Terrance’s Take: 0-3 isn’t ideal, but give Texans more time

If you are listening to talk radio, watching television news, or paying attention to all the amateur sports analysts on TikTok, then you’ve heard it.

The Texans’ season is off the rails just three games into the season.

C.J. Stroud’s downward spiral is spinning out of control, the defense isn’t as good as promised, and the coaching staff is asking its players to do things they can’t do.

Just throw the whole 2026 season away!

But what’s funny is that it isn’t at all how it feels inside the Texans locker room, where the team knows that just a handful of plays stand between a 2-1 start to the season and their 0-3 reality. To a man, the players and their head coach in the aftermath of Sunday’s 19-17 meltdown loss at Indianapolis strongly believe they will get this thing turned around, and soon.

The sense of urgency around the franchise to right the ship immediately is there.

“The sense of urgency has never left. It’s always been a sense of urgency,” Texans coach DeMeco Ryans responded Monday when I asked him about where the sense of urgency is with him and his team. “We’ve had a couple of games here. First two games, I mean, it comes down to a two-minute drive there in the first game versus Buffalo, same thing here, versus Indy, two-minute, can go one way or the other.

“We can be sitting here looking at ourselves 2-1, but we’re not. We didn’t finish the games. Of course, we have to do a better job of finishing collectively, starting with myself, coaches, and the players. Collectively, if we finish better, we’ll be in a better position.”

If Ryans and the Texans didn’t have a history of figuring it out, there might be a real reason for concern. But they do.

This 0-3 start feels very similar to last season, when the Texans also started 0-3. Do we remember what happened?

The Texans won three of their next five before going on a nine-game winning streak to conclude the season with a third-straight postseason berth. Could the Texans be in for a similar run this season? Who knows.

To the Texans’ credit, they aren’t using last season as proof that they can turn it around.

“It’s on a week-to-week basis. I don’t want to compare this year to last year,” said tackle Tae Ersery. “This is a whole different year, whole different league, whole different types of defenses that we are going up against.”

Another good sign is that the team is sticking together and not dry-blaming the guy next to him or teammates on the other side of the football. And they aren’t questioning game plans or schemes.

“I seem to think so,” running back David Montgomery said when asked if everybody is comfortable with the playbook knowledge-wise. “Again, I only know my position, though. Trying to focus on doing my job instead of … It’s not really my job to focus on everybody else’s job.

“I try to focus on my job, and I’m sure everybody else is, too.”

As the Texans get set to host their in-state rival, the Dallas Cowboys, on Sunday at NRG Stadium, the focus is squarely on the offense. And it should be.

We thought Montgomery was going to come in here and magically cure the rushing attack. We thought the young receiving corps. could make explosive plays even without Nico Collins in the lineup. And we also thought the offensive line deficiencies had been fixed with a couple of new additions.

Not so fast.

These things could all happen this season, but it will take time and chemistry for it all to come together. The offensive line has to learn how to block for Montgomery’s running style in the heat of the battle, and Montgomery has to learn how to read this offensive line unit’s blocks.

It’s a nuance thing that works itself out with time and experience in the heat of the battle. It was interesting on Monday listening to reporters try to imply that perhaps the offensive coaching staff isn’t preparing the players to play the game.

There is a reason why the plays look good in practice but not always in the game. There are million-dollar coaches on the opposite side who are being paid to make sure schemes don’t look or do the same thing from week to week to throw the opposition off.

Stroud continues to take heat for not looking as good as he did in his rookie season. But Stroud hasn’t been the Texans’ biggest problem by any stretch. In fact, he has been credible, completing 60% of his passes for 794 yards, three touchdowns, and no interceptions — all without his star receiver in the lineup.

Could Stroud be better? Of course. And he needs to improve soon.

For me, he holds the ball too long, waiting for receivers to get open, which is partly why he is among the most sacked quarterbacks in the league. But he hasn’t given the ball to the other team yet, and quarterbacks with a higher trajectory, like Brock Purdy, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Joe Burrow, and this week’s counterpart, Dak Prescott, all rank below Stroud’s seventh-place position in passing this week.

But don’t expect Stroud to rest on the fact that he is in good company among franchise quarterbacks who could be playing better. It’s about him, and Stroud is taking accountability.

“I have the utmost confidence. You can call me crazy. I don’t really care,” Stroud said after Sunday’s loss. “But we’ve been here before, and I think this is sadly something that we can learn from what we did in the past and do even better than last time. That’ll be the goal.”

In the meantime, many details need to be cleaned up. The offense has to get better, the defense has to be consistently dominant, and even the coaching staff has to figure out the time-clock management, which proved crucial in the waning moments of the loss to the Colts.

The good thing is Ryans is owning it all and vowing to get it all fixed in the wake of the disappointing loss to the Colts.

“For us, it wasn’t good enough for the game yesterday. Starting with me, it wasn’t good enough from a coaching standpoint,” Ryans said. “If that’s where you’re going, it wasn’t good enough; we’ll get better.”