So, the Texans traded a low draft pick last summer to Buffalo for the contract rights to veteran wide receiver Eric Moulds in a much ballyhooed deal. The theory of the deal was that the veteran receiver would help take the pressure off of the Texans’ stud receiver, Andre Johnson.
So much for that theory.
Meanwhile, the guy who Moulds replaced came within a couple of minutes of playing in the Super Bowl this past season.
Even if such deals don’t work out, it’s a good thing for the Texans to be taking well-calculated risks in attempting to improve the chronically underachieving team. However, regular readers of this blog knew that the Moulds deal was probably a loser well before Moulds ever played a down for the Texans. Why didn’t the Texans’ personnel evaluators realize that Moulds was washed up before the team blew a five million dollar signing bonus on him? That’s the question that Bob McNair ought to be asking himself this morning.
At least the Texans cut their losses on Moulds early. In the low expectation world of Texansville, that signals progress.

This earlier post noted the institutionalized fanaticism that is involved in the recruitment of big-time college football players. But that fanaticism is really nothing compared to the obsession that many professional football fans will indulge over the next several weeks as National Football League teams prepares for its annual draft of minor league, er . . I mean, “college” players in mid-April.
Inasmuch as many folks in Houston believe that the poor performance of the Houston Texans during their five seasons of existence is attributable to the poor draft picks of Texans’ management (I’m not convinced that’s entirely correct, but oh well), we are bombarded in these football-crazed parts over the next several weeks with media coverage of who the Texans and other NFL teams should choose in the draft. I’ve always had this vague notion that all this attention given to who NFL teams should choose might actually push the teams toward making poor choices, but I’ve never really been able to put my finger on any support for that notion.
Well, American Enterprise Institute scholar Kevin Hassett just might have the answer. According to an ongoing study that Yale University economist Cade Massey and University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler are conducting, Hassett reports that the Texans likely would have been much better off trading their high draft picks from past drafts for mutiple lower draft picks that the team could have used to buy more good players:

To recap, Massey and Thaler studied the draft and found that teams make systematic errors. They tend to place too high a value on the top players and too low a value on draft picks a little farther down.
The problem is, the very top players in the draft receive very high salaries. Even if they compete brilliantly, it’s hard for them to outperform their earnings. But by definition, since all teams have to operate within the same salary cap, winners have to have teams that are filled with players who outperform their paychecks.
Last year’s top overall pick, Mario Williams of the Houston Texans, is a nice example. He received a salary package worth $54 million over six years — and proceeded to play like a fairly mediocre defensive end. He was the sixth-leading tackler on his team, and recorded only 4 1/2 sacks.
While those numbers suggest Williams will be a serviceable NFL competitor, he was compensated as one of the best defensive players in the league. And since the total salary bill for the team is capped by the league, the money spent on Williams is money that can’t be spent on players at other positions. That undermines their ability to compete.
On the other hand, players a little farther down in the draft can be enormous bargains. Take Houston’s second-round pick DeMeco Ryans. He led the NFL in tackles, but only received a contract of $5 million over four years. Good teams fill their roster with such deals and avoid committing huge resources to the big-money players like Williams.

In other words, the Texans need more DeMeco Ryans and fewer David Carrs and Mario Williams, although it’s a bit early to write off the Williams pick as a bust on the level of the Carr pick. Hassett’s point is also supported by the success of the New England Patriots, who have used a model of emphasizing quality depth over star players in building one of the most successful NFL teams over the past decade. During most of that time, the Patriots were picking at the bottom of the draft board while, over the past five years, the Texans have been picking at or near the top.

Last week, it was the institutionalized fanaticism of signing day in minor league professional football. Following on that drama, this Hog News post is dispositive evidence that there is not enough to do in Arkansas:

So many people desperately want someone to come forward and tell the truth. The problem with that is many of the key players in the latest Arkansas football saga have to move forward and continue their lives. They have to protect their futures. Anyone who has attempted to tell the truth this past year has had their character, reputations and even their careers attacked by those who believe it is in the best interest of the program to prevent it. But the facts related in these writings are true and have been verified.

Read the entire piece, at your own risk. ;^)

I was glad that Colts QB Peyton Manning finally was on a Super Bowl winner because he is truly one of the NFL’s greatest QB’s of all-time. But I thought it was a tad absurd that Manning was named the Super Bowl’s Most Valuable Player when he didn’t even play particularly well. How about one of those fellows in the trenches where the Colts dominated the Bears throughout the game?
Dave Berri agrees, but makes the salient point that it is much more difficult to evaluate the performance of football players than the performance of players in other sports (i.e., baseball) that do not require the same degree of reliance on teammates as football. After pointing out that Manning actually was statistically worse during this season’s successful playoff run than he had been in each of the Colts’ playoff failures over the past three seasons, Berri observes the following:

So what lesson has Manning learned? For his team to win, he must play bad?
No, thatís not the lesson.
There are actually two lessons. First, playoffs are a small sample and luck plays a substantial role in determining the outcome (a point made last Sunday in The New York Times). Secondly, teammates matter in football. Quarterbacks do not win or lose games all by themselves. This was true when Manningís team failed in the playoffs. And itís true this year as well.
So we should stop judging quarterbacks strictly in terms of whether their teams happen to win. Manning was not less of a quarterback when his team failed to win its last game. And heís not finally a success because his team happened to win its last game.

Berri also makes an interesting point about Bears QB Rex Grossman. Read the entire piece.

