The Houston Texans had a decent first half against the New York Jets in Week 12 at NRG Stadium.
Houston 14-11 and tallied 157 yards total offense, which wasn’t impressive but was on pace to provide at least 300 yards on the day for the Texans.
Instead, the Texans’ offense faltered and produced 45 yards total offense, could not add another point, and went three-and-out or four-and-out on two of their final five possessions.
Quarterback Tyrod Taylor cited a lack of execution as the reason why the Texans faltered.
“Yeah, didn’t execute on third down, didn’t execute in general on early downs as well, too,” said Taylor. “Put yourself in third-and-long in certain situations, those are hard to come by. But just the flow wasn’t right in the second half. We have to be better at that moving forward.”
The Texans picked up 12 first downs in the first half. In the second half, Houston picked up just one on a 30-yard Taylor scramble.
“I think that boils down to execution,” Taylor said. “Like I said, it’s just us not executing. If you look at the first half, the flow of the game was in our favor. We were executing, hitting our chunk plays, doing what we needed to do in the run game. But like I said, we didn’t do it in the second half.”
Coach David Culley blamed the team’s penalties on offense in the second half as part of the problem, even though Houston only had one called, an offensive pass interference that was declined.
“We’ve had some penalties,” said Culley. “We’ve had some sacks. We’ve had some missed assignments. It’s gotten minimal. The good thing about it is we haven’t been turning it over is the big thing about that. But we just got to get more consistent with doing the things consistently that we need to do in order to stay on the field, and we’re not doing that yet.”
Houston falls to 2-9 on the season and will complete their season series with the Indianapolis Colts in Week 13 at NRG Stadium.