Declan MacManus posted:

you'll notice the rest of the team hasn't asked their way off just yet, and agents aren't doing targeted leaks of "everybody wants the gently caress out of here"

Intruder posted:

That has a lot to do with the team's roster too

They just won 4 games in a season where Deshaun threw for almost 5000 yards, 33 TD and 7 picks and ran for 450 with 3 TD. It's not like they're overflowing with talent

And they absolutely have a history of former players talking about how bad it was to be there

dirty shrimp money posted:

Missouri has some crazy enough folks right? Like St. Louis? St. Louis Missourians after Houston voters flat reject a NRG Stadium improvements bond?

Declan MacManus posted:

are mizzou fans happy with mizzou?

Laslow posted:

They produce Super Bowl champion quarterbacks, such as Blaine Gabbert, and that’s a fact!

Troy Queef posted:

As a STL person:

—most people here grew up either Catholic or Lutheran, and while there has been some megachurch movement here of late they’re always seen as a bit...off. Plus we had Kurt Warner and his Jesus thing, and we kinda held our noses with him cos he won. Easterby’s act would go over like a lead balloon.
—Right now the only thing we want from the NFL is several billion dollars for loving us over with the Rams move. Football-wise, Mizzou is good again and KA-KAW is scheduled to come back in 2022, so we are fine as is.

Diva Cupcake posted:

A fun read

https://twitter.com/aaronjreiss/status/1362397587295203335

FizFashizzle posted:

Please post it.

quote:

Oh, poo poo.

Deshaun Watson had just finished a workout in a small gym on a cloudy day in Atlanta when his quarterback coach, Quincy Avery, saw the news. Just 24, Watson was coming off the most accomplished season of his young career in 2019. He made the Pro Bowl for the second consecutive year, collected his first playoff win in the Texans’ overtime thriller against the Bills and the following week helped Houston jump out to a 24-point lead against eventual Super Bowl-champion Kansas City, all signs that bigger and better things might be in store. Then Avery picked up his phone.

“Oh, poo poo,” he said across the gym.

Watson, wearing shorts and a simple black T-shirt, looked at his phone. The Texans had traded all-everything receiver DeAndre Hopkins, Watson’s best weapon, the receiver he had first met on a recruiting visit to Clemson years ago, the receiver he once said he had “trust and loyalty” in — and Watson had found out about it on social media. Avery turned his phone on Watson, video rolling. “When you finish a workout and try to figure out why your phone exploded,” Avery captioned the three-second clip on social media. Watson just glared.

Watson was angry about the trade, which represented the first major crack in the relationship between him and the team, but less than six months later, shortly before the first game of the season, he agreed to a $156 million contract extension — the second-richest deal in football. On a Zoom call with reporters and friends, Watson, tears welling in his eyes, thanked owner Cal McNair, coach and general manager Bill O’Brien and executive vice president of football operations Jack Easterby. “For the McNair family, OB, Jack to just trust in me, believe in me — I’m their guy, I’m their quarterback — is the biggest thing that really touches me,” Watson said before his voice cracked. Back in his hometown of Gainesville, Ga., Watson’s family crowded into view of a single webcam. They told him there was only one thing left to do: win a Super Bowl.

Instead, the 2020 season ended with Watson further from the Lombardi Trophy than ever before. A series of decisions made since Easterby’s arrival in April 2019 — in many of which O’Brien had a significant say, and all of which McNair signed off on — played a part in the Texans going 4-12 despite Watson performing like a top-three quarterback.

More importantly, the turmoil led Watson to ask for a trade, his trust in the organization shattered.

Watson considers his stoic demeanor part of his DNA, something he says he picked up while watching his mother battle cancer, when she could be frustrated and down but didn’t show it. Watson says he’s determined to handle himself the same way, so given time, he could move on from the Hopkins trade. Once, when O’Brien and his All-Pro receiver clashed, Waston said the best solution was “to sit in the middle and watch it from afar,” rather than pick sides.

Still, the trade was the strongest evidence yet of the instability that has hurt the Texans’ efforts to build around Watson.

The general manager who traded up to draft him No. 12 overall against team consensus, Rick Smith, stepped away after Watson’s rookie season to care for his sick wife. The GM who replaced Smith, Brian Gaine, was fired after a little more than a year despite the Texans winning 11 games. Easterby’s arrival had preceded Gaine’s ouster by about two months, and together Easterby and O’Brien took control of the front office, with the former assuming the lead on contract negotiations following the dismissal of Chris Olsen, the team’s longtime cap expert.

