All season long it's been a challenge to put this Houston Texans defense into historical context without overdoing it with the hyperbole, so it's always a welcome development when someone with significantly more cache than I have comes along and says something about this unit that is worth listening to.
On Wednesday, former Seattle Seahawks star Richard Sherman joined Kevin Clark on the This Is Football Podcast, and Clark asked the Legion of Boom standout what defensive scheme he'd want to play in if he were still throwing the shoulder pads and cleats on. Sherman, perhaps surprisingly eschewing a very solid Seahawks defense, instead opted to go with the Texans.
"Any scheme? It'd be Houston's," Sherman answered. "They run a lot of different things, but they keep it simple. They're either in man, three, they run a little two. They don't disguise crazy. They just say, 'Hey. Gap, sound, accountability football. We gonna get in your face. We gonna be physical. Everybody's running and hitting. We taking the ball away. And you gonna have to deal with us.' I would love to play in that scheme."
The appreciation between the Legion of Boom and Houston's Swarm goes both ways. Earlier this year, Derek Stingley Jr. noted that the unit that Sherman starred on serves as an influence of the one that Stingley has made his name playing for.
"Y'all changed the game. The physicality, the attitude, all of that. That's the standard,"Stingley told Sherman. "You take something from everybody and make it your own."
Just as was the case in Seattle, Houston benefits from having a secondary with four players -- Stingley, Kamari Lassiter, Jalen Pitre and Calen Bullock -- who will deserve Pro Bowl consideration at season's end, but it's not just the highly-touted DB's that make these groups historically great. Both the mid-10's Seahawks and this version of the Texans have a D-Line that provides a hellacious pass rush and a group of linebackers that fly to the ball.
But of course, in Sherman's analysis of the group, it's always gonna come back to the DB's.
"Houston's D-Line is really deep, really aggressive, really attacking. Will Anderson and Danielle Hunter are obviously the kingpins of that D-Line, and they do a phenomenal job," Sherman noted. "But that secondary — Kamari Lassiter, even more than Stingley, my guy Calen Bullock, and Pitre, I love watching him play. You would think [Lassiter] is like a 250-pound linebacker, and he's not that big, but he plays huge, and he plays fast."
Fast, smart, nasty, physical... the same descriptors we used for the Legion of Boom, feel free to use them on Houston's defense too. It's no longer hyperbole.