The Houston Texans have finally found their fifth full-time coach in team history.
According to Adam Schefter of ESPN, the Texans will be hiring defensive coordinator and associate head coach Lovie Smith.
Smith’s success in the NFL came largely with the Chicago Bears from 2004-12, leading Chicago to two NFC Championship Game appearances. The closest the Bears came to winning a world championship was at the end of the 2006 season when they lost Super Bowl XLI to the Indianapolis Colts.
After being out of football for a year, Smith returned to coaching with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from 2014-15, leading them to a 2-14 mark his first season and then 6-10 before being fired.
From 2016-20, Smith was the head football coach for the University of Illinois. The Big Ten school went 17-39 during Smith’s five years with a 10-33 mark in conference play. Illinois fired Smith at the end of the 2020 campaign.
The Texans hired Smith in January 2021 as their defensive coordinator. Houston finished with nine takeaways, the fewest in the NFL, in 2020. True to Smith’s philosophy of cultivating takeaways, Houston finished with 25 in 2021, tied for the 10th-most in the NFL. The Texans were the only team with a losing record to finish with a top-10 in that category.
Houston is hiring a retread coach for the first time since their 2002 inception when they brought on former Carolina Panthers coach Dom Capers. The Texans did not post a winning record for the four seasons Capers was on the sidelines from 2002-05.
Smith, 63, becomes the third Black coach to lead the Texans. The first was Romeo Crennel, who was an interim coach for the last 12 games in 2020. David Culley replaced Crennel as the full-time coach in 2021, going 4-13 in his lone season on the sidelines. Houston also becomes the first AFC South team since the Colts to hire Black full-time coaches in succession (Tony Dungy, 2002-08; Jim Caldwell, 2009-11).