Will the former star rookie be there in September?
Training camp is right around the corner for your Houston Texans. Guys will be there to start officially on July 23rd. By my math that is less than two weeks away. Some camps come with a lot of intrigue and there are quite a few unanswered questions, but this year might be a lower drama year than most. That is almost always a good thing. However, there a few unanswered questions.
One of those questions is Dameon Pierce. Those that have read my work regularly know I am a former coach. I took on the moniker “vballretired” because I spent several years as a high school volleyball coach. Volleyball and football are obviously different sports and high school is obviously different than professional football, but there are some commonalities.
If you shot any of us up with truth serum we would all tell you a pretty similar story. None of us are universal successes and none of us are universal failures. We all exist in that area in between. There are players we connected with and helped grow. There are players we didn’t connect with and couldn’t help grow. Every coach can tell the same story.
Obviously, there are exceptions to every rule. We talked about David Culley last time. I don’t know how many players he honestly made better. If we exclude him, there are players that did better under Lovie Smith than DeMeco Ryans. Pierce might be one of those guys that did better under Pep Hamilton than Bobby Slowik. It could be a case of scheme. It could be a personality thing. I can honestly say that my situation had both.
Any good (or even average) coach agonizes over those players they could not reach. A large part of the failure of Slowik was an inconsistent running game. It was worse before the Texans brought in Joe Mixon. You could see those struggles when anyone other than Mixon was carrying the ball. The chief culprit was Pierce. Following his 900+ yard rookie campaign, he was expected to be the bell cow. That never happened.
Enter Nick Caley. Certainly, bad pass protection was the main reason why he was hired. The NFL is a quarterback league. C.J. Stroud is a potential franchise quarterback. He didn’t get better in year two. He got worse. You can probably stop there when looking at the reasons why Slowik was let go. However, stopping there wouldn’t tell the whole story. In fact, the story probably shouldn’t begin there.
2023: 1647 rushing yards (22nd), 3.7 YPA (28th), 10 TD (23rd)
2024: 1909 rushing yards (15th), 4.4 YPA (13th), 15 TD (15th)
So, at least according to the basic stats the Texans went from below average to average from year one to year two. Normally that would be a success. However, we have to read between the lines. When we remove Joe Mixon from the conversation things look a lot different. Let’s take a look at the other Texans running backs.
Dameon Pierce: 293 yards, 7.3 YPA, 2 TD
Cam Akers: 147 yards, 3.7 YPA, 1 TD
Dare Ogunbowale: 112 yards, 3.7 YPA, 0 TD
JJ Taylor: 44 yards, 4.4 YPA, 0 TD
Pierce looks like he was successful, but that includes a 92 yard touchdown run and a 54 yard touchdown run. Take those two carried away and he goes to a 3.86 yards per attempt. So, Pierce was essentially the same as those other backs. That is probably why they drafted Woodie Marks and picked up Nick Chubb.
The unknown is how Caley’s offense will be different. We don’t know if it will be better, worse, or the same. There are any number of permutations of that statement. We could be talking overall success. We could be talking individual success. We could be looking at the passing game or the running game. Training camp is when we start getting the answers to those questions.
What we know is that Pierce is at a crossroads. He is in the last year of his rookie contract. The Texans acquired a potential premium back in Chubb. They acquired a likely third down back in the draft. There are a few other backs in camp that could make some noise as well. He is out of time.
Pierce is a good guy by every reasonable standard. He is a good teammate and a professional by all accounts. He is a good guy off the field as well. There isn’t a person with a heart and soul that is rooting against him. However, he has to do the work of adapting to the new offense. He has to show that his performance the last two years was about Slowik and not about him. We wish him the best of luck. We are all suckers for happy endings.