Most coaches don’t survive Bill O’Brien-level playoff collapses

Texans head coach Bill O’Brien likes where his team is headed after a historic playoff collapse. History says he may want to look again.

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Some teams and coaches are equipped to survive historic playoff meltdowns. Some are not. We’re about to find out whether the Houston Texans can overcome their 51-31 divisional round loss to the Chiefs, after blowing a 24-0 second-quarter lead. It looked for all the world as if the Texans would advance to their first conference championship game — before all hell broke loose.

The Chiefs scored touchdowns on seven straight drives. Patrick Mahomes became the second quarterback in NFL history to throw four touchdown passes in a quarter in a postseason game, matching Doug Williams’ performance in Super Bowl XXII. Texans defensive coordinator Romeo Crennel kept calling man coverages even when it was clear that, both as a thrower and as a runner, Mahomes was tearing man coverage apart. Whatever the season stats said about Mahomes’ specific liabilities against certain types of coverages — and it did favor throwing man concepts at him coming into this game — Crennel and his staff didn’t adjust, and it cost them dearly.

But the biggest goat horns were fit for O’Brien’s head. Two calls will stick with him through the rest of his coaching career — the decision to kick a field goal with 10:58 left in the first half on fourth-and-1 from the Kansas City 13-yard line. Houston then kicked off to receiver Mecole Hardman, who promptly returned the ball 58 yards to the Houston 42-yard line. Mahomes then hit tight end Travis Kelce for 25 yards, and then hit running back Damien Williams for a 17-yard score.

“I felt like I had a first down there and when I didn’t, I just felt like we didn’t have a great play there for the fourth down at that point and time,” O’Brien said after the game. “So, I felt like it was better to kick the three, but that’s a very fair question. I felt like it was just better to kick the field goal there.”

And that was the start of the barrage. O’Brien’s admission that he didn’t have a call he liked from the opposing 13-yard line didn’t help his case at all.

O’Brien’s decision to try a fake punt halfway through the second quarter — an attempt that was stopped by the Chiefs — is the other call that will haunt him for years.

Reid said after the game that it was actually a good play call, and that the Texans were close to pulling it off. But when we’re dealing with process versus outcome in the playoffs, outcome tends to win, whether it should or not.

“We felt like we had to manufacture some points, manufacture some yards, and it just didn’t work out,” O’Brien said of the call. He felt that the Texans would need “fifty points” to win. As it turned out, that wouldn’t have been enough.

Houston’s implosion turned out to be a tie for the fourth-biggest unraveling in NFL postseason history, behind the Houston Oilers blowing a 31-point lead to the Buffalo Bills in the wild-card round in 1993, and the Chiefs blowing a 28-point lead to the Indianapolis Colts in the wild-card round in 2014. So, yes, Andy Reid has been on both sides of this. And of course, there was the Falcons blowing a 28-3 lead to the Patriots in Super Bowl LI. The 2002 New York Giants also lost a 24-point lead in the playoffs — in their case, it led to a 39-38 wild-card loss to the San Francisco 49ers.

Now, it’s up to O’Brien to recover from it, which isn’t always easy — or possible. The Oilers’ loss to the Bills led to the firing of defensive coordinator Jim Eddy, who was replaced by all-time defensive genius Buddy Ryan. The problem was, Ryan was also an all-time underminer, and that became apparent quickly as he divided his defense against the offense and got in a sideline fight with offensive coordinator Kevin Gilbride. By 1997, the roster was decimated, and the Oilers were in Tennessee.

“Sometimes, the game speaks for itself, so you don’t have to say a whole lot,” Reid said after his Chiefs were shocked by the Colts, who whittled away at Kansas City’s 38-10 third-quarter lead to shock an opponent who thought things were sealed up. The Chiefs missed the playoffs in the following season of 2014, but have been in the hunt every year since, have transitioned from Alex Smith to Patrick Mahomes, hired Steve Spagnuolo to re-define a defense that blew an overtime opportunity to beat the Patriots in the 2018 AFC Championship game, and could very well pick up their first Super Bowl title since the end of the 1969 season.

Regarding resiliency, Reid’s Chiefs are the exception. Most franchises can’t swallow past the acrid taste of postseason failure at that rate.

Dan Quinn’s Falcons lost offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan to the 49ers following their epic collapse against the Patriots, and as it turned out, most of the offense with it. Atlanta lost in the divisional round in 2017 to the Eagles, and they’ve been in 7-9 purgatory ever since.

The 2014 Seahawks, who were one yard away from beating the Patriots in Super Bowl XLIX and becoming the first team since the 2003-2004 Patriots to repeat as Super Bowl champions, were never the same after Malcolm Butler’s goal-line interception. A young, united team started to see fractures in the locker room, and the belief system that was so strong before was never quite the same again. The Seahawks have never been the same again, either — though they’ve still been successful in the regular season, they’ve never advanced past the divisional round.

Some things, you just can’t come back from.

O’Brien was asked after the loss why Texans fans should believe that things will be better with him as the team’s head coach. The team is 2-4 in the postseason with O’Brien at the helm, and given the way things went on Sunday, it’s a relevant question.

“I feel like we’re moving in the right direction,” he said. “I think we did a lot of good things this year. Not enough, obviously. I feel good about where we’re headed.”

Where they’re headed is into two straight drafts without a first-round pick after trades for left tackle Laremy Tunsil and receiver Kenny Stills in 2019 that represented an “all-in” strategy which turned out to be ephemeral at best. Where they’re headed is into an uncertain future that most coaches with this kind of baggage don’t survive. If O’Brien can buck the curve and take his team back, it will be a bigger and more improbable win than the big, improbable win he suffered on Sunday.

Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”