Houston Texans have become the laughing stock of the NFL

Flashback to early 2020 and the Houston Texans were up 24-0 over the eventual Super Bowl champion Chiefs. It’s been all downhill from there. 

It wasn’t long ago that the Houston Texans were a respectable franchise. They were winning AFC South titles and had one of the best quarterbacks in the league in Deshaun Watson. They also had big names like DeAndre Hopkins and J.J. Watt that made them a fun team to watch whenever they were on primetime.

When the Texans narrowly knocked the Bills off in the 2020 AFC Wild Card, people were excited to see what they could throw at the Chiefs in the Divisional Round. It started off great for the Texans, who were leading 24-0 over KC early in the second quarter. Somehow, they ended up trailing 28-24 by half time. Since then, not much has gone right for Houston.

The Texans went on to lose 51-31 to the Chiefs, who went on to win the Super Bowl. Their huge comeback victory over Houston sparked the eventual Super Bowl while the Texans went into a downward spiral.

Houston had no draft picks to work with due to trading for offensive lineman Laremy Tunsil. Head coach and general manager Bill O’Brien made the head-scratching decision to trade Hopkins, one of Houston’s best players, to Arizona for virtually nothing. By the time the regular season rolled around, Texans fans were at their wit’s end.

The regular season got off to as poor of a start as possible, as the Texans started the year 0-4 and finally fired O’Brien as a result of the atrocious beginning. The Texans finished the year with five straight losses despite Watson throwing for at least 300 yards in all but one of those games.

All of that is still minuscule compared to what would happen after the season wrapped up. First and foremost, the Texans normally would hold the No. 3 pick due to their bad season, but because of the trade for Tunsil, they don’t get to reap the benefits of that.

To make matters worse, the Texans upset Watson when they hired Nick Caserio as their general manager without discussing it with him first when he was told he’d have a say in who was hired. Watson was also annoyed that his team was the only one at the time not to interview Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy for their head coach position and that seemed to be the turning point for Watson.

While the Texans eventually put in an interview request for Bieniemy, it was too late. The Texans were no longer on thin ice with Watson, they had fallen through the ice, and Watson had enough. Trade rumors started to circulate at that time and after the Texans hired David Culley as their head coach, Watson officially requested a trade.

A little over a year ago, the Texans were leading 24-0 over the Chiefs. Had they won that game, they’d have hosted the AFC Championship Game as a four-seed and if they beat the Titans, would have been in the franchise’s first-ever Super Bowl.

Instead, they blew a 24-0 lead, traded their best wide receiver for a washed-up running back, had no draft picks, started 0-4, fired their head coach, finished the season 4-12 despite having one of the best quarterbacks in the league, and look to be in a situation where they’ll have to trade the aforementioned best quarterback.

Not many teams could screw up this badly, but the Houston Texans did so. I didn’t even get to the storyline of Watt wanting to be traded after the dumpster fire that was the 2020 season. Watt has been the face of the Texans franchise since they drafted him in 2011 and even he’s fed up and wanting a fresh start somewhere else.

It remains to be seen just how long the Texans are going to be in this bad of a situation, but trading Watson would make them not only an irrelevant team but the laughing stock of the league. That’s not something we expected to say about the Texans when they were leading 24-0 in the AFC Divisional Round.