“At a certain point, don’t you stop and say, ‘Do we need to fire all these people because they are not getting along with the head coach and Easterby?’” a league executive said. “It’s weird.” The duo had little experience with their new duties, and it showed.

In a league with flexible finances, the Texans attempted to justify the Hopkins trade by saying they couldn’t afford to make him the league’s highest-paid receiver — that it would make their roster too top-heavy. But the Texans were only in that position because of other O’Brien and Easterby moves, most notably the rushed decision to trade two first-round picks, a second-round pick and more to the Dolphins for left tackle Laremy Tunsil and receiver Kenny Stills just before the 2019 season. It was a precedent-breaking price for a tackle, and in the offseason that followed, the team not only had to pay Watson but also Tunsil, who had enough leverage to sign a deal worth $4 million more annually than the next closest tackle.

League executives with other teams said the Texans shopped Hopkins for months — and his demand for a top-of-the-market extension limited his trade value, leading the Texans to eventually accept an underwhelming return: expensive and declining running back David Johnson, a 2020 second-round pick and a swap of fourth-round selections. Hopkins had three years remaining on his old contract, so the Texans could have called his bluff on a holdout, but O’Brien and Easterby didn’t view Hopkins as a culture fit and were wary of a contract dispute bleeding into training camp while teammates inked big deals.

It bothered Watson that the team hadn’t communicated with him about the trade, which was quickly and overwhelmingly pilloried as one of the worst in NFL history. Both Lindsay Jones of The Athletic and Bill Barnwell of ESPN handed out “F” grades. CBS Sports dubbed the move a “blunder.” Some of the criticism bordered on mockery. One NFL player ripped the Texans as buffoons. Another suggested the NFL should look into drug-testing general managers and coaches.

After nearly a week of harsh criticism and no public comments from team brass regarding the trade, the Texans sent an email to reporters titled “2020 Offseason Notes,” the contents of which spanned 58 bullet points across six sections and were consistent with Easterby’s messaging. The memo included the phrasing “smart, tough and dependable” three times to describe players; O’Brien began using the phrase after Easterby’s arrival, and it was incorporated into highlight videos. The section on the Hopkins trade mentioned that the pick Houston acquired from Arizona was “only 18 spots lower than” the pick Minnesota acquired for receiver Stefon Diggs, in addition to the following bullet points:

-Acquired very valuable 2nd round pick in 2020 (40th overall).
-Area of the draft where you still get ‘first round talent’ but the contract is less money.
-Will bring a very talented, young and cheap player to Houston for the next four years
-This is the deepest wide receiver class in years.
-Acquiring Arizona’s 2021 fourth-round pick was important part of deal that nobody talks about.
-Should be a much better draft pick than the fourth-round pick we gave up this year.
-Needed more draft capital for 2021 since we don’t have a first or second round pick.
-Arizona is in a very tough division so the pick has a chance to be pretty high.
-David Johnson will be our starting running back and a key part of the offense. He is a tough, smart, dependable player and we needed a RB after letting Carlos Hyde leave … Arizona’s Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year nominee in 2019 while not playing the role he desired — very high character and good teammate … Played for two different head coaches and two different offenses the last two years which impacted production and both were first-time head coaches.

A few weeks later, O’Brien made his first comments on the Hopkins trade on a conference call with season-ticket holders. O’Brien immediately went on the defensive, at one point spelling out how every move was made with the team in mind. “Capital T, capital E, capital A, capital M,” he said. “We don’t think about one player. … We think about the future.”

Not long after the Texans drafted him in the first round in 2017, Watson reached out to Jason Roland, a Houston barber whose clients include Texans and Rockets players. Roland liked Watson right away but also sensed some initial distance. “He doesn’t open up to a lot of people,” Roland said. “It takes time for him to open up. I see it as a trust thing. But once he trusts you and you’re in his circle, you’re good.”

Michael Perry, his quarterback coach in high school, says Watson donated his Pro Bowl check to the high school where Perry coached even though it wasn’t the high school where Watson had played. And when Watson wrote about his life for The Players’ Tribune, he included a section about what Perry meant to him. Other schools tried to recruit Watson away from Perry and Bruce Miller, the head coach at Gainesville High, but Watson never considered leaving. “One thing about Deshaun,” Miller said, “if he feels like you’re loyal to him, he’ll be loyal to you.”

“It’s like an unspoken rule,” said Nick Schuessler, who backed up Watson at Clemson. “Once you garner his trust and can prove your loyalty, Deshaun will be the best friend you ever have.”

