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HOUSTON
On the one hand, Bill O’Brien won four division titles in five years, including one as recently as a year ago.
On the other, the Texans are a mess now – and have a bleak future thanks to the personnel decisions made by O’Brien.
And so, he is gone after a tenure of exactly 1000 regular season games as head coach, plus four as GM.
Bill Barnwell of ESPN.com has thoughts:
Monday’s news that the Texans were firing head coach/general manager Bill O’Brien after an 0-4 start was somehow simultaneously stunning and not surprising at all. I’ve been skeptical of O’Brien’s decision-making since he assumed personnel power in 2019, with move after move seemingly betraying either a lack of long-term vision or a failure to understand how the rest of the league values players. I can understand why Texans ownership would evaluate those moves and plan to find a solution to replace O’Brien as the team’s general manager in the years to come.
Firing O’Brien the coach right now, though, makes absolutely no sense. The Texans are 0-4 and flailing in the AFC South, but they’ve played the league’s toughest schedule, with games against the Chiefs, Ravens and Steelers before a loss on Sunday to the Vikings. Losing to the previously winless Vikings obviously isn’t anything great, but O’Brien had won four division titles in his prior five seasons with the organization. Four losses against mostly excellent competition shouldn’t be enough to drastically steer the organizational ship in the opposite direction and start a brand new direction. It makes you wonder how much attention ownership was actually paying before this slow start.
Let’s split the decision across O’Brien’s two different roles, because I look at each of them differently:
Firing Bill O’Brien the GM
How much could really have changed between now and the end of August? Sure, O’Brien’s decision to trade away wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins for running back David Johnson and a second-round pick doesn’t look great, but it looked bad in March when ownership presumably signed off on the idea of trading away their star player. Other trade acquisitions like running back Duke Johnson and cornerback Gareon Conley have been injured. The overpays for low-ceiling free-agents like wideout Randall Cobb and safety Eric Murray haven’t gone well — the Texans were interested in free agent Earl Thomas to replace Murray in the starting lineup, with Justin Reid playing more strong safety, before O’Brien’s players reportedly talked him out of the move — but those were decisions which looked awful at the time.
O’Brien paid over the odds to lock up young core pieces like quarterback Deshaun Watson, offensive tackle Laremy Tunsil and linebacker Zach Cunningham, handing out contracts that were more generous than market value, but that’s also not a fireable offense. Under any circumstances, the level of oversight from Texans ownership is baffling. There was a time to pull the reins back on O’Brien, but it was a while ago. His 2019 moves suggested he was overmatched when it came to trades and contract negotiations. Letting him get a second offseason in charge of personnel decisions was the mistake ownership made.
OK, so, with the Texans spending a league-high $249.3 million on players this season while starting 0-4, why not correct that mistake as early as possible and get O’Brien out of the GM chair? For one, they can’t go out and get an immediate replacement. Early reports suggest that Houston will turn things over to former Patriots chaplain Jack Easterby, who was brought by O’Brien to Houston in 2019 and became vice president of football operations in 2020. Pretty much every bad move O’Brien has made over the last two years has come with Easterby in the picture, so the idea that Easterby is somehow going to fix the problems left with this organization after O’Brien’s departure seems curious.
Furthermore, while the Texans have Watson and several other promising young players, this is going to be one of the least appealing jobs in the league. The Texans didn’t have their first- or second-round picks in 2018 after trading for Watson and dumping Brock Osweiler’s contract. They sent away 2020 first- and second-round selections as part of the trades for Tunsil and wideout Brandin Cooks, and while they got one back in the Hopkins deal, they don’t have their first- or second-round choices in 2021.
Any general manager who takes this job is going to be feeling the pinch of those missing picks and won’t get another crack at a high pick until 2022. Ownership just committed a ton of money to contracts, meaning the Texans aren’t likely to be aggressive in free agency over the next year or two. Plus, while some would-be general managers might be interested if they can get time to retool the roster and restock the draft capital, Houston has been wildly erratic with its timelines. Since owner Cal McNair took control after the death of his father in 2018, he has fired general manager Brian Gaine after winning a division title in his only year on the job, let O’Brien re-shape the organization to his liking, then fired the former Penn State coach after an 0-4 start. Why would any promising executive with options elsewhere want to take on this role?
