championship of their own.
Watson does not want to be in Houston. This is not just media conjecture, as he Tweeted as much himself later in the weekend. Trading him or forcing him to retire seem to be the only options on the now heavy plate load of incoming general manager Nick Caserio (option three, it would seem, is an incredible, uphill battle to win back Watson’s affection and convince him that he is not squandering his athletic prime in Houston, which see
Jan 16, 2021
On the eve of the finale of the Texans’ lost 2020 season, Jack Easterby preached. In the preceding weeks, as scrutiny both inside and outside the building swelled around the character coach turned acting GM, Easterby seemed to some to have been keeping a lower profile. But now, he took acting head coach Romeo Crennel’s place at the head of a team meeting.
Easterby delivered a speech that was described in multiple direct accounts as a lengthy missive intended to be rousing. The discourse centered almost entirely on Deshaun Watson, the Texans’ star quarterback at the end of a historically great if wasted season. Easterby, those sources said, was effusive in his praise for the quarterback, but to the dismay of many, he did not extend the same attention to: J.J. Watt, the team leader and greatest player in franchise history, who was on the verge of completing only his second healthy season in the past five years; the turmoil that engulfed the organization; the midsea