Monthly Archives: September 2010

Houston Texans, Year Nine

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gary-kubiak Year Nine of the Houston Texans begins this Sunday with a home game at Reliant Stadium against the dreaded Peyton Manning and the Colts, so it’s time for my seventh (!) annual preview of the hometown team.

The Texans finished off their eighth season in grand style by beating the mostly-trying Patriots with an impressive 21-point 4th quarter comeback. The win wasn’t enough to propel the Texans into the playoffs, but it was the Texans’ fourth win in their final five games of the 2009 season, which gave the franchise it’s first winning record (9-7). In the rather barren terrain of accomplishments that is Texansland, that was a major accomplishment.

Nevertheless, from a won-lost record standpoint, the Texans remain one of the worst expansion franchises in the history of the National Football League after eight seasons. As is usually the case in football, a myriad of influences have combined to cause the Texans’ poor overall record, not all of which are the fault of Texans management and players. Nevertheless, with a team as young and relatively unsuccessful as the Texans, it’s always helpful to review the team’s journey in evaluating whether it is probable that the team has made the progress necessary to make the leap into the NFL playoffs.

The Texans were the toast of Houston for their first three seasons during which Houston’s professional football-deprived fans were simply happy to have an NFL team again and didn’t really have much in the way of expectations. Texans management and the local mainstream media trumpeted the party line that Texans were building a playoff contender “the right way” — that is through prudent drafting and development of young players while eschewing the temptation of short-term rewards provided by over-priced veterans who were on the downside of their careers.

The progressively better won-loss records in the first three seasons (4-12, 5-11, and 7-9) — plus the drafting of young stars such as WR Andre Johnson, RB Dominack Davis (or whatever he ended up changing his name to) and CB Dunta Robinson — seemed to indicate that the Texans’ plan was working. The local mainstream media completely bought into that narrative.

Unfortunately, those progressively better won-loss records distracted Texans management from recognizing that the quality of the Texans’ overall roster was not close to that of an NFL playoff contender. The best evidence of that deficiency was that the Texans entered each of their first four seasons with the same two core problems — the Texans’ offensive line could not protect the quarterback and the Texans’ defensive front could not pressure the opposition’s QB.

Former Texans GM Charlie Casserly never could solve the offensive and defensive line problems (remember LT Tony Boselli, the flirtation with LT Orlando Pace, prospects such as Seth Wand and the thoroughly unimpressive DT’s, Anthony Weaver and Travis Johnson?). The 2005 draft was an absolute disaster (DT Johnson as the 15th pick in the first round?) and initial Texans head coach Dom Capers’ changes to the offensive and defensive systems between Years Three and Four proved equally dubious. After the Texans limped home with a desultory 2-14 record in Year Four, Texans owner Bob McNair mercifully cut the Casserly and Capers regime loose.

Reliant Stadium Subsequently, McNair decided to blow up his original management model and surprisingly hired Gary Kubiak, who promptly made (acquiesced to?) a whopper of a blunder in his first major personnel decision as Texans’ coach — retaining QB David Carr even though it was reasonably clear as early as before Year Three that Carr was unlikely to develop into even an average NFL QB.

Kubiak — who is a quick study in evaluating talent — promptly soured on Carr during the early stages of Year Five as Texans fans endured one of the worst offenses in the NFL that season. As a result of that horrible Year Five offense, Kubiak arguably overpaid for QB Matt Schaub before Year Six and clearly overpaid for over-the-hill free agent RB, Ahman Green. Not much changed through 12 games of Year Six as even the local mainstream media cheerleaders were questioning whether Kubiak was the proper coach to right the Texans’ ship.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the Texans showed some spark and won three of their last four games to finish with an 8-8 record for Year Six, the first non-losing record in franchise history. The Texans’ offense — even without Schaub and star WR Andre Johnson for five and seven games respectively — improved to 12th in the NFL in yards gained and 14th in points scored, by far the best finish of any Texans offense. That was enough to give long-suffering Texans fans hope that things might finally turn around for the franchise the following season.

Unfortunately, the Texans treaded water in Year Seven. A solid season-ending win over the Bears allowed the Texans to finish at 8-8 again, but the team did not contend for a playoff spot and suffered several demoralizing defeats. Given that the team had a 7-9 record after Year Three, a reasonable case could be made that not much progress had been made from the end of Year Three through Year Seven. The offense was better, but the defense was worse than it was after Year Three. Moreover, the 2007 draft was beginning to look almost as bad as the horrid 2005 draft. Had the deck chairs simply been rearranged on the Texans’ version of the Titanic?

