Value of Things: A different look at the Texans defense

1 week ago 2

One of the things I have brought up in passing is that the Texans defense makes life miserable for opposing quarterbacks. Unfortunately, I have not taken the time to lay that out statistically and that is completely on me. This is a space where we dedicate ourselves to the data side of things. So, we will go through a systematic game by game approach to look at the Texans defense and what this means for the next round of the Texans 2025 season.

The NFL is a quarterback driven league by design. As a business model, professional sports only get money if they get eyeballs. That includes clicks, views, subscriptions, ticket sales, and ratings. The powers that be have figured out that chicks dig offense. Fans like scoring and so the rules have been skewed to encourage that most of the media attention goes to the quarterbacks.

In many ways, the Texans are bucking the system. They have built their entire 2025 persona around scoring 20 points and holding on for dear life. The narrative would say that it is impossible to sustain that model because quarterback play improves in the playoffs. Assuming that the Bucs do not make the playoffs, we can divide the Texans season to date completely in half. Let’s see how they fared with playoff quarterbacks versus non playoff quarterbacks.

Playoff quarterbacks

	Com	ATT	PCT	YDS	TD/INT	RTG
Matthew Stafford	21	29	72.4	245	1/0	109.1
Trevor Lawrence	20	40	50.0	222	0/1	56.5
Sam Darnold	17	31	54.8	213	1/1	73.7
Mac Jones	19	32	59.4	193	2/1	84.5
Bo Nix	18	37	48.6	173	2/1	68.9
Trevor Lawrence	13	23	56.6	158	1/1	74.2
Josh Allen	24	34	70.6	253	0/2	67.4
Justin Herbert	21	32	65.6	236	1/1	84.9
Total	153	258	59.3	1693	8/8	77.4

Now, there was some editorializing here to some degree. Brock Purdy is the quarterback for the 49ers, but Mac Jones performed likely as well as Purdy would have. Furthermore, the Bucs and Ravens may be playoff teams. However, there is no universe where Cooper Rush is comparable to Lamar Jackson, so we leaned into the narrative and considered him a non-playoff quarterback. As you can see above, the Texans made some playoff quarterbacks very unhappy this season.

We point this out because the narrative will likely be that the Texans beat up on some bad teams and padding their stats against some bad quarterbacks. Before we give into some lazy narratives we should look at the stats to see if there is any validity to this claim. As it stands, we have it perfectly set up with another eight quarterbacks.

Non-Playoff Quarterbacks

	COM	ATT	PCT	YDS	TD/INT	RTG
Baker Mayfield	25	38	65.8	215	2/0	98.0
Cooper Rush	14	20	70.0	174	0/3	58.1
Cam Ward	10	26	38.5	108	0/1	35.4
Cam Ward	24	37	64.9	194	1/0	87.0
Daniel Jones	14	27	51.9	207	2/0	101.0
Patrick Mahomes	14	33	42.4	160	0/3	19.8
Jacoby Brisset	27	40	67.5	249	3/1	98.9
Geno Smith	16	23	69.6	201	2/1	107.3
Total	144	244	59.0	1508	10/9	75.7

I simply love statistics. It often cuts through the laziness and helps crystallize what is actually going on. There have been good performances against the Texans defense, but in the aggregate they perform just as well against non-playoff teams as they do playoff teams. There are minor differences, but the completion percentage is nearly the same, the quarterback rating is nearly the same, and the touchdown to interception ratio is nearly the same.

We can talk about rankings all day long, but the simplest way to look at this data is to look at it through the prism of a team evaluating its quarterback. If a team played 16 games and their quarterback put up the following numbers what would likely happen.

2025: 297 completions, 502 attempts, 59.2 PCT, 3200 yards, 18 TD, 17 INT, 76.6 Rating

I don’t know about any of you, but if that were my quarterback I’d probably be spending the offseason looking for a new quarterback. That is essentially what the Texans have done to quarterbacks. Of the three quarterbacks to have ratings 100 or higher, two of them are not in the playoffs. Two others had ratings over 90 and it is highly likely that neither of them will be in the playoffs either. So, this is not a case of the Texans beating up on weaker opponents.

The second way to look at this moving forward is to compare C.J. Stroud with a fictional quarterback putting up the numbers above. Obviously, he missed three games with the concussion, so his counting stats will not look as good as the ones above, but let’s see what happens with the percentage and rating statistics.

C.J. Stroud: 259 completions, 400 attempts, 64.8 PCT, 2872 yards, 18 TD, 8 INT, 92.6 rating

If the point of the postseason is to determine which quarterback is better than the Texans have seemingly put their thumb on the scales by making the opposing quarterback look awful. I don’t think Stroud’s performance is going to get him into Canton at this point, but these numbers are far better than what Texans opponents are putting up. Those numbers by themselves could explain how they have gotten to 11-5 even with their offensive struggles.

The blueprint is easy to see. They have executed the blueprint flawlessly throughout the last eight weeks. The question will be whether that blueprint holds up in January and February. Based on what we see here, there is no reason to believe it can’t work. It already has worked against the likes of Josh Allen, Justin Herbert, Trevor Lawrence, and Patrick Mahomes. Statistically it worked against Bo Nix as well. Will it work against Drake Maye or a Lamar Jackson led Ravens team? That remains to be seen.

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