On the field, Watson endeared himself to Houston with his breathtaking plays and displays of affection for his new city. In his rookie season, he donated his first game check to three Texans cafeteria workers affected by Hurricane Harvey. In his second season, he rode a bus 12 hours, from Houston to Jacksonville because the Texans worried how the air pressure from flying would affect his bruised lung and banged-up ribs. He wore a tour hoodie for Travis Scott, a Houston native, that day. Later that season, he told The Ringer he was doing everything he could to “bring joy and excitement to this city.”

Watson did that through seemingly impossible moments, like the time he threw a touchdown pass even though he couldn’t see out of his eye because he had just gotten kicked in the face or when he spun and bounced off two Bills defenders to set up the winning field goal in overtime. The playoff miracle against Buffalo, in particular, revealed a truth that fans and teammates alike had come to believe: The Texans were never out of it as long as Watson was back there.

“He’s the future of this team and this city,” said J.J. Watt, the face of the franchise for the past decade. “We have to do whatever we possibly can to make sure that he’s in the best position to have success and to lead this place to success not only this year, not only next year, but for the next 10 years.”

In the aftermath of the Hopkins trade, Watson expressed his frustration to coaches and management, and the Texans promised changes. During contract negotiations last offseason, O’Brien told Watson’s camp that the quarterback would be more involved in the team-building process moving forward, sources said. And to further appease him, the team accepted his agent’s request to include a no-trade clause in the four-year extension.

For the time being, the relationship was salvaged.

On the day Watson finalized the deal last September, he went to get his hair cut. Roland texted to ask Watson where he was, and Watson said he was outside, in his car, on the phone with Cal McNair. Not too long after Watson took a seat, the news announcing his massive new deal flashed across ESPN. Watson bashfully dropped his head, “Like, ‘Yeah, but I’m still low-key,’” Roland said.

“He has a small circle for a reason because there’s trust,” Roland added. “Somebody like that, you break their trust, you just deflate ’em. You crush ’em. And it’s hard as heck to get back.”

As the season went along, Watson started to lose faith in the direction of the organization. There were several warning signs in the first few weeks alone: an opening-night loss to the Chiefs that only proved that Houston’s roster overhaul had done nothing to shrink the gap between the two teams. A blowout loss to the Ravens in Week 2. A mid-practice argument between O’Brien and Watt in Week 3. O’Brien taking back play-calling duties from offensive coordinator Tim Kelly in Week 4. And a loss to the Vikings that dropped the team to 0-4 — all with the only true franchise quarterback in team history.

By that point in the season, the mismanagement of the Texans’ roster was obvious. After trading a second-round pick for Brandin Cooks, whom Easterby identified as a good culture fit, Houston was the only team with four receivers counting for at least $6 million apiece against the cap. One of them, Kenny Stills, was such a nonfactor that the team cut him after he caught 11 passes in 10 games. The team’s duo of receiving backs, David and Duke Johnson, was hardly a factor in the passing game — and collectively accounted for nearly as much cap space as all of the team’s corners.

As for that “very valuable” second-round pick the Texans acquired in the Hopkins trade: The team didn’t use it to dip into a deep pool of receivers. With Notre Dame receiver Chase Claypool still on the board, as well as defensive rookie of the year candidate Antoine Winfield Jr., the Texans picked Ross Blacklock, a defensive lineman from TCU who played just 23 percent of the defense’s snaps.

Houston’s maneuvering left some offensive skill positions overstocked at the expense of a defense that ranked 30th in efficiency. A source close to Watson likened the Texans’ team-building approach to “a kid in a video game,” changing strategy on the fly.

If that was the case, then firing O’Brien four games into the season — after empowering him with the general manager title and allowing him to trade away a star receiver — was McNair rage-quitting on the season from the owner’s box. “You have an owner that is seen as inexperienced, and it’s reinforced by the hiring of Easterby and giving him the status that he did,” a longtime executive from another team said of McNair, who took control of the team from his late father in 2018 after six years as the team’s COO. “If that had been a 15-year owner, you might say, ‘OK, this guy has made good decisions here and here, so we will give him the benefit of the doubt.’ Cal doesn’t get that.”

Not even from his quarterback. Sources said after O’Brien lost his job so soon following the roster overhaul, Watson questioned the Texans’ plan — if they had one at all.

When the team was 1-6, McNair said in a radio interview with a team employee that he hadn’t given up hope on the playoffs, and that pandemic-related crowd reductions made a wild-card team’s path to the Super Bowl easier than ever. The trade deadline was the day after McNair gave that interview, and though the Texans flirted with the Packers about a potential deal in which they would give up receiver Will Fuller, Houston ultimately stood pat. While Easterby acted as interim general manager, team sources said the Texans were hypersensitive to the perception of “losing” any trade.

