Battle Red Blog
A quick look back at what could have been
It is the dead period in the NFL calendar. Free agency has happened. The draft has happened. Teams have gone through OTAs and mandatory minicamp. Sure, teams like the Miami Dolphins and Pittsburgh Steelers are making moves, but for the most part there isn’t much to talk about. Almost seemingly on cue, the snake that was peered his head out of the dirt to make a comment.
Jack Easterby came out of the hole in the ground he was hiding him to blame the fans for his firing in Houston. Obviously, no one can know for sure who was responsible for letting Easterby go. We can’t be a fly on the wall for that conversation. Besides, I imagine there were any number of conversations that happened before the final one. One thing I can be sure of is that the fact that people holding signs at the Texans’ games had little to do with the final decision.
Here is where get to the six degrees of separation. There are no direct links between the rise of Hannah McNair and the fall of Jack Easterby. It is what some in the legal business would call a preponderance of the evidence. Her rise in decision making just so happened to coincide with his demise. Is it a coincidence? I suppose anything is possible, but it isn’t likely.
I know it is a painful memory, but we as Houston Texans fans have to go down memory lane to fully appreciate where we are. We have never been the the postseason three years in a row. Something has always happened in that third year. Of course, that could possibly give us pause for optimism this year, but this organization feels different. There is an air of competence in the air.
This is a team that hired a position coach to be a head coach. You could tell from the opening moment of the press conference. This was going to end in disaster. If normal fans could listen to David Culley in a press conference and tell he was a patsy then a general manager with Nick Caserio’s intelligence and experience could clearly see it wasn’t going to work.
Maybe that was the plan from the get go. Maybe they knew there was no chance they were going to win, so it didn’t matter who they put in that chair. Maybe they saw the hiring as a sort of golden parachute for a career position coach that had given decades of his life to the sport. Maybe they collectively decided that putting a competent coach in that spot would only ruin a potentially promising career.
Professional sports teams are purposefully vague when it comes to the decision making process behind the scenes. This gives everyone involved plausible deniability. Yet, the hiring practices that led to David Culley and Lovie Smith were haphazard at best. At worst, it was amateur hour. It would be hard to imagine...
