At the end of September, the Patriots were treading water with a 2-2 record. The Texans were downright scuttling at 0-3, dropping their first three games of the season.<\/p>\n
Since then, these have been among the hottest teams in the NFL, losing only three combined games — and the winner of Texans-Patriots will advance to the AFC Championship Game. (And if the Buffalo Bills beat the Denver Broncos, the Texans-Patriots winner will host the game.)<\/p>\n
The Texans and Patriots have a lot of connections through the coaching staffs and front offices, and they each have former Pro Bowl defenders as head coaches. But they’re built differently — Houston with a dominant defense, New England with a budding star in Drake Maye<\/a> at quarterback.<\/p>\n If C.J. Stroud<\/a> can bounce back from a tough game at Pittsburgh, the Texans can be tough to beat. But New England’s defense also flexed its muscles in the Wild Card Round, with five sacks of Justin Herbert<\/a> and allowing the Chargers only three points.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the end of September, the Patriots were treading water with a 2-2 record. The Texans were downright…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":126853,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[9952,9955,47847,10410,10374,9722,56,58,57,79,54783,10365,223,9957,9953,54782,52639,10407,10414],"class_list":["post-126852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-around-the-nfl","tag-c-j-stroud","tag-christian-gonzalez","tag-danielle-hunter","tag-drake-maye","tag-game-preview","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news","tag-houston-texans","tag-milton-williams","tag-new-england-patriots","tag-news","tag-nico-collins","tag-no-minute","tag-playoff-news","tag-sheldon-rankins","tag-will-anderson-jr","tag-woody-marks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126852","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=126852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}