DGDB&D: a Texans blog.

Rod Woodson is a moron

Sep 4, 2008 2008 Season, NFL Network

Not to knock the air of out Matt’s attempt at making Leo Tolstoy blush, but I figured I’d share this video with you guys: NFL Total Access preview of Texans-Steelers, Week 1

Back when I had a roommate who was more than happy to pay for satellite TV to my benefit, I would watch NFL Network over ESPN pretty much any given day. NFL Network pre-season and draft coverage was immensely better, and during the season you were bombarded with nothing but highlight shows. Bad-ass! So when I saw this video on the NFL website, I was excited: it’s like TV, except free! But about halfway into it you’ll get the urge to orally defecate on your computer.

Basically, Rod Woodson is an idiot. It’s not that he’s some partisan Steelers homer, not that I can detect anyway. But he is filled to the brim with nothing but arguments made in either bad faith, with an astonishment lack of research, or with a terribly short memory. This is the same sort of “let’s create a story” journalism that you see in political media these days; it’s more forgiveable in sports journalism, since we’re not electing the leader of the free world, but it’s still really fucking annoying.

There is no quarterback controversy. No one who follows the Texans, or scouts the Texans, or even watches highlights of the Texans, and certainly nobody who actually works for the Texans, thinks that Rosenfels should start over Schaub. Rosenfels probably doesn’t even think that.

But this is what happens: the question gets asked so many times without regard for an honest answer that it becomes “conventional wisdom” that Rosenfels should start, and then graduates to “blatantly obvious.” Luckily we have a smart owner in Bob McNair, but I don’t doubt that there are knee-jerk owners out there that buy in to crap like this and fire coaches left and right because the idiot box said they should.

Anyone who has seen the Texans in the past four years would realize that Andre Johnson is the centerpiece of the offense. They would realize that Matt Schaub played several games without Andre Johnson on the field last year; both players were hurt at different times of the year. Indeed, in his first year as a starter, Schaub played only 11 games - and now all of a sudden he’s a habitual injury risk that isn’t any good when he actually is on the field? That’s what Jamie Dukes and Rod Woodson would have you believe.

This also ignores the fact that quarterbacks pretty much can’t do anything about the performance of the defense, which despite the amount of young talent we have on it, sucked donkey balls last year. Dukes even points out all the young talent we have on defense, as if that’s the strength of our team. Yes, it is promising, but the defense was dragged to an 8-8 record last year by the offense. As cool as they look on paper, our defense hasn’t done anything of note outside of force DeMeco Ryans to tackle pretty much everyone the last two years.

I mean, how hard can it be to get a scouting report or film of NFL games when you work for the league’s own television network? A television network that was borne out of the work of NFL Films! I need a Jaworski fix.