While the house is burning, Demeco Ryans prefers to stand inside and just watch the flames.

This blog is courtesy of Sam Schmidt with minimal editing. September 10, 2023.

Maybe it's the rush of being back to NFL football. Maybe it's the rush of fantasy football Week 1. Probably, it's both, but maybe, just maybe, without playing a down of football after age 10, I have cultivated a level of emotional investment in the play of second-year Texans RB Dameon Pierce that as I write this, I feel uncomfortable about.

Who am I to speak to the strategy of an NFL head coach? I cannot identify what I myself am best at in this life of mine. From a philosophy standpoint - instrumental to intrinsic - it would be tough for me to consolidate and pool a group of things I think I do very well in my life compared to everything else I do in my life, if that's not too confusing. On short thinking, I brush my teeth at near expert level; 2-3x per day, 2+ minutes every time. So when it comes to judging an exponentially more successful person in a field exponentially more difficult than brushing teeth, it's bittersweet. But as a former-mediocre-college-athlete that hasn't played football since before my balls dropped, here it is:

Demeco Ryans came in Week 1 with a Texans team that we as fans are not expecting a lot from record-wise. Opening up in Baltimore in Week 1 is no cookie, especially for a rookie CJ Stroud and one of the objectively worse offensive line corps in the last 10 years. However, Ryans coming from the 49ers to coach in Houston, for better or worse, gives the reason for increased expectations to Texans and really all NFL fans/watchers that there is promise for improvement. Again, never played a snap of football after age 10, but improving on a 3-13-1 record doesn't seem like a Nobel achievement, relatively speaking.

Then, just as the warming wind of promise and hope blows into living experience of Texans fans and Dameon Pierce fantasy owners alike, we get this bullshit:

I wish I could say there is a lot to unpack here, but we are talking about the Houston Texans, and the entire point of me venting on this blog is that there should be WAY more to unpack than what Demeco Ryans committed to in Week 1. Watching every NFL game every week in 2022, I had Dameon Pierce as a Top-5 angry runner among ALL NFL RBs. Maybe even #1, can't recall. After bearing witness today to maybe the worst offensive line I have ever seen, Demeco Ryans ignored Pierce's 5 YPC in the 1st half (albeit on six carries) and had his eyes elsewhere every of the 15 plays where Stroud ran for his life. I just looked at every Texans possession against the Ravens in Week 1; I get that Ryans' priorities for game-management may diverge from mine, but how do you justify Pierce carrying the ball ZERO times in their last two drives (14 plays)? Yeah no sh*t Houston was three scores down. It's called "the expectations couldn't be lower for the Texans this season, so instead of trying to hero-coach your way into upsets, focus on your rookie QB remaining with the living for the entire season, and give the ball to your best offensive player".

Again, full concession from me that this is a linear problem and this should and will not matter to many others. BUT I think if you're an NFL fan and you watched enough last season to know what kind of player Dameon Pierce is, he is just about the only reason for the NFL Redzone channel to flip to a Texans game once we get to around Week 5 in the season. And without a suitable quantity of carries, Dameon Pierce will metamorphose from a promising, projecting franchise RB1, into an eventual elite RB on a team that won't want to pay him. I guess in that inevitably eventual roundtable, the Texans won't be able to leverage his wear and tear based on usage if this ridiculousness continues.