Over the last week, there have been many rumors circulating from many valid sources across the NFL citing that current Houston Texans general manager Nick Caserio could be either let go or step away from the Texans after the draft.
The obvious here is that when the Texans hired Demeco Ryans to be their new head coach and signed him to a six-year contract the hierarchy changed. By nature of that six-year commitment, Houston Texans owner Cal McNair showed where he was putting his future. With that in mind, it is possible that Demeco Ryans, a guy who has already brought with him former coaches and members of his previous organization, the San Francisco 49ers, to Houston. He could have a general manager in mind from San Francisco, such as Adam Peters.
Who that would be is anyone's guess, but it is a very valid possibility. Up to this point, we have seen what appears to be a really great working relationship between Ryans and Caserio. However, at the end of the year press conference we did see a much more vulnerable and less confident Caserio. So maybe he knew something was up.
Why wouldn't the Houston Texans just fire Nick Caserio now?
I've also seen some questions as to why the Texans wouldn't have fired him immediately after the season and want to address that. First of all, most scouting department contracts end after the draft season. This makes a ton of sense because they spend the majority of their year scouting and gaining data up until the actual draft. To let go of the general manager would also mean letting go of a lot of that information as well as the potential for that information to be leaked to another team.
This is also why I wouldn't expect the Texans to move away from Caserio until after the draft. If they were to let go of him right now, there's nothing stopping the Panthers from paying him money to join their staff until the end of the draft just to tell them who the Texans like or any team to do that really.
Lastly, since Caserio has been in Houston, very little information has been leaked from the front office's standpoint. However, in the last week and a half, we have seen a ton of information leaked. During the Deshaun Watson saga, we didn't hear much about what the Texans were doing or what they thought, but now all of a sudden, we're hearing different rumors about who they want to draft and things like that. Caserio is very tight-lipped, so the fact that all this information has been getting out leads me to believe that he may no longer be the main man in charge.
Only time will tell what will happen, but by the end of the month, we should know who the general manager in Houston will be for the 2023 season.