A quick look back at what could have been
It is the dead period in the NFL calendar. Free agency has happened. The draft has happened. Teams have gone through OTAs and mandatory minicamp. Sure, teams like the Miami Dolphins and Pittsburgh Steelers are making moves, but for the most part there isn’t much to talk about. Almost seemingly on cue, the snake that was peered his head out of the dirt to make a comment.
Jack Easterby came out of the hole in the ground he was hiding him to blame the fans for his firing in Houston. Obviously, no one can know for sure who was responsible for letting Easterby go. We can’t be a fly on the wall for that conversation. Besides, I imagine there were any number of conversations that happened before the final one. One thing I can be sure of is that the fact that people holding signs at the Texans’ games had little to do with the final decision.
Here is where get to the six degrees of separation. There are no direct links between the rise of Hannah McNair and the fall of Jack Easterby. It is what some in the legal business would call a preponderance of the evidence. Her rise in decision making just so happened to coincide with his demise. Is it a coincidence? I suppose anything is possible, but it isn’t likely.
I know it is a painful memory, but we as Houston Texans fans have to go down memory lane to fully appreciate where we are. We have never been the the postseason three years in a row. Something has always happened in that third year. Of course, that could possibly give us pause for optimism this year, but this organization feels different. There is an air of competence in the air.
This is a team that hired a position coach to be a head coach. You could tell from the opening moment of the press conference. This was going to end in disaster. If normal fans could listen to David Culley in a press conference and tell he was a patsy then a general manager with Nick Caserio’s intelligence and experience could clearly see it wasn’t going to work.
Maybe that was the plan from the get go. Maybe they knew there was no chance they were going to win, so it didn’t matter who they put in that chair. Maybe they saw the hiring as a sort of golden parachute for a career position coach that had given decades of his life to the sport. Maybe they collectively decided that putting a competent coach in that spot would only ruin a potentially promising career.
Professional sports teams are purposefully vague when it comes to the decision making process behind the scenes. This gives everyone involved plausible deniability. Yet, the hiring practices that led to David Culley and Lovie Smith were haphazard at best. At worst, it was amateur hour. It would be hard to imagine they could find any group of half way interested football fans that could make worse decisions.
Again, no one is quite sure what Easterby was responsible for and how much influence he had over such decisions. All we know is that when he left the team hired arguably their best coach in franchise history. They have had successive drafts that some experts have pegged among the league’s best. Add to that some shrewd free agent additions and it is hard to believe that this is the same organization that couldn’t seem to get out of its own way.
It would be easy to say that it was due only to Easterby exiting stage left. However, that would be wrong. It also coincided with Hannah McNair standing up and taking a more active role. That happened right around the end of the 2022 season when the team couldn’t even tank correctly. Episodes of the Keystone Cops looked more organized than what the Texans were doing.
Fast forward a few years and not only are the Texans trying for a third consecutive AFC South title, but they are on the verge of getting a new practice facility. Of course, whether they end up going through with the project or renovations to NRG remains to be seen. Some of it will involve public money and the national appetite for public ventures like stadiums is at an all-time low.
However, other teams (notably the Dallas Cowboys) have made these kinds of partnerships work and profitable for themselves and the community. I hate to cast aspersions, but there is nothing in Cal McNair’s history that indicates that he had the know how or foresight to get something like that done. This is Hannah. While I can’t fully support spending public dollars on a stadium less than 25 years old, I get the impulse to expand and take your business to the next level.
As painful as those memories of the early 2020s are, it is important that we keep them in mind and everyone knows what Easterby’s role was in all of that. Coaches and general managers (and executives) don’t get fired when people hold up signs. They get fired based on their record and the performance of the organization. The results speak for themselves. If Jack Easterby had an ounce of self-awareness he would crawl back into the hole he popped his head out of. He wouldn’t blame anyone else for his firing. Doing anything else is either the behavior of someone who is delusional or socipathic. Either is equally plausible.