When Bill O’Briens Happen to Good Teams

BY ADAM GREENE

Say that you have a team loaded, across the board, with NFL super stars. You’ve got one of the best young quarterbacks in the game, arguably the best wideout and a defensive end that’s likely on his way to the Hall of Fame and is just in the middle of his career.

The rest of your wide receivers, they’re all pretty good. You’ve got a good to great offensive line and your defense is stacked at all three levels with playmakers. You feel pretty good about yourself and you should.

Now, let’s say you’re in a playoff game against a team that is similar, with stars all the way around, but it’s a team you’ve beaten this season. You’ve already proven you can not only match up with this squad, like you, loaded now and for the future, but that you can beat them.

Now imagine that you’re up 24-0 in the first quarter.

And somehow, some way, you still manage to lose in what turns out to be one of the greatest playoff choke jobs of all time. Welcome to the 2019-20 Houston Texans and the architect of said collapse, Bill O’Brien.

While you could argue with other historic playoff gagging losses that the fault doesn’t solely lie with the coach, there is no argument in this game. Not only were the Texans up four scores, they had grabbed one touchdown by blocking a punt. Do you know how much blocking a punt in a game improves your win probability? It’s 90 percent. You block a punt in a game, there’s a 90 percent chance you’ll win it and that’s just science.

So Houston had a four-score lead and a blocked punt (with the 90 percent win modifier) on their side and still managed to lose. How?

Because Bill O’Brien is a complete moron and has no business coaching an NFL team. That’s how.

Let me set the stage for you. The Texans could not have asked for a better start to their divisional round match up against the favored Kansas City Chiefs. They drove down and scored on their first possession and then blocked the aforementioned punt for a touchdown on the Chiefs’ first possession.

They held K.C. to a six play drive that ended in a punt, then after punting themselves, recovered the muff to set up first and goal at the Chiefs’ six. Deshaun Watson tossed a TD to Darren Fells to take a 21-0 lead.

Kansas City was imploding. The Texans were cruising. This was only solidified by the Chiefs’ next drive, which went 3-and-out. The tents were about to fold and Houston tacked on a field goal to take the fabled 24-0 lead with just under 11 minutes of actual game played. The blowout was on.

Then, as anyone would expect who watches any football game, Kansas City managed a score. They weren’t “back in the game” with this touchdown. They were still down 24-7 and had played like complete garbage to that point. Of course Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid could put one scoring drive together. You had to expect it, regardless of who had the momentum (it was still the Texans, by far, at this point).

What you don’t do, up 24-7 after completely dominating the game from the opening whistle, is panic and do something stupid.

So what does Bill O’Brien do? He calls a fake punt on his own 31 yard line on a fourth-and-four. The Texans didn’t get it and with the short field, K.C. scored again to make the score 24-14, a decidedly different game.

And that was when everyone watching at home, at a bar, in that stadium and on both the Chiefs’ and Texans’ sidelines knew that not only was Kansas City about to come back, but Houston was about to give the 1993 Houston Oilers a run for their money in the record books. The Chiefs scored the next 41 points in the game.

Those old Oilers led 35-3 over the Buffalo Bills on Jan. 3, 1993 and ended up losing 41-38. It was game so famous it earned two nicknames. For the Bills, it’s known as “The Comeback.” For the Oilers, who would move to Tennessee four years later and become the Titans a few years after that, it was known as “The Choke.”

The loss was so obviously on O’Brien that after the game Watson was asked if his coach should be fired. Of course, he said no, because what else is he going to say.

But I can say it. If the Texans ever win anything it will be in spite of Bill O’Brien, not because of him. It will be because Deshaun Watson and J.J. Watt and DeAndre Hopkins willed it so. It will be because they’re talent is so great that they overcame O’Brien’s horrid leadership. It’s why Aaron Rodgers has a Super Bowl ring today and why Dak Prescott is probably never going to get one.

Yes. Bill O’Brien is the AFC’s Mike McCarthy. Let’s just hope Houston isn’t dumb enough to let him hang around another six years to prove it.

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