A couple of weeks after the deadline, the Texans scored just seven points in a road loss to the Browns. As the wind whipped off Lake Erie, making it hard to throw, Houston came up empty on a fourth-and-goal play that could have swung the outcome. On the flight home from Cleveland, Watson watched another game: Bills at Cardinals. Eleven seconds remained, and Arizona had the ball at Buffalo’s 48-yard line, down four points. The Cardinals’ play call sent only one receiver to the end zone, and after quarterback Kyler Murray juked a defender and sprinted left toward the sideline, his pass landed above three defenders and into Hopkins’ huge hands.

The NFL named this its Clutch Moment of the Year. Watson called it just another Hopkins play.

“No surprise,” he said.

The losing, especially the close defeats, wore on Watson, who won state championships in high school, a national championship at Clemson and never missed the playoffs in an NFL season he finished. After a goal-line fumble blew the Texans’ upset bid against the Colts in Week 13, Watson sat on a bench while other players mingled and headed to their locker rooms. A towel covered the quarterback’s head. “This poo poo hurts,” he said that day. “I’m tired of losing.”

In his season-ending news conference in January, Watson said the Texans needed “a whole culture shift,” adding the team had “too many different minds, too many different ideas and too many people who think they have this power, and it’s not like that.” One source characterized it as “a direct message to Cal McNair” telling the owner to move on from Easterby, who is responsible for directing the team’s culture and has amassed increasing influence, as detailed by Sports Illustrated in December.

Watson also said the team needed patience as it began a journey toward a Super Bowl with a new general manager and coach. The day before, he’d spoken to McNair by phone and endorsed keeping offensive coordinator Tim Kelly on staff. Based on previous conversations and public statements by McNair, Watson had the impression he’d be involved in the Texans’ search process.

That didn’t happen.

The Texans’ search committee — McNair, team president Jamey Rootes and Jed Hughes of the search firm Korn Ferry — interviewed four general manager candidates and three head-coaching candidates. But Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bienemy, of whom Watson had spoken highly, was not included in that group. Neither was the general manager the team ultimately hired, longtime Patriots director of player personnel Nick Caserio, although the Texans had already vetted him.

Houston tried to hire Caserio after firing GM Brian Gaine in 2019, but after New England threatened tampering charges amid rumors that Easterby recruited Caserio at a Patriots Super Bowl ring party, the Texans dropped the pursuit. That created a power vacuum filled by O’Brien and Easterby. When starting his GM search, McNair said that person would determine Easterby’s role. Soon after the season, Easterby alerted McNair that Caserio, a friend with whom he shares an agent, could end up taking the Panthers’ open GM job. Instead, the Texans embarked on a “new search,” as McNair put it — and hired Caserio themselves. Just as with Hopkins, Watson found out about the big move on social media. He posted a cryptic, since-deleted tweet that evening: “Some things never change …”

In an effort to minimize drama, McNair said during Caserio’s introductory news conference that he understood Watson’s point of view before embarking on the search process. But that didn’t stop Watson from ignoring the Texans’ calls and eventually requesting a trade — one that, if completed, would rank among the most high-profile transactions in NFL history. The Jets and Dolphins are two rumored preferred landing spots for Watson, whose no-trade clause gives him leverage. But a source said the quarterback is open to other teams and is aware that any trade with New York would limit the Jets’ ability to build a quality roster around him. For now, the Texans are not engaging in Watson trade discussions with other teams, even while the possibility of Watson sitting out games looms over them. McNair said as recently as Feb. 12 that the team’s stance won’t change.

There’s debate over how much influence a player should have on a team’s hiring process, especially when it comes to vetting general manager candidates, but most team executives fault McNair for letting this mistake — a miscommunication at best and an unkept promise at worst — poison his team’s future. In the end, Houston landed arguably the most qualified GM candidate while becoming the only team to hire a Black head coach this offseason, a point of emphasis in the league — yet the organization still managed to further alienate its franchise quarterback.

After the final game of the season, Watson and Watt walked off the field, side by side. The Texans had just lost to the Titans, their fifth consecutive defeat, to wrap up a miserable 4-12 season. Watson had thrown for 365 yards and put up 38 points. Watt had two more tackles for loss and played in all 16 games for just the second time in the past five years. As had been the case too frequently, it wasn’t enough.

