David Culley was only hired to be the Texans’ fall guy

David Culley outperformed expectations in Houston. It didn’t matter.

David Culley never had a chance.

The first-year head coach was a surprise hire when the Houston Texans tabbed him after more that 40 years as an assistant across the NFL and NCAA. He inherited a roster that had won four games the year prior. It had traded away or released the two greatest players in franchise history over the previous two offseasons. The lone bright spot in his lineup was a quarterback who didn’t want to be there and then couldn’t after more than 20 women accused Deshaun Watson of sexual misconduct in civil court.

Culley still managed to outperform the meager expectations heaped on a team expected only to lower the average ticket prices of whomever it played on the road. He won four games — including victories over the Titans and Chargers — and did just enough to keep Houston from the top overall pick in the 2022 NFL Draft.

That was enough to get him fired after one season.

It’s a crappy and transparent move from a crappy and transparent franchise. The Texans gave their first-year head coach a bare cupboard and a 33-man free agent class whose highest-paid member was a punter:

This year was never about winning; it was about getting 2021 over with and creating distance between the franchise and the disastrous end of the Bill O’Brien era. O’Brien was the one who bled the team’s cap space through poorly-planned contract extensions that helped necessitate the departures of J.J. Watt and DeAndre Hopkins. He was the reason the Texans had just one first round draft pick between 2018 and 2021.

He was the one who left Culley to guide a team where:

  • The primary quarterback, Davis Mills, was a third-round rookie who’d played only 14 games in college.
  • 31-year-old Rex Burkhead led the team in rushing, and 32-year-old Mark Ingram finished second despite being traded seven games into the season.
  • 41 percent of the team’s targets went to guys the playmaker-needy Patriots discarded (Burkhead, Brandin Cooks, Phillip Dorsett, Danny Amendola somehow).
  • The team’s high-priced middle linebacker, Zach Cunningham, stopped caring about any of this and wound up released, only to emerge as a starter for the AFC’s top-seeded Titans.

His reward for getting that group to four wins was never having to coach them again. Instead, Texans general manager Nick Caserio (a former Patriots executive) and executive vice president Jack Easterby (a former Patriots “character coach,” whatever the hell that is) cut him loose with their eyes on hiring former Patriots assistant Brian Flores, whom the Miami Dolphins fired on Black Monday.

It’s somehow both a common sense and desperation move. Culley knew he was a stopgap solution when Houston hired him; that’s why the franchise only guaranteed two of the five years on his contract when he signed. Now he’s free to join another NFL team or drop back into the college ranks, along with the kind of line item on his resume that necessitates a raise. He’s never lost sight of the feeling he made it to the mountaintop in the first place, even if coaching the Texans is the NFL version of the highest peak in Nebraska.

Houston gets its chance to prune the Belichick coaching tree once again while potentially adding a coach Watson reportedly mentioned in his trade requests. If Watson can’t play or still wants out, the franchise gets a chance to pair Mills with a guy who pushed Tua Tagovailoa and Ryan Fitzpatrick to 19 wins the past two seasons.

Whomever takes over in 2022 will have a significant head start on Culley, who’d effectively been lapped by the time he joined the race last winter.  Houston hired him to be the emperor of nothing, but now that the franchise wants to be something, his services are no longer needed. There still isn’t much young, franchise-building talent on the Texans roster, but the next man up will inherit a team in a better place than it was when Culley found it.

In most places that’d be called success. In Houston, it was grounds for a firing.

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