What’s old is new again in Houston. Weeks after benching quarterback Brian Hoyer in favor of Ryan Mallett, Texans coach Bill O’Brien told reporters, including Tania Ganguli of ESPN.com (on Twitter), that Hoyer will once again be the team’s starter for the team’s Week 6 game against the Jaguars.
Mallett was pulled from the Thursday night game against the Colts after taking a big hit in the backfield. Hoyer, the team’s original starter for the season, was called in and he played decently the rest of the way. Hoyer completed 24-of-31 passes for 312 yards and tossed two touchdowns to rookie Jaelen Strong.
Despite lacking a franchise-caliber quarterback last year, the Texans finished 9-7 and nearly made their first trip to the playoffs since 2012. In the offseason, the team traded Ryan Fitzpatrick to the Jets for a conditional late-round pick. Fitzpatrick started 12 games, completed over 63% of his passes, and threw 17 touchdowns against eight interceptions in 2014. The 32-year-old is career journeyman who has never been a world-beater, but he did fare respectably enough last season to rank as Pro Football Focus’ (subscription required) 12th-best QB out of 28 signal callers who played at least 50 percent of their teams’ offensive snaps.
To replace Fitzpatrick, Houston signed free agent Brian Hoyer on a two-year deal worth $4.75MM guaranteed, and re-signed Ryan Mallett to a two-year of his own worth $7MM. Neither was on Fitzpatrick’s level in 2014 and, so far, they haven’t played up to that level in 2015 either.
Hoyer will now have an opportunity to reassert himself as Houston’s starting quarterback, but it’s starting to look like the Texans will need to address the position once again in the offseason.
The Texans need to bottom out for a legit QB prospect, frankly. Mallett and Hoyer are both bad, and they’re unlikely to find a solution on the FA market. Far more often than not, if you want to go the playoffs and beyond, you’ve gotta get your QB via the draft – and usually with a high pick in the first or second round. The only QB prospect the Texans have drafted in the first two rounds since their inception was David Carr. That’s unacceptable for a franchise that’s been so woeful at the position for the vast majority of its existence.
So is life for the in-betweeners. The Jets, Bills and Chiefs may actually be in worse positions to move forward, considering they’ll probably each finish with a better record than the Texans. The Browns have actually tried to remedy this several times, only to make what turned out to be bad picks. It’s a frightening state for the middle. Unless an elite defense is involved, the NFL is becoming like the NBA in this regard, only its upward mobility is fixated on acquiring a upper-echelon player at one position, whereas NBA tankers’ objectives are to merely find a star at any. The Browns and Jets have found out the hard way what happens when you shoot and miss, but the new draft pay scale will permit teams to try more often since the first-round busts are cap-crippling.