In reality, when the Texans let O’Brien trade away a boatload of draft picks to acquire Tunsil and moved on from Hopkins, they should have committed themselves to seeing the O’Brien experiment through until the end of 2021. That would have been the right time to re-evaluate things, and if the Texans were going to move on from their coach/GM at that point, they could hire someone with a fully-stocked closet of draft picks and the chance to get out from under several of O’Brien’s questionable contracts.
Firing O’Brien now acknowledges that the Texans were wrong to give him that sort of power, but it doesn’t do anything to alleviate the problems. A more realistic path would have been to use the veto power of ownership to block anything particularly egregious O’Brien had planned and tell him that he was going to need to win with the roster he had spent months building. That might not have gone over well — and it’s possible that O’Brien wasn’t willing to work as a coach if he didn’t have full power as general manager — but the team made this bed for itself over the last two years. An 0-4 start shouldn’t have been what made them realize their mistake.
Firing Bill O’Brien the head coach
Let’s add offensive playcaller to his list of duties after reports that O’Brien had taken over in Week 4. At times, though, his solution for any plan seemed to be rubbing more Bill on it and hoping it fixed the problem, which seemed ill-advised given that O’Brien had only ceded playcalling duties to Tim Kelly in February.
Leave O’Brien the general manager aside, though, and think strictly about the coaching side of things. Can you really justify this move? O’Brien took over a 2-14 team with Ryan Fitzpatrick at quarterback and posted five winning seasons in six years at the helm. The only losing season he had was when Watson tore his ACL in 2017. The Texans were 52-48 over O’Brien’s six-plus years at the helm, but they won four division titles in five years.
I wasn’t optimistic about their chances of succeeding in 2020, and O’Brien hadn’t been able to push them toward an AFC title game, but how many coaches get fired after an 0-4 start against a brutally difficult schedule with that sort of résumé? It seems impossible that O’Brien was fired while both the Lions’ Matt Patricia and the Jets’ Adam Gase still have their jobs.
It would be one thing if the Texans were firing O’Brien after the season and had a high-profile replacement for the job like Lincoln Riley or Dabo Swinney. Firing him with a plan after a disappointing campaign would have been more defensible, even if I think it would have been a little harsh given years of relative success. Without a general manager, Easterby also seems set to play a meaningful role in the hiring process.
Instead, the Texans are promoting 73-year-old Romeo Crennel to take over as the team’s interim coach. Crennel, who was promoted upstairs after the Chiefs torched his defense in the divisional round, is not going to re-shape the Texans. He’s 28-55 as a head coach in his career. The worst thing that could happen now is that they could improve against an easier schedule and convince McNair to keep Crennel on as their full-time coach.
It’s exactly what happened in 2011, when the Chiefs ended a messy relationship with Todd Haley after a 5-8 start and promoted Crennel to the role. He finished 2-1, with the Chiefs upsetting an undefeated Packers team in his debut. Kansas City handed the full-time job to Crennel, who … promptly went 2-14 and lost his job after a year. In the long run, it worked out brilliantly for Kansas City, which was then able to hire Andy Reid after the Eagles moved on from the future Hall of Fame coach, but Crennel’s luck in a small sample set the Chiefs franchise back a year.
The Texans will be better over the rest of the season, but I suspect that will mostly be a product of the schedule getting easier. The problems on this team still exist. The trades left them with little depth. Too many of the core players (David Johnson, Will Fuller, J.J. Watt and even Watson) have major injury concerns from season-to-season. The secondary is a disaster and the Texans have no clear path to fixing it. The contracts handed out and trades made by O’Brien the general manager limit the flexibility any new coach will have in re-shaping the roster.
Again, it’s hard to believe that ownership let O’Brien re-shape the roster this spring, saw what the first month of their season was going to look like, and then fired their football czar after he started 0-4. Sunday’s game might have gone in a different direction if Fuller had come down with a one-handed catch in the end zone in the fourth quarter, which would have given the Texans the opportunity to tie the game with a two-pointer. If Fuller came down with that catch and the Texans came back to win the football game, would ownership have given O’Brien a reprieve? Would his plans over the last 18 months suddenly have made more sense? Did it take a loss to the Vikings for McNair to pay attention to what was wrong with his football team?
