HOUSTON (SportsRadio 610) -- Two dynamic players who showed up in the first four days of training camp are both under 6 feet tall with a massive chip on their shoulders.
For wide receiver Anthony Miller, who the Texans acquired in a trade with the Chicago Bears on July 25 for a fifth-round draft pick, it's a new start.
Miller, a supremely talented athlete selected by Chicago in the second round of the 2018 NFL Draft, appeared in 47 games with 17 starts in three seasons with the Bears. He caught 134 passes for 1,564 yards and 11 touchdowns, but seven those game in his rookie season.
His lasting impression in Chicago is being ejected from the wild-card playoff loss to the New Orleans Saints when Miller punched defensive back C.J. Gardner-Johnson in the helmet.
While Miller may not have put it all together in Chicago, he stood out immediately at Texans training camp, just a few days after he was traded.
"Boy, he can play," said veteran Brandin Cooks, who led the Texans in receiving yards last season. "He's shifty. Looking at him out here on the first day, he's built, and he can make a guy miss, he can stick his foot in the ground, and you love to see it."
Miller's primarily played in the slot at Texans camp and he's made a ton of plays, as quarterback Tyrod Taylor noted Friday.
Texans general manager Nick Caserio told Payne and Pendergast on Thursday that trading for Miller wasn't necessarily motivated by the subsequent trade of Randall Cobb to the Packers just a few days later.
But that's undoubtedly who Miller will be replacing, while fourth-year slot receiver Keke Coutee also factors into the mix.
When asked what exactly the 5 feet, 11-inch, 200-pound Miller brings to the Texans' offense, Cooks spoke about his mentality.
"It's nasty," Cooks said. "He's a guy that he may be small but at the end of the day he got such a big chip on his shoulder, he going to come to work every day and he's got a lot of speed there in the backfield."
The Texans coaches have spoken this offseason about a renewed focus on the run game, after having one of the league's worst in 2020.
Their passing game is likely to be an extension of that, with Taylor making quick decisions and throwing short passes to slot receivers like Miller and Coutee, and the upgraded running back group that includes Mark Ingram II, Phillip Lindsay, Rex Burkhead and last year's starter David Johnson.
All four of them have been successful at various points in the NFL.
But Johnson has never lived up to his All-Pro season in 2016. Ingram was buried on the Ravens' depth chart by younger backs, despite recovering from an ankle injury midway through the season.
Lindsay, the youngest (27) and smallest (5'8") of the group, is a two-time 1,000-yard rusher for the Denver Broncos, who signed with Houston for a surprisingly low base salary of $2.25 million this season.
"I have a big chip on my shoulder," Lindsay said Thursday. "I definitely did. For me, I feel like I'm always being disrespected, you know. And for me, I'm going to go out there and I'm going to show it. In my head, I'm the baddest dude there is, period. I don't care who else is in the NFL or anything like that, you've still got to deal with me and that's just how I act. But it's not just about me. It's about our team. And that's all I care about. So as long as we're winning games and stuff like that, things will come. Accolades will come as time goes on, but it's about team. It's about winning.
"You've got a bunch of us. Think about it, everybody come in here and, for some reason, they think we're the scumbucket. I don't know what they got going on in the media. Everybody has something to prove because there's some great dudes in there, and they are really talented and they played a lot of football. And we just want to get on the same page, and we're going to do that over time and put some games together and win a lot of games. That's our goal."