Thankfully, several signs emerged in Year Seven that indicated the Texans were headed in the right direction. The offensive line and the receiving corps were far-improved and had more depth than at any time in franchise history. Despite being somewhat brittle, Schaub showed the talent necessary to be a consistently above-average NFL QB and RB Steve Slaton emerged as a game-breaking running back. Although the Texans’ defense did not improve statistically in Year Seven, the Texans had accumulated a nucleus of young defensive players who — with proper coaching and sensible personnel adjustments — were likely to gel into a reasonably effective unit sometime over the next couple of seasons.

Unfortunately, that progress really did not occur in Year Eight. After yet another loss to the Colts in Week 12, the Texans were 5-6 and already a long shot for the playoffs despite a generally favorable schedule. Slaton had inexplicably turned into a fumbling mess of a running back who ended up going on injured reserve after losing his starting job to a group of journeyman RB’s. So, despite winning four of their last five games to post their first winning record, the Texans’ Year Eight performance had the look of fool’s gold.

Andre-JohnsonAlthough disappointing, that performance was good enough to earn Texans’ coach Gary Kubiak another season at the helm. I’ve been skeptical from the start that Kubiak is the right coach to lead the Texans into the playoffs, primarily because I believe that he was not a good fit for the “strong coach” model that McNair adopted when he fired Casserly and Capers. McNair has endured quite a bit of on-the-job training with Kubiak that he probably would not have experienced with a more seasoned head coach.

On the other hand, each of Kubiak’s teams have improved during his tenure with the Texans and his current team appears on paper to be the strongest that the Texans have fielded in their nine seasons. Thus, even though every other NFL team has either made the playoffs or fired its head coach during Kubiak’s tenure with the Texans, Kubiak supporters can make a decent case that McNair made the right choice in retaining him, at least for Year Nine.

Despite my skepticism about Kubiak’s ability to lead the Texans over the playoff hump, he does have many positive characteristics. The players like him and play hard for him. He handles the players and media well, and I have always been impressed by his willingness to recognize mistakes, cut losses and make changes. Kubiak does not seem to be burdened with the stubbornness that often undermines NFL head coaches.

Moreover, continuity in coaching staffs is an underappreciated factor in the success of NFL teams, so maybe giving Kubiak more rope than most NFL coaches receive will finally produce McNair a winner. McNair certainly deserves it in view of his patient support of the Texans’ football operation.

But what does all of this mean for the Texans in Year Nine?

Given the high number of variables that play into a successful NFL season, picking NFL playoff teams is a highly speculative endeavor, at best. Given that constant change is a fact of NFL life, assessing something as seemingly simple as strength of schedule is a moving target and can literally change overnight, particularly given the high injury risk in the NFL.

My sense is that the Texans have accumulated enough talented football players on offense to be playoff-caliber so long as QB Schaub remains healthy and new PK Neil Rackers doesn’t have a meltdown like Kris Brown had last season. But defensive improvement will probably again be the key to whether this season is a breakthrough season for the Texans or another disappointment.

Inasmuch as one of the Texan’s best defensive players (LB Brian Cushing) is suspended for the first four games and Kubiak elected to go with a young and relatively inexperienced secondary, my sense is that defensive improvement will be slow and probably not evident until later in the season. Accordingly, I’m placing the over/under for Texans’ wins this season at eight, the same number as I predicted last season. Eight wins will not be good enough to make the playoffs.

Oh well, patience is certainly a virtue for anyone who is a Texans fan.

Finally, as with my regular baseball reports on the Stros, I’m dispensing this season with the weekly football game reviews that I’ve done over the past seven years. The blogosphere has grown to the point where virtually every pro and college team has a blog that covers each team far better than I ever could in my once-a-week posts. As with the Stros, I’ll continue to do an occasional post on discrete games or issues during the season, but simply not on a weekly basis anymore.

Moreover, with the maturation of the sports blogosphere, there really is no reason to rely any longer on the mainstream media for football news and analysis. For several years now, Alan Burge has been doing a much better job of covering the Texans on a nuts and bolts basis than the mainstream media, while bloggers Stephanie Stradley, Lance Zerlein and Houston Diehards all provide first-rate analysis of particular issues facing the Texans.

Similarly, on the college football front, both The
Wizard of Odds and the Pre-Snap Report are excellent resources for keeping up with the college football season overall. With regard to blogs that cover particular teams, Barking Carnival is my favorite for the Texas Longhorns, while I Am the 12th Man does a good job of covering the Texas Aggies.

On the local front, the best sources of information on the Houston Cougars are Steve Campbell’s blog and Fight for Red and White blog, while The Rice Football Webletter does a great job of covering the Owls.

So, with that, let the games begin!