Before the season, I compared O’Brien to Chip Kelly. Like O’Brien, the Eagles coach parlayed his success in college to an NFL head-coaching role, then used his success as a coach to win a power struggle and take over personnel duties. Kelly then made a series of bizarre decisions in free agency and via trade, and when his team failed to live up to expectations, the Eagles fired Kelly.
Kelly at least got a full season to prove that his choices were as foolish as they seemed. O’Brien has had a year and four games, but he made it into the playoffs in his first season with both roles before the ugly start to 2020. Both seem subject to the Peter Principle, the idea that people in a company will rise to the level where they can prove they’re overmatched. O’Brien will get another job as a coach, but it’s difficult to imagine another team handing him personnel duties after he made nearly two years of widely-panned moves.
In the end, there was nobody left for O’Brien to use as an excuse, no power to grab and no promotion to achieve. The only person more powerful than O’Brien in the organization, McNair, is the one who made the decision to cut ties with O’Brien and his plan for the team after a month of bad football. I can understand why McNair made his decision, but it seems impossible to separate what O’Brien’s done from the opportunity McNair gave him to make those decisions. McNair can right the ship and turn things around if the Texans make the right hires for O’Brien’s old positions this offseason, but neither job looks particularly appealing. McNair also have proven that he’s not up to his job over the last two years, but as O’Brien was reminded on Monday, you can’t fire an owner.
Speculation from Albert Breer, including hints and whispers about Jack Easterby’s role in all this:
The Texans firing Bill O’Brien qualifies as seismic news in the NFL, and ends a tumultuous few years in the organization, during which Houston ousted two general managers and brought in a former team chaplain as EVP of football operations, then added the GM title to the head coach’s business card. And now, that EVP of football operations, Jack Easterby, sits atop the organizational chart on the football side. If you’re getting Game of Thrones vibes, I don’t blame you.
The interesting piece, to me, is that O’Brien’s appeal to owner Cal McNair over the last 16 months—since ex-GM Brian Gaine was fired—was to conduct a cultural overhaul of the organization, building behind a certain type of player and through the lines of scrimmage. In doing so, the core of the roster changed radically, and the team’s supply of draft picks was used as capital to implement the new vision.
And now, after one draft and one free agent period, the plug has been pulled on that project, not much more than a year after the plug was pulled on Gaine, who only lasted 16 months as GM after Rick Smith (who predated O’Brien in the organization) was fired. For those keeping score, that’s pretty much a how not to on building a team.
• So where do they go from here? Easterby, I’m told, very much has McNair’s ear, and word is that was a factor in all this. The EVP of football ops—whose reputation league-wide isn’t in a great place right now—also has some strong connections to keep an eye on.
The first and most obvious one is to Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels. McDaniels had planned to bring Easterby with him to Indianapolis in 2017, before his deal with the Colts fell apart. Easterby is also close to, and shares an agent with, Patriots director of player personnel Nick Caserio. The two, you’ll remember, were together at New England’s ring ceremony in June 2018, just as Gaine was being dismissed.
The expectation at that point was that Caserio—who’s also very close with O’Brien, as is McDaniels—would join his friends in Houston as new Texans GM. But the Patriots blocked it from happening. Now, a fair question resulting from all this would be whether Caserio and/or McDaniels would go there after what happened to O’Brien.
And maybe the most intriguing name here is one outside the Patriots extended family. I’m told Easterby, a South Carolina native, is very close with Clemson coach Dabo Swinney. Swinney, of course, won his first national title at the school with Houston’s Deshaun Watson as his quarterback, and has repeatedly compared Watson, as an athlete and a figure within his program, to Michael Jordan.
More hints about McDaniel. Grey Papke of Larry Brown Sports:
The Houston Texans will likely take their time with their head coach search, but one name is already emerging as one to track.
New England Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels is a “name to watch” in the search, as noted by Ian Rapoport of NFL Network. McDaniels looked at head coaching jobs last offseason, so it’s clear he’s still interested in an opportunity. In addition, Texans Executive Vice President of Football Operations Jack Easterby is known to be very close to McDaniels. The pair spent time together with the Patriots.
The Texans job has its attractions. Deshaun Watson is a franchise quarterback. However, the team has no first-round pick this year, and is saddled with a lot of questionable contracts. It’s not a great situation for an easy rebuild.
McDaniels reportedly had interesting demands when hunting for a coaching job last offseason. He may make those same demands of the Texans if they want him to take the job.
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