Over the years, Watt and Watson had become Houston icons. The Texans never made the playoffs until Watt showed up; they couldn’t aspire for more until Watson arrived. The previous season was one of potential and promise, with Watson putting the Texans on the doorstep of their first AFC Championship Game. But the 2020 season was a disaster from any angle. As they headed for the locker room, Watson tapped Watt twice on the backside. Watt turned, and for a moment the pair stopped on the field.

“I’m sorry,” Watt told him. “We wasted one of your years.”

In the coming weeks, one of them would ask to be released and the other one would ask to be traded. Their time together in Houston was soon to be over, and as they neared the exit, Watt turned to Watson to repeat himself.

“I’m sorry.”

quote:

League executives with other teams said the Texans shopped Hopkins for months — and his demand for a top-of-the-market extension limited his trade value

indigi posted:

none of the stuff about Easterby and the Texans is particularly surprising, but this os:


giving the best receiver a contract that reflects his skills limited his trade value? really? GMs are stupid

fsif posted:

Anyway, my favorite part of the article were the bullet points that showed why the trade was Good, Actually.

quote:

As for that “very valuable” second-round pick the Texans acquired in the Hopkins trade: The team didn’t use it to dip into a deep pool of receivers. With Notre Dame receiver Chase Claypool still on the board, as well as defensive rookie of the year candidate Antoine Winfield Jr., the Texans picked Ross Blacklock, a defensive lineman from TCU who played just 23 percent of the defense’s snaps.

General Dog posted:

Video games have permanently hosed up my concept of receiver value (you can always find someone with 90+ speed cheap, and that's literally all that matters)

Ches Neckbeard posted:

Lol

https://twitter.com/JohnCPrepper98/status/1362452781530030082?s=20

Amy Pole Her posted:

Those bullet points are hilarious lol he’s saying the same exact thing multiple times.

This dude makes 500k a year+ and he’s rocking college level presentations

Ches Neckbeard posted:

Neil Armbong posted:

Glad to know bat boy made something of himself.

Neil Armbong posted:

Glad to know bat boy made something of himself.

Ches Neckbeard posted:

skaboomizzy posted:

I think you'll find the real Bat Boy is the former Governor and current junior Senator of Florida.

fsif posted:

Anyway, my favorite part of the article were the bullet points that showed why the trade was Good, Actually.

PupsOfWar posted:

when it comes to the watson situation i don't know how much i blame it on easterby and how much i blame it on a sort of intrinsic cultural divide between the people who own sports teams and the people who play on sports teams

i don't want to say millionaire athletes are more *normal* than billionaire financiers, since to reach the position of pro athlete you have to be a crazed obsessive by any normal person's standards

but if you're an athlete you probably didn't grow up that rich (barring the rare born-with-a-silver spoon character like brady or a manning), probably grew up with something approximating normal relationships, still experience a degree of precarity since your career is short and the golden parachute doesn't work for you in quite the same way it does for finance guys, etc

watson's issues with the organization are totally understandable from a regular person's perspective (doesn't like Cal, feels disrespected by Cal, doesn't have confidence in the organization since Cal is so attached to easterby), but Cal probably can't compute them since those aren't things your brain understands if you grew up amid billionaire wealth.

Declan MacManus posted:

otoh, if there’s one thing rich and powerful people understand, it’s respect.

maybe not cal mcnair specifically

PupsOfWar posted:

i don't know about that
or rather i don't know that they understand it in the same sense that a player would

they understand hierarchy, they spend their whole lives either schmoozing to bigger rich guys or expecting smaller rich guys to schmooze to them

but like..."I respect this person's abilities and appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with them" type respect, no

you have that with teammates and family and coworkers, which billionaires don't have

basically what I'm getting at is billionaires are all solipsistic sociopaths who believe they're the only person who exists , they might understand social inputs and outputs in the way you'd understand pushing a button, but they don't understand relationships beyond that. They're like squids.

when watson says "cal, i don't like you, i refuse to work for you any more" i think cal doesn't get it because the only "work" a billionaire ever does is cutting deals with people they don't care about in order to gain advantage over other people they don't care about. Not one of them would ever think of refusing to do something on principle or out of personal disdain.

El Gallinero Gros posted:

I don't doubt that DeShaun dislikes Cal but my impression as a casual outsider was that it's more about how poorly Houston has managed it's assets (and rightly, he doesn't want to waste his physical prime on an awful team) is that not correct?

El Gallinero Gros posted:

I don't doubt that DeShaun dislikes Cal but my impression as a casual outsider was that it's more about how poorly Houston has managed it's assets (and rightly, he doesn't want to waste his physical prime on an awful team) is that not correct?