C.J. Stroud’s TD pass against the Falcons on Sunday shows what the rookie learned from a previous play — and what other rookies don’t.
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Houston Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud has started his NFL career with 186 pass attempts without an interception to begin his NFL career, and he is the fourth player in pro football history with at least 1,400 passing yards and no interceptions in his team’s first five games of a season. Stroud faces the New Orleans Saints on Sunday, and if he keeps that streak going, he will become the first quarterback ever without an interception in each of his first six career starts.
That’s all great, but when you get into Stroud’s tape, and how he’s functioning in Bobby Slowik’s offense, his excellence is really about how well he’s seeing and executing things against more complex defenses than he’s ever seen before.
This manifested itself in Houston’s eventual 21-19 loss to the Atlanta Falcons last Sunday — which turned out to be a big win for the Texans at the quarterback position. With 1:54 left in the game, Stroud hit tight end Dalton Schultz for an 18-yard touchdown in which Schultz ran a fake post and then went vertical.
“I don’t want to give out all my secrets, but I just had like – I think it’s a gut feeling that you get in-between the games,” Stroud said on Wednesday. “So, me and Bobby [Slowik] had a conversation on the sideline about a certain route that we wanted to do, and we didn’t have it in at practice. I just felt like, in those big time situations, the guys that they… [Falcons safety] Jessie Bates [III] is a great player. Super good, really instinctive. He almost picked me off – he did some weird 360-turn. It’s the first time I’ve seen that, so now I’ve got it in my bank and hopefully he doesn’t ever get me again.
That was this play with 12:12 left in the game. Receiver Robert Woods ran an intermediate crosser against Atlanta’s Cover-3, and Bates did a brilliant job of jumping the route.
Doing that over the middle is one of Bates’ superpowers — you can ask Bryce Young of the Carolina Panthers about that, as Bates had two of his three picks this season by baiting and jumping Young’s throws.
Do Bryce Young’s two interceptions to Jessie Bates reveal a bigger problem?
The difference between Young, the first overall pick in the 2023 draft, and Stroud, the second overall pick in the 2023 draft, was what Stroud took away from it.
“But playing against [Bates] keeps you honest, and I knew that he was going to try to make the play of the game and try to take it away,” Stroud continued. “But previous film study I was watching film on – like, a big time third down situation – and just seeing they were in this like quarters, match-y, Cover-4 look, and I told Dalton [Schultz] to do a certain thing in his route that I thought would get us not only the first down, but the touchdown, so we were on the same page. I’m literally trying to break down exactly what I want from him [Schultz] in the huddle, and at first, I don’t think it registered. And then he was like, ‘Okay, I get it. I get it.’ So, Dalton’s really smart and made a hell of a route.
“But yeah man, just being instinctive. Trying to put my guys in the best position to make plays and win games, and that instinct, it was really special. And Bobby [Slowik] and them were really happy on the sideline, and he was a part of that, too. I talked on the sideline with him [and] I told him that I was thinking about doing it, and he was like, ‘Man, if you’re feeling it, then go ahead and make a play,’ so we made the play, and it is what it is.”
“We had run a concept a couple times in the game, and we saw a hole there, and we had a route in the game to take advantage of it, but it was out of a different formation in a little bit of a different look with a different guy on it,” Slowik said Thursday. “We had kind of been talking on the sideline and C.J. was comfortable with [the play] – he had thrown it during the week – he was comfortable with trying to give it a shot with Dalton [Schultz], and Dalton is probably the one guy on the team that I would trust to be able to go out and execute something like that watching someone else do it. We have a lot of trust in each other. If we’re confident in being able to do it, I have no issue going out and getting something like that done when we had a rep during the week. Now, Dalton ran a filthy route. Filthy route. It was awesome.”
“This league is what you make it,” Stroud concluded. “What you put in is what you get out. I put in a lot of work throughout the week with my teammates. We do an extra two-minute drill, four-minute drills. We have things called ‘bleed situations’ where we want to end the half with the ball, or [score] points, so a lot of different situational things we’ve been doing since OTAs, and the fruit of your labor is starting to show up publicly when it was just private for a long time. The saying, ‘Whatever is done in the dark, comes to light,’ is true. So just a lot of work that’s been put in from not only myself, but from my teammates, and then I think we all trust each other.”
Clearly, the Texans’ rookie quarterback has done more than enough to earn that trust.
