David Culley has seen over a quarter century’s worth of the NFL as an assistant, but nothing could prepare him for the experience of being a coach.
The longtime assistant coach finally got his shot with the Houston Texans in 2021, and regardless of how much experience he had accrued or great coaches he had worked under in Sam Wyche, Bill Cowher, and Andy Reid, Culley was going to have to make his own mistakes.
One of the mistakes Culley owned up to in his final meeting with the Houston media on Monday was the Texans’ resistance to run more hurry-up offense with rookie quarterback Davis Mills.
According to Culley, it was when the Texans fell down 21-0 to the Tennessee Titans at halftime of Week 18 that he finally had a satori about running more no-huddle with Mills.
“We weren’t very good in the first half of that ballgame and my gut feeling was we got to change up something,” Culley said. “I didn’t know what, but the thing was the tempo. Well, actually I found out, probably I look back on it, that there were times I should have used the tempo in some of these other ballgames that I had before.”
Culley added, “Those are some of the things that you learn as you go back and make decisions that I could have done or should have done earlier.”
The first-year coach’s evaluation of Mills in the no-huddle was that, “he did a very, very good job.”
Said Culley: “He commanded everything. [Offensive coordinator] Tim (Kelly) was still calling plays. He was making checks. He was doing everything we needed to do. And that’s just something that he’s done very well when he was at Stanford.”
Culley indicates he has learned from the mistake of keeping Mills out of no-huddle situations for fear of turning the ball over. Perhaps the Texans’ conservative approach could change in 2022.
“I’m happy with his progress and I think we found out something about him that moving forward that we can do to help us offensively because that’s something that he was comfortable with and did it very well against a very good football team in a very, very big ballgame,” Culley said.
The Titans needed to beat the Texans 28-25 to secure the No. 1 seed. If the Texans had prevailed, the Kansas City Chiefs would have had the AFC’s only bye week and home-field advantage throughout the postseason.