The Houston Texans fired coach Lovie Smith and replaced him with Demeco Ryans ahead of the 2023 season after finishing 3-13-1 and last in the AFC South the previous year.
Ryans was the franchise’s fourth coach in the past three seasons. The former defensive coordinator for the 49ers the past the previous two years. Ryans played a major role in helping San Francisco reach the 2022-2023 NFC Championship game.
Ryans, the 2006 NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year for Houston who still leads the Texans in career tackles, signed a six-year deal for this long-term overhaul.
With Ryans in place, and top draft picks quarterback C.J. Stroud and Will Anderson Jr, Houston is moving its new era forward, the Houston Texans were beginning a rebuild, or at least that’s what the NFL world thought ahead of the 2023 season.
The first-year head coach, first-year quarterback and defensive star and a roster full of young, but talented players were tasked with rewriting the narrative after the team posted 11-38-1 record over the past three previous seasons.
The result? Stroud thrived in a QB-friendly system designed by rising offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik, who designed the offense to fit what the former Ohio State QB did best in college. He played like a seasoned veteran — and the defense thrived under the leadership of Ryans.
The Houston Texans stunned the NFL world by winning the AFC South with a (10-7) record and reaching the playoffs for the first time since 2019, when Bill O’Brien was the team’s head coach. While the future was bright, Houston was knocked off in the Divisional Round just like O’Brien’s Texans teams were in two of the four playoff appearances he led the team to from 2014-2019.
Ultimately, Bill O’Brien was fired in the middle of the 2020 season and the Texans downfall began. They finished that year (4-12) and didn’t come close to having a winning season until this past year with Ryans at the helm and Stroud emerging as one of the top young signal callers in the NFL.
Many casual NFL fans and die-hard Texans supporters often wonder what went wrong for O’Brien, who found plenty of regular season success during his 7-year tenure as head coach, but couldn’t pinpoint how the team had such a significant drop off from making a run to the Divisional Round in 2019 to free falling the very next season so badly he was canned in the middle of the year.
On January 21, 2021, O’Brien was named the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at the University of Alabama under head coach Nick Saban, replacing Steve Sarkisian, who left to become the head coach at the University of Texas at Austin.
Former Houston Texans Coach Bill O’Brien Reveals What Went Wrong At The End Of His Tenure
Across seven seasons as head coach, O’Brien led Houston to the playoffs four times, each ending in ruin before the AFC Championship Game.
“We didn’t really get to where we wanted to get to, because of a series of events that happened,” O’Brien said. “I ended up having the general manager title. Looking back on that, that’s really not who I am. I’m a coach and that’s what I do well
“So probably took a little bit too much on my plate. And it didn’t end very well, but we had a good run there.”
Bill O’Brien recently took the head coaching job at Boston College after initially accepting the OC position at Ohio State. He’s always thrived at the collegiate level, but many will always wonder if he could have gotten that Houston Texans team to a Super Bowl if he hadn’t taken on GM responsibilities which led him to make bad decisions and took him away from coaching.