Following on this weekend post on the end of the David Carr era for the Houston Texans, John Lopez — who for my money is the Chronicle’s best sportswriter — provides this column that provides the type of insight (i.e., how the relationship between Texans owner Bob McNair and Carr protracted the Texans’ mistake in relying on Carr) that was utterly missing from fellow Chronicle sports columnist Richard Justice’s commentary on Carr’s exit:
McNair loved David Carr until it hurt. That was the biggest problem of all.
For all the other things that hurt this club, all the people and decisions involved, all the bad luck and bad contracts, it was the relationship between owner and quarterback that set so many things spiraling downward.
McNair loved all the things Carr stood for as a man, a husband and father. He loved the way Carr handled himself as the face of the franchise.
Love was blind.
The Texans, specifically coach Gary Kubiak and general manager Rick Smith, are in one fine mess now, their careers clinging to a life preserver named Matt Schaub, for a number of reasons. Many of the problems, they inherited. But it started with McNair investing too much emotionally.
Read the entire column. Lopez is on the money that there are operational problems in the Texans front office in the area of player evaluation and contract negotiation. It’s not clear to me by any stretch that the Kubiak coaching regime has corrected those problems.
By the way, the current thinking around the NFL is that Carr will be reunited with former Texans coach Dom Capers (now the defensive coordinator) in Miami.
Actually, if we are not looking at this in hindsight, I think the unemotional, conventional NFL wisdom last year was to reup Carr, give him some good coaching, and then use the first pick on other needs.
Lopez, in fact, was the #1 cheerleader of Reggie Bush. A pick not terribly compatible with jettisoning Carr last year. I personally wasn’t a big fan of Bush as a Texan, but as long as we are talking alternative histories, it is possible that having more weapons, (i.e. good running backs who had actually been in camp), for Carr might have helped his season. All the “help” given to Carr that Lopez cites is a joke. Nobody in the league had a worse running back situation last year. Nobody.
The emotional pick at the time would have been to get Vince Young. At least how that pick was being sold by the local media. His biggest supporters sold him as the hometown hero. They said he would be a project and should sit.
Nationally, he was seen as unconventional and a risk, and had Bud not forced the Titans to take VY, he could have easily dropped in last year’s draft. (His agent did him no favors by how he was sheparded through the draft process).
Personally, I thought the best way to sell VY was on his merits as a player–his accomplishments and his amazing statistics. (his junior stats were stunning especially given how many times he had to shut down his game in the third and fourth quarters because the games were so out of hand).
If the Texans would have chucked Carr in February, and then picked Vince in April, nationally that would have been seen as the emotional thing to do. Heck, there are still ESPNers saying that the Texans are stupid to get rid of Carr this year.
As for contract negotation, the Texans got rid of both Casserly and the cap man/negotiator Dan Ferens last year. They’ve spent this offseason getting rid of bad contracts, and with the FAs they’ve gotten, most of the contracts are fairly front loaded, so if the performance doesn’t match the contract, they can more easily get rid of the players.
Yes, McNair is a nice guy, but I think he was failed by the football guys around him. Dan Reeves said Carr wasn’t the problem, and then Kubiak says Carr can be fixed based mostly on the only info he had–watching video. He couldn’t have had first hand experience of how Carr responded to coaching.
I think keeping Carr was the conventional NFL point of view, divorced from the emotional considerations that the fans (and some teammates) had–that they were sick of seeing Carr make mistakes, had they had no good will left with him, wanted to see Vince Young, and booed Carr for every mistake. It was just a toxic environment that the vulcan Casserly just kind of blew off–“see, fans can’t make these decisions, see.”
McNair doesn’t want to be a meddling owner–he trusts the football guys to make football decisions. And he has been failed by some of that advice.
I don’t know what will pan out from the Schaub pick, but I do appreciate the long term thinking with it. If you think he can be the guy, it is better for the franchise to get that guy, than it is to get someone who might have been easier for the coach to work with short term. Quarterback development isn’t something that fans have much patience with but is essential to winning.
Ultimately, it is easier to be a pessimist about the rebuilding of the Texans because it is always harder to fix a team than it is just to add parts. That’s why really good coaches oft prefer to go to good situations–the Phil Jackson syndrome. And why lower drafted quarterbacks sometimes look really good–because they were drafted into better situations.
