HOUSTON (SportsRadio 610) - When David Culley met with reporters Monday afternoon, one day after the Texans completed a 4-13 season under his first tenure as head coach, a meeting with upper management still had not been scheduled to assess the season.
Players had spent the past two days fielding questions about Culley's performance and potential future with the team. They were largely complimentary of his attitude, consistency and leadership through a difficult season.
They also acknowledged the bottom line business side of this, that wins and losses are measurements for football coaches and whether they get to keep their jobs.
"As far as I know, I’m the head coach of the Texans right now, and am moving forward with that," Culley said.
But Culley, who could not have fairly been expected to have a winning season in his first year given the Texans' lack of young talent and draft capital, acknowledged 2021 was not good enough.
"Well, you’re judged every year," he said. "Basically, you’re judged on wins and losses, and if you judge it on wins and losses I’m not happy with four wins at all. I expected to get more than four wins and felt like we should have got more than four wins. This is a bottom-line business, and I wasn’t happy with the number of wins we got. But, expect to get more.”
While he may be moving forward as head coach, for now, general manager Nick Caserio is still evaluating the entire football operation. That includes the head coach.
Caserio was scheduled to meet with reporters and appear on SportsRadio 610 this week, but those plans were pushed back Monday night without much explanation.
It stands to reason management needs more time to evaluate and would rather wait until they have answers before taking questions.
So on Monday, with his future seemingly hanging in the balance, Culley talked about what he learned as a rookie head coach and plans for his second season.
"We’ll expect a big jump," Culley said about the possibility of coaching a second season. "Very disappointed in the fact that we only won four ballgames. Expected to win more, thought we should have won more. We didn’t. But you always expect a big jump, and it’s no different than with players. Like the rookies, you expect a big jump for a rookie going into the second year, especially with the rookies that we’ve had that played a bunch. It’s the same way with this football team. We’ll add some more pieces through the draft, and obviously Nick (Caserio) will add some people through free agency. We kind of know what we need to do to keep moving forward, and just looking forward to doing that."
The Texans were one of the first teams to be mathematically eliminated from the playoffs this season and they will have the No. 3 overall pick in 2022. They have not picked in the first round since 2019, when they selected offensive lineman Tytus Howard.
There also needs to be a decision on estranged quarterback Deshaun Watson, who earned $10.5 million as a part of the active roster but did not play in 2021.
If and when a trade happens, the returns of it would factor into the Texans' offseason possibilities.
But the team can be certain their five rookies drafted in 2021 will be part of the team in 2022, namely third-round quarterback Davis Mills.
Mills passed for the most yards of any rookie in franchise history after starting in 11 games and playing in 13. He played for the injured veteran Tyrod Taylor early in the season, before eventually taking the job.
Culley admitted Monday that given Mills' upside, and how much the Texans struggled to run the ball, they should have focused more on the passing game.
The Texans at times had the league's least efficient offense, both running and passing. They finished ranked 29th in pass DVOA and last in run DVOA, according to Football Outsiders.
"We’ve got to coach that better," Culley said. "I think, too, as we went along we kind of found out that obviously, I want to run the football, but we weren’t able to run the football very well. Obviously, there’s different reasons why that happens. That has nothing to do with (offensive coordinator) Tim (Kelly) or the play caller, but the point we found out as we went along, there were times where probably the best thing to do was throw the ball more in these particular situations.
"A good example of that was just making adjustments. Yesterday was a classic example of that. We weren’t very good in the first half of that ball game, and my gut feeling was we had to change up something. I didn’t know what, and the thing was the tempo. Well, I find out that obviously when I look back on it that there were times that I should have used to tempo in some of these other ballgames that we had before. You asked me earlier about what did I learn, those are some of the things that I’ve learned as I make decisions and you go back and say, ‘That’s something that I maybe could have done or should have done earlier.’"
Culley spoke more on Mills' development over the season.
“The guy (Mills) has been very good in two-minute situations where we didn’t huddle and when the clock wasn’t an issue. He did a very, very good job of commanding everything. Tim (Kelly) was still calling plays in to him, he was making the checks, he was doing everything that we needed to do. That’s just something that he’s actually done very well when he was at Stanford. But I’m happy with his progress and I think we found out something about him moving forward that is something that we can do to help us offensively, because that’s something that he was comfortable with and did very well against a good football team in a very big ball game."