The first third of the 2025 season has been a disappointment for the Houston Texans, who entered the year with hopes and expectations of winning a third consecutive AFC South division title. Presently, the Texans find themselves 3.5 games back of the surprisingly dominant Indianapolis Colts, but even if Indy wasn't the early-season darling of the league, this would still be cause for concern for the Texans.
The problem here seems to be not just that the Texans are still going through the growing pains of working in a new offensive coordinator, four new starters along the offensive line and various new faces at skill positions. It's that the offseason plan of general manager Nick Caserio was a failure that the Texans are paying for week in and week out.
In his recent rundown of all 32 teams' offseasons, ESPN's Bill Barnwell declared that it was the Texans who had the worst offseason, skewering numerous decisions that Caserio made that have failed to pay off.
"I'm not sure I've seen a team give up on so many meaningful additions so early in the season since the Al Davis days in Oakland," Barnwell wrote. "Texans general manager Nick Caserio gave (Nick) Niemann $4 million guaranteed and then cut the special teamer in August. He traded for Gardner-Johnson, restructured his deal in September and then cut him after three games, leaving Houston on the hook for $8.3 million. Robinson was benched after one game and spent two games on special teams before being traded to the Browns, with the Texans paying $9.2 million for his brief stint."
Barnwell continued, noting that $21.5 million had been spent on players who were no longer on Houston's roster by the end of the month of September. That doesn't even include the trade for and money spent on wide receiver Christian Kirk, whose production has been limited in just three games so far this season.
The bright spots of the Houston Texans offseason
Barnwell was complimentary of a few of Houston's offseason additions, recognizing the potential of both Aireontae Ersery and Woody Marks, a pair of rookies selected in the 2nd and 4th rounds respectively in the 2025 NFL Draft. He also mentioned Ed Ingram as an offseason highlight. Late last week, I wrote about Ingram's emergence as one of the highest-graded guards in the NFL, per Pro Football Focus. The fact that Houston parted ways with only a 6th round pick for him is a win.
Additionally, with both Nico Collins and Christian Kirk likely sidelined this Sunday against the San Francisco 49ers, the door is open for both Jayden Higgins and Jaylin Noel to emerge as go-to options for CJ Stroud in the Texans passing game. Thus far this season, both of these former Iowa State Cyclones have been used sparingly in the aerial attack.
If you want to give credit to Nick Caserio, you could make the case that because he had already done such a good job building the Texans defense, not much work had to be done on that side of the ball this season, though the swing and miss on CJ Gardner-Johnson is undoubtedly a disappointment. But CJGJ wasn't a need for the Texans defense, he was a luxury who didn't pan out.