Saw a reminder earlier of how the last time Aaron Rodgers faced a Demeco Ryans defense in the playoffs and got demolished. And that was a 49ers D that wasn\u2019t at the level of what H-Town has going right now.<\/p>\n
My concern is still the same as it has been all season: offensive play calling. Unless Jerome Bettis reveals a free agent clone of his prime self who signs with the Texans, the A-gap running game will be just as ineffective as it has been all year.<\/p>\n
One thing I\u2019ve come to realize about this 2025 Texans team is they find a way to win. In years past, players have given up, the team has looked confused, unmotivated, ill-prepared. They continually lost games they could have won, and\/or lost by less than a single score. But Ryans has these guys focused on finding ways to win. Mike Tomlin has instilled that in his teams since day one. Meaning, this should be a game with two playoff caliber teams convinced they can will themselves to victory.<\/p>\n
That leaves execution as the true matchup to determine who will win. (Well, that and sloppy officiating- but not gonna go there). Which team will make more mistakes? According to NFLpenalties.com the Texans were the 7th most penalized team in the regular season, with 141 flags thrown at them. That amounted to 989 yards given away due to penalties. The Steelers were 7th from the bottom with only 116 hankies, losing 803 yards to them.<\/p>\n
With turnovers, the other costly mistake, Houston has a +17 differential while the Steelers are at +12. Based on that criteria for making predictions, it seems the Texans will likely win a close one, marked by a costly turnover or two in their favor.<\/p>\n
Houston\u2019s offense will benefit from no TJ Watt, and Pittsburgh\u2019s offense will suffer at the hands of Will Anderson Jr and Danielle Hunter. At the end of the day, Anderson and Hunter will likely force Aaron Rodgers and the Steelers into making more mistakes. Edge: Houston. Literally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Saw a reminder earlier of how the last time Aaron Rodgers faced a Demeco Ryans defense in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115327,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[50711,56,58,57,23714,40884],"class_list":{"0":"post-115326","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-houston","8":"tag-groupthink","9":"tag-houston","10":"tag-houston-headlines","11":"tag-houston-news","12":"tag-houston-texans-analysis","13":"tag-houston-texans-playoffs"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}