Sunday night in Week 10 features a battle of two first-place teams, with the Houston Texans hosting the Detroit Lions. Both franchises are gunning for unprecedented postseason success in their respective histories as two of the teams that have never been to the Super Bowl.
The Lions are favored, as they should be. Injuries have hit the Texans offense as virulently as the bug has bitten the Lions defense; this looks to be a game about who can score more, not who can keep the other team from scoring as much.
This is a special matchup for me personally. Fans who have watched the Detroit Lions Podcast or heard me on the radio over the years know that I have frequently compared these current Lions and their rise up under Dan Campbell and Brad Holmes to my experience with the Texans surge from being a frustrating franchise to legit perennial contender over a decade ago. And I still believe very much in that, though they’ve gone about the rise in different ways.
I lived in Houston from 2010 to 2013, moving there from Michigan. Coming off some dark times as a Lions fan, it was fun and engaging to see a Texans team that finally buried years of mediocrity (or much worse) and rise up. A young core led by J.J. Watt, Arian Foster, Demeco Ryans, Connor Barwin, Johnathan Joseph and others (Glover Quin included) congealed nicely around a star-crossed veteran QB in Matt Schaub, who thrived to Pro Bowl status after some shaky times (sound familiar?). Those were fun, exciting and unprecedentedly successful teams in Houston.
But they stalled out short of their goals. Schaub started throwing pick-sixes, Watt and the secondary couldn’t stay healthy, Andre Johnson hit a wall, high-character “glue” vets like Eric Winston and Owen Daniels fell off just enough. Close but no victory cigar.
I covered their resurgent hiccup in 2017-2019 for Texans Wire, with Deshaun Watson breathing life back in before the bottom completely fell out for both him and the Texans. I still look back at those Houston teams from 2011-2018 with profound admiration in the way they established the Texans to a largely meh fanbase to that point. Everyone else who lives in my house still roots for the Texans…
…which made the last meeting between the two teams a tough one. Thanksgiving 2020. A bad Texans team (they were 3-7, with two of the wins over a Jaguars team that finished 1-15) came into Ford Field and beat the Lions over the head with turkey legs. Houston had an interim head coach at the time in Romeo Crennel, after Bill O’Brien got canned for a miserable start. Houston was 0-4 and didn’t have a single defensive takeaway, ranking dead last in points allowed and completion percentage. Crennel had stabilized things, but that was not a good Houston team at all.
Houston won that fateful game, 41-25. The score looked closer than the actual game, thanks to what many Lions fans derisively called “Stat Padford” at the end. It led me to write this anti-Matt Patricia piece in head-shaking anger.
That ugly loss on national television turned out to be the last straw for then-new Lions owner Sheila Hamp, who hadn’t yet dropped the “Ford” from her name. Patricia and GM Bob Quinn were fired that week, to the gleeful joy of the Lions fan base that hadn’t already tuned out on a lifeless, hopeless team.
We’ve come a very long way from those dismal depths in Detroit. The Lions are now the best team in the NFC and maybe the entire league. Detroit is winning games because of coaching, not to mention a loaded roster that has proven deep and versatile.
Should the Lions exorcise yet another past demon on Sunday night, it will sway even more of the very few remaining skeptics. This Detroit team has risen and will keep rising, hopefully beyond where the similar teams of Texans past could not.