With the Chicago Bears playing in Super Bowl XLI, it was only a matter of time before the NY Times caught up with Buddy Ryan, the architect of the suffocating Bears defense that dominated the game the last time the Bears played in the Super Bowl (1985).
Ryan holds a special place in the hearts of Houston football fans. During the 1993 season, while passing through Houston as the defensive coordinator for a pretty good Oilers team, Ryan hauled off and slugged fellow Oilers assistant coach, Kevin Gilbride, on the sidelines during a nationally televised game. The reason for the outburst was Ryan’s frustration over Gilbride’s dubious coordination of the Oilers’ mercurial Run ‘n Shoot offense in that particular game. Local sports wags still shake their heads over that incident.
Although volatile, Ryan was a superb defensive football coach and certainly one of the best in NFL history. He was most well-known for that fine defense on the 1985 Bears Super Bowl championship team, but he may have done an even better job in coordinating the defense on the 1969 New York Jets team that upset the mighty Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. Most people remember Joe Namath’s famous prediction from that game, but the the Jetsí offense only scored 16 points. On the other hand, Ryan’s Jets defense held the high-powered Baltimore offense to 7 points after Vince Lombardi’s Packers had put up 35 and 33 points in the first two Super Bowls. Most folks before Super Bowl III thought that the AFL teams were chronically overmatched in playing against the established NFL powers, but the Jets and the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl IV changed that perception forever.
Ryan’s genius was the unmitigated aggressiveness with which his defenses played. Focusing on sacking the QB (“We’re trying to find out the identity of the opposition’s second team QB,” Ryan would quip with a wink), forcing turnovers and and stopping the offense on third-down, Ryan ushered in the era of bringing zone blitzes from everywhere on the field to disrupt the offense. Interestingly, the underdog Bears’ chances of winning today are largely dependent on whether the Bears’ defense can effectively pressure Colts QB Peyton Manning. Ron Rivera, who played for Ryan on the 1985 Bears championship team, is the Bears’ defensive coordinator trying to figure out how to do that.
As with many top notch coordinators in football, Ryan was not a particularly effective head coach. He was fired from NFL head coaching jobs at Philly and Arizona before retiring to his Kentucky horse farm in 1995 after 34 years of coaching in the NFL. He continues to raise horses there while caring for his Alzheimerís-ridden wife of 36 years and following the careers of his two sons, both of whom followed him into coaching.

As we endure the overblown run-up to Super Bowl XLI this week, there will invariably be much blather about the high incomes of the participants and professional football players generally. Frankly, given the risks of what these players face, they deserve every dime they make.
As this NY Times article reports, the life of even a relatively high-income NFL football player is no picnic:

[F]ootball playersí careers resemble life as Thomas Hobbes described it in the 17th century: theyíre nasty, brutish and short. The average football career lasts less than four years, . . .
The minority of players who do make it past a fourth year are still treated like (highly paid) temporary or contract workers. In baseball and basketball, teams must honor multiyear contracts, even if players suffer career-ending injuries or if their skills decline.
Not so in football. ìA person with a five-year contract will get paid only for the current year if he suffers a career-ending injury,î Professor [Skip] Sauer [of The Sports Economist fame] noted.
Star players with bargaining power have been able to protect themselves by negotiating guaranteed multimillion-dollar signing bonuses. But less-valued players are not able to extract those bonuses, and the relatively weak playersí union has not been effective in getting many concessions from owners, nor much protection for players hurt on the job.

The article goes on to mention the examples of former Houston Oilers Hall of Fame running back, Earl Campbell, who is partially disabled from the punishment he took during his football career, and the more recent case of former Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Andre Waters, who committed suicide after battling depression and brain damage caused by the multiple collisions he endured while playing football.
Along those same lines, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Stan Kroichick recently wrote this fine series of articles (see also here, here and here) on the 1981 San Francisco 49er’s, the first of that franchise’s four Super Bowl championships of the 1980’s (the 1994 team won another one) in which he chronicles the physical problems that the players on the 1981 team have endured over the 26 years since that magic season (and here’s another one examining the health problems of Wilbur Marshall, one of the stars of the 1985 Bears Super Bowl championship team). It’s a daunting tale and one that will be simmering just beneath the surface of the NFLís pomp and circumstance during Super Bowl week.

Bill Parcells and his former assistant, Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, are good football coaches. But, man, can’t they just take themselves a bit less seriously?
Parcells quit the other day as the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys after four mostly mediocre seasons. As this earlier post noted, Parcells is reasonably good at what he does, but is miserable doing it. This clever Onion piece from a couple of weeks ago picked up on that in predicting Parcells’ resignation.
Meanwhile, Belichick showed his sunny side after the Patriots’ loss to the Colts in the NFC Championship game this past Sunday, as this YouTube clip reflects:

By the way, aren’t Parcells and Belichick an interesting contrast to the two Super Bowl coaches this year, Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith? Michael Smith of ESPN.com describes the latter two:

Dungy and Smith are role models, not just for coaches who look like them or men who look like them, but for all coaches and all men. They live their lives the right way, and as a result they do their jobs the same way. Their priorities are, in order: faith, their families and football. The outcome of the Super Bowl or any game does not define them. They personify words such as class, grace, dignity, honor and integrity.

It’s not as bad as that whole Vince Young thing, but Badsports’ Kevin Whited and Scott over at H-Town Sports do raise a valid question in wondering how wide receiver Jabar Gaffney (the second draft pick in the Texans’ history) has gone from Texans castoff to playoff star for the New England Patriots?
I wondered the same thing before this season and why the Texans overpaid for a wide receiver in decline to replace Gaffney.
Meanwhile, consistent with that quality of decision-making, the Texans announced late last week that they are raising ticket prices for next season.