Ryans deflected blame for the loss away from Stroud and toward himself.<\/p>\n
“When things don’t go your way, you have bad performances, it’s not a time to point fingers or say it’s on one person,” Ryans said. “If anybody, it all starts with me. For me, as the head coach of this team, we didn’t perform well. Obviously, I didn’t have our guys, you know, ready to go in this moment. So that starts with me. We stick together.”<\/p>\n
The Texans were fortunate to have survived Stroud’s five fumbles (two lost) during the Wild Card Round at Pittsburgh, with Houston’s defense taking over in the fourth quarter. That gave Stroud a total of seven turnovers in two playoff games, with only Carson Palmer (eight in 2015) having more in a single postseason since 2000, per NFL Research.<\/p>\n
Following a brilliant rookie campaign, Stroud hasn’t looked quite the same. He followed up a disappointing second season with a mixed bag in 2025, missing three starts with a concussion. Mills took his place, and the Texans went 3-0 while Stroud was out.<\/p>\n
Stroud played fairly well after returning, helping extend the Texans’ win streak to 10 games prior to the postseason. In his first four postseason games prior to this year’s playoffs, Stroud had thrown for 976 yards and four TDs, which is why his yips in the past two games were so surprising.<\/p>\n
Stroud said he felt like he let all of Houston down, both on Sunday and for the whole season.<\/p>\n
“I look back (at the season), and I just, I just feel like I let people down,” Stroud said. “Not happy with that. It hurts, and I’m not naive to it. I didn’t play my best this year.<\/p>\n
“But I’m gonna respond. I’m gonna keep my my chest up, my chin up high, and I’m gonna just keep battling for it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ryans deflected blame for the loss away from Stroud and toward himself. “When things don’t go your way,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422436,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[37242,64,63,5377,1255,44,593,19976,85],"class_list":["post-422435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-around-the-nfl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-c-j-stroud","tag-houston-texans","tag-news","tag-nfl","tag-no-minute","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}