You’ve got to be kidding me

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housing-bubble No, really. Get a load of this:

The unexpectedly deep plunge in home sales this summer is likely to force the Obama administration to choose between future homeowners and current ones, a predicament officials had been eager to avoid.

Over the last 18 months, the administration has rolled out just about every program it could think of to prop up the ailing housing market, using tax credits, mortgage modification programs, low interest rates, government-backed loans and other assistance intended to keep values up and delinquent borrowers out of foreclosure. The goal was to stabilize the market until a resurgent economy created new households that demanded places to live.

As the economy again sputters and potential buyers flee – July housing sales sank 26 percent from July 2009 – there is a growing sense of exhaustion with government intervention. Some economists and analysts are now urging a dose of shock therapy that would greatly shift the benefits to future homeowners: Let the housing market crash.

When prices are lower, these experts argue, buyers will pour in, creating the elusive stability the government has spent billions upon billions trying to achieve.

As regular readers of this blog know, the notion that housing markets need to allocate risk of loss before those markets can stabilize and recover is not rocket science.

In fact, the government’s dithering over the past two years in propping up these inflated housing markets has actually made the situation worse because it has postponed the transfer of misallocated resources in the housing markets to other markets.

Another day, another failed bailout. So it goes.

Retiring thoughts

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Retirement- Clear Thinkers favorite Arnold Kling has had some insightful thoughts lately (see also here) about the economics of retirement lately:

[Megan McArdle’s] main point is that if you live about 90 years and spend the last 30 of them not working, it is hard to maintain your standard of living no matter who pays for it. There is a lot of optimism about stock market returns built into state pension funds, individual retirement plans, and–I would say–even Social Security and Medicare. My argument is that without strong stock market returns, general tax revenues are not going to be robust, and Social Security and Medicare will go broke really soon without robust general tax revenues. [. . .]

For any given level of output, more consumption by one group (say, people over 65) is going to reduce what can be consumed by everyone else. As the ratio of people over 65 to everyone else goes up, this increases the ratio of state-confiscated income to total income required to keep Social Security and Medicare going. [To some] this higher confiscation rate represents a kinder and gentler society. But it may not feel kind and gentle to those who earn incomes and have them confiscated.

Kling’s thoughts resonate when reading this WSJ article on teacher’s pensions:

When it comes to shaking up the status quo, however, the most potent education reform may be the one that’s too often considered a side issue: pension reform.

That’s right, pension reform. Over the past 25 years, the private sector has moved from having four of five workers in a defined-benefit pension to having just one of five workers in such a plan. Mostly this means a shift to 401(k)s and the like, where payouts are related to what employees pay in.

Like most government employees, teachers have not made this shift. Their unions fight bitterly to retain the defined benefit plans underwritten by taxpayers. While these plans allow some lucky folks to retire in their 50s with a generous payout, they also feature perverse incentives that punish the young (more on this below) and encourage people to hang on for dear life even when they’d much rather leave. [.  .  .]

"A retired teacher paid $62,000 towards her pension and nothing, yes nothing, for full family medical, dental and vision coverage over her entire career," said [Governor Chris Christie]. "What will we pay her? $1.4 million in pension benefits and another $215,000 in health-care benefit premiums over her lifetime. Is it ‘fair’ for all of us and our children to have to pay for this excess?"

The article goes on to point out that the unintended consequence of these subsidized pensions is that – similar to the dynamic of employer-based health care policies – employees lose the incentive to pursue different and potentially more fulfilling careers because of fear that they will lose their non-portable benefits if they change jobs.

Does it really make sense to reward employees who simply wait out the system for the pot at the end of the rainbow that the rest of us cannot afford to provide?

Preparing for Life

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john-grisham I’ve never been a fan of John Grisham’s novels, although I concede that a couple of them have been made into entertaining movies.

But after reading this Grisham/NY Times op-ed, I’m a big fan of John Grisham:

I WASN’T always a lawyer or a novelist, and I’ve had my share of hard, dead-end jobs. I earned my first steady paycheck watering rose bushes at a nursery for a dollar an hour. I was in my early teens, but the man who owned the nursery saw potential, and he promoted me to his fence crew. For $1.50 an hour, I labored like a grown man as we laid mile after mile of chain-link fence. There was no future in this, and I shall never mention it again in writing.

Then, during the summer of my 16th year, I found a job with a plumbing contractor. I crawled under houses, into the cramped darkness, with a shovel, to somehow find the buried pipes, to dig until I found the problem, then crawl back out and report what I had found. I vowed to get a desk job. I’ve never drawn inspiration from that miserable work, and I shall never mention it again in writing, either.