I think it is legitimate to question sometimes if the Texans are too niiiiice, (I had a blog post about that back aways) but I don’t think that reupping Carr was just a product of nice. I think it was a product of seeing promise in Carr in 2004, and not having much to look at in 2005 because offensive coordinator Pendry was so out of his league.
And then also blowing off the emotional feelings of the fans about the QB situation. The Texans problems with Carr and the 2006 draft was too much vulcanism and forgetting that football is an emotional game and that fan enthusiasm is contagious.
(In other words, I am not a Lopez fan. His articles in the paper are puffy and his radio show contains so much wrong information it causes me to start talking to myself in my car).
Stephanie, I think you are correct that the football people have let McNair down, although I think that you give them far too much benefit of the doubt in regard to Carr. Yes, the OL problems probably masked Carr’s limitations to a certain degree and may well have exacerbated them. But given his lack of development over his first four seasons, it was clear by the time that Kubiak arrived on the scene that Carr was damaged goods. By reupping Carr last year, the Texans procrastinated and blew an opportunity to get value for him.
Not just the OL problems. Number 2 WR was also a problem. And TE talent.
The 2005 scheme was dreadful. Mike Sherman in a quote that didn’t make much news said that the 2005 video was nearly unusuable.
Carr’s first half of 2004 was actually pretty good until teams figured out how to deal with the offenses deficiencies.
In other words, I don’t think it was a no brainer in February of 2006 that Carr was done as a QB in the league. And you wouldn’t have gotten value for him anyways–you would have had to give him his release because if you signed him, the salary cap hit would be greater than the trade value.
So in this alternative history, you release Carr in February, and basically VY holds you hostage for the first pick, because you’d need QB and any other QB picked would have caused major rioting.
Stephanie, if the market for Carr in February 2006 was such that a trade was uneconomic, that’s a pretty solid indication that it was not worth the money of exercising the option to retain him.
And I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that VY would have been the QB drafted by the Texans if they had elected not to pick up Carr’s option, although there would have been much pressure to do so. Obviously, both Leinart and Cutler would have been in the running, too.
The bottom line is that Lopez has a point that the Texans held on to Carr too long. Inasmuch as it’s better late than never to recognize such mistakes, I’m glad the club is cutting Carr loose now and moving decisively in another direction. But their flexibility in doing so now is not what it would have been last year.
Please let me clarify.
It is not that a trade would be uneconomic because nobody would have wanted Carr last year at his contract.
It is that to trade him, the Texans would have had to exercise the bonus first. Even if someone would want that contract, to trade him after exercising the contract would have caused a cap hit to Houston that would exceed the benefits that the Texans would likely get in a trade.
So that is why once the Texans exercised the option, you couldn’t realistically take QB in the draft. Because you couldn’t just then trade Carr economically. It would make more sense just to release him before the draft if you didn’t think he could be your QB.
Lopez can characterize this as all being about an emotional attachment to Carr, but it was either getting nothing for Carr last year, or nothing for Carr this year.
I think the traditional NFL move would have kept the player they thought could be fixed, not drafted QB, and then taken a non-QB best player available. VY, Cutler, and Leinart at the time weren’t considered the BPA by at least two teams, and no team chose to trade up to the first spot to get those players.
Yes, the Texans held Carr too long, and that isn’t an unusual point of view. However, I’m just making the point that Lopez’s characterization of why is overly simplistic and smacks of hindsight and just old making up stuff.
Stephanie, my sense is that the Texans had more alternatives for Carr after the 2005 season than after the current one. Yes, they would have likely had to exercise the option on Carr to swing a deal after 2005, but they probably could have pulled it off if the club would have been willing to absorb some of Carr’s compensation in the deal. My point is that, if Carr was untradeable after the Texans exercised the option, the Texans were throwing money away in doing so — the market was telling the club that Carr was overpriced and Carr had shown very little to indicate that his value was going to improve. The club would have been better off letting Carr go last season and then assessing whether to use the top pick for a QB (as you note, not a clear-cut choice). As it worked out, it’s unlikely that the Texans would have gotten poorer QB play out of replacement-level QB’s than what they got from Carr in 2006.