By the time Bill O’Brien’s run with the Houston Texans ended, he was both the head coach and general manager for the organization.
Ryan Fitzpatrick thinks that was the problem.
Though it never led to a Super Bowl, O’Brien had some good seasons during his six-plus years at the helm. But a series of ill-fated personnel decisions – namely the trading of DeAndre Hopkins for a second-round pick, a reclamation project in David Johnson and a fourth-round pick swap – led to him getting fired after Week 4 in 2020.
Ryan Fitzpatrick was O’Brien’s first starting quarterback in Houston in 2014. Now an analyst for Amazon, Fitzpatrick told “Payne and Pendergast” he thinks too many responsibilities doomed O’Brien.
“I think if I overall look at his time with the Texans, I think he’s a really good football coach, but I think that is where it should end," Fitzpatrick said Thursday. "I think he should be a football coach and maybe just got into too many different things that were taking the time away from being the guy that was an X’s and O’s guy that was calling plays and doing that.
“I think it’s hard as a head coach, you want to oversee everything, you want to have your hands in everything. But I think his biggest strengths were calling plays and leading men, and I don’t know that wearing that many hats ended up doing him any favors.”
Currently, O’Brien is serving as the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach on Nick Saban’s staff at Alabama. It briefly seemed like he might get back into the NFL this offseason, but that never came to pass.
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