But a desk wasn’t in my immediate future. My father worked with heavy construction equipment, and through a friend of a friend of his, I got a job the next summer on a highway asphalt crew. This was July, when Mississippi is like a sauna. Add another 100 degrees for the fresh asphalt. I got a break when the operator of a Caterpillar bulldozer was fired; shown the finer points of handling this rather large machine, I contemplated a future in the cab, tons of growling machinery at my command, with the power to plow over anything. Then the operator was back, sober, repentant. I returned to the asphalt crew.

I was 17 years old that summer, and I learned a lot, most of which cannot be repeated in polite company. One Friday night I accompanied my new friends on the asphalt crew to a honky-tonk to celebrate the end of a hard week. When a fight broke out and I heard gunfire, I ran to the restroom, locked the door and crawled out a window. I stayed in the woods for an hour while the police hauled away rednecks. As I hitchhiked home, I realized I was not cut out for construction and got serious about college.

Many of us had similar experiences to Grisham’s before finding our life’s work. In talking with young folks these days about their uncertain futures, I find myself often advising them that uncertainty is, for most of us, an unavoidable part of life. Although often difficult at the time, those experiences help define our character and spirit.

I decided to go to law school while working on a loading dock on Produce Row in Houston. I’m eternally grateful for that loading dock. What was your loading dock?

John Cleese on Creativity

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Find a way to avoid the distractions, at least for a little while (H/T Presentation Zen).

Answering the Obesity Paradox

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skinny-fat-men On one hand, drinking even diet soft drinks causes higher risk of heart disease?:

A new US study has found that drinking more than one soft drink a day, whether regular or diet, may be linked to an increased risk of developing heart disease, via an increase in metabolic syndrome, a group of characteristics like excess girth, high blood pressure, and other factors that increase the chances of getting diabetes and cardiovascular problems.

But on the other hand, even though overweight people are at higher risk of heart attacks, patients with heart failure have lower mortality rates if they are obese:

[T]he “obesity paradox” among patients with heart failure. The paradox refers to the repeated finding that while overweight people are more prone to heart failure, patients with heart failure have lower mortality rates if they are obese. The reason for this paradox is far from clear, though Dr. Lavie suggested that one explanation could be that once people become ill, having more bodily “reserve” could be to their advantage.

My sense is that the obesity paradox is more the result of overweight people having more muscle mass. It’s not the excess fat that helps them recover from heart failure. It’s the muscle mass and strength.

As Art DeVany has been saying for years: “Muscle is medicine. Strength carries us effortlessly through life.” As we age, our workout routines should be tailored toward maintaining or increasing strength.

Swing Thoughts

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Jimhardy2_000 A couple of interesting articles on very good golfers at different stages of their careers came across my desk yesterday.

Jaime Diaz – consistently one of Golf Digest’s best writers – wrote this Golf Digest article on his conversation with Jack Nicklaus in connection with the Golden Bear’s 70 birthday (H/T Geoff Shackelford). Although Nicklaus still holds the record for major championship victories at 18, he tells Diaz that he now thinks he could have accomplished substantially more if he had really applied himself (he believes he left about one third of his effort on the table). Nicklaus goes on to note that his failure to learn proper pitching technique until relatively late in his career cost him several major victories.

The other insightful article is this Sean Martin/GolfWeek piece on the hottest golfer on the PGA Tour this year – the relatively unheralded Matt Kuchar, who lost his Tour card earlier in the decade and appeared to fall off the golf map after a stellar amateur and collegiate career.

Martin does a good job of explaining the swing change that saved Kuchar’s career. And as with many things in golf, there is a Houston connection to Kuchar’s conversion.

When his golf game was bottoming out five years ago, Kuchar came to Houston to see Jim Hardy, who sort of specializes in golf swing reclamation projects.

Kuchar initially worked with Hardy, who then introduced him to his acolyte, Chris O’Connell. From there, as Martin explains in the article, O’Connell helped Kuchar change his swing to one that rotates much more around his body rather than up and down along the target line. As Jeff Ritter pointed out here awhile back, the swing changes that Tiger Woods is now making with his new swing coach (Sean Foley) are quite similar to the ones that Kuchar made.

It took a couple of years, but Kuchar has now fully embraced the swing change and the results have been amazing. With his win last weekend at the Barclay’s, Kuchar is now first in money earned this season on the Tour, has now finished in the top 20 in 11 of his last 13 tournaments and has the most top 10 finishes this season on the Tour. Not surprisingly, Kuchar will be one of the members of the U.S. Ryder Cup team next month.

Good thing he came to Houston, don’t you think?

Are you ready for some football?

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The draft of Year XXIII of the Fantasy Football League of Houston (yes, that’s year 23 – our league was one of the first) was held last night and a good time was had by all. And thankfully, Norman Tugwater did not show up.