The 2002 NFL season marked the arrival of the Houston Texans, the league’s 32nd franchise, and since then, the Lone Star State’s second team has yet to make an appearance in the AFC Championship Game. And while the present-day Texans are indeed flawed in a couple of important places, with All-Pro talents like Derek Stingley, Will Anderson, Calen Bullock and Danielle Hunter up and down the defensive side of the roster, there is just no way around it… Houston’s defense should be Super Bowl caliber great in 2025.
You don’t need me to tell you this, though. It seems like everyone in H-Town agrees that the Texans defense has a chance to be scary, successful and best case scenario, superior to every other unit in the NFL this season.
“Best defense in the league. Every level: d-line, linebackers, safeties, corners, we got the best defense in the league,” veteran offensive lineman Tytus Howard said of Houston’s defense on July 25. “Every day in practice, it’s hard for us, because we’re going against the best in the league. So, if we can do stuff we’ve gotta do against our guys, on Sundays it’s going to be easy for us.”
But the Texans defense doesn’t need their offensive teammates to be singing their praises. There’s enough confidence on the defensive side of the ball that it’s ever apparent that Houston believes this could be a truly special group.
Texans D Talking the Talk, Prepared to Walk the Walk
For as dominant as the Texans defense looked at various times throughout the 2024 season, there’s an organization-wide commitment to leave last season in the past and focus on this year.
“To me, every year I start over,” DeMeco Ryans said, per ESPN’s DJ Bien-Aime. “Every year we have to reinvent ourselves. We have to create and mold and grow to see what the 2025 Texans will look like. Just because the defense has been successful in the past — they’ve done a good job — that doesn’t just guarantee success today.”
Ryans is right, but at the same time, after one particularly one-sided practice on Sunday, when the defense got the better of the offense on numerous occasions, the Texans’ third-year head coach made it clear that this is the expectation in Houston.
“That’s who we are. That’s what we do. That’s the defense just being who they are. They’re making plays,” Ryans said.
The confidence from the coaching staff is rubbing off on the unit as a whole. Earlier this summer, Derek Stingley Jr. made waves when he suggested that the Texans could lead the NFL in interceptions by “at least 10 to 15.”
A gap that big between the NFL’s leader in interceptions and the team in second is unprecedented, but if Derek Stingley stopped short of mentioning that 10-to-15 pick gap, nobody would’ve batted an eyelash.
It’s just as possible that the Texans could lead the NFL in sacks in 2025. They were tied for fourth in 2024, and with another year of working opposite of each other, edge rushers Danielle Hunter and Will Anderson could both be ready to build on what they established last season.
“We know how each other rush now,” Hunter said during minicamp. “The biggest thing is we line up, and we have a sense, an idea, of what’s going to happen inside, and what’s going to happen on the outside. So, that’s a plus.”
A plus for Houston, sure, but a terrifying negative for 31 other NFL teams.
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