Dunta starting for a full season instead of just six games will help. Let’s not let the contract issues distort reality; he’s a much better CB than anybody else we have. Eugene Wilson will also be the opening day starter at FS; that improves our secondary as well.

Travis Johnson is in a contract year. I’m assuming he’s stupid to the point that he has already gone and spent his rookie contract on white tigers and shit like that, so it would behoove him to give a little effort this season.

No more Greenwood. This is big. Whether it’s Adibi, June, or Diles in that WLB position, I think it makes our defense more dynamic.

But most importantly, the scheme is different. Forget the fact that Frank Bush has never been a DC before. I don’t feel like I even need to justify this with a sound argument, because it’s too damn obvious. Richard Smith’s defense was absolutely incapable of working with the players on our team. In fact, unless he had Reggie White and Warren Sapp playing on that line with Mario, his defense was guaranteed to suck hard.

29th to 15th would be nice, but with this offense, we don’t even need that much improvement. Just force a few more turnovers and get decent field position and Schaub, ‘dre, and Stevie will do the rest en route to 10-6 or 11-5. It certainly can’t get any worse, can it?

…but I think we’re sucking each other’s d**ks a little too much. There’s a lot of reasoning that basically sounds like the reasoning of a compulsive gambler: if only it lands on black four times in a row, we’re going to be rich! Please forgive me for pissing on the parade.

Why are we so quick to assume that the offense will be as good or better than it was last year? A lot of things went right for the Texans offense last year. FO says that offense is more consistent from year to year, so I guess if you’re going to have a good unit, you want it to be the offense. But it’s not a given that things go great for us again. Let’s remember that the offensive line was healthy all year, a pretty rare feat itself. We’re going to be breaking in a new offensive lineman (let’s take this moment to remember that I predicted his selection — thank you!), as well. Now, I have confidence in Mr. Caldwell, but he is a new addition to the line. There are going to be injuries all over the offense, and chances are pretty good that it’s going to be someone important. But we’re taking for granted that we’re going to have a healthy offense.

And this says nothing of the (albeit measured) optimism on defense. (I’ll concede that losing Richard Smith can only be a good thing.)

Lately I’ve adopted into my philosophy that chance and circumstance play a larger role in life than a lot of us are willing to admit. We don’t admit this since it’s a scary proposition that things aren’t completely under our control. (I know that I’m not the first person to see things this way, hence my use of the word “adopt”.)

I’d guess that a greater deal of a team’s success than we generally acknowledge is based on the mistakes and misfortunes of the other teams that it faces. We all know that this Jets are easier to beat without Kris Jenkins, or the Colts without Dwight Freeney, so we can understand how victories against those teams might be devalued. Others argue that everyone always has some injury problems so you can’t rationalize away wins by qualifying them like that – which is understandable. And then we assume that it all evens out in the end, and that a 10-6 team is a pretty good team.

But let’s take a 30,000-ft approach on this. The reality, I fear, is that this hypothetical 10-6 team isn’t that different than a 6-10 team. Thinking about things in this manner would seem to take a lot of fun out of sports – “my team won largely due to chance!” isn’t a great chant in a sports bar.

This isn’t something unique to Texans fans – every fan base is doing this sort of thing this time of year.

I guess a different way of putting this is that I think there are a few exceptional teams (outliers), and even fewer horrible teams (Lions and Raiders), and in between there is everyone else with varying degrees of luck. I think the Texans fall into that last group again this year, unless the players we’ve drafted this year have even more exceptional talent than has been proposed already (and thereby make the Texans outliers).

Don’t get me wrong – not everything is luck and chance! There are things under our control, and it’s very worthwhile to pursue means to exploit those opportunities. But we have to concede that there are things outside of our control as well, which doesn’t make for very interesting blog posts.

After all, you can’t do anything about luck (other than to not put yourself in a position to be affected by it in the first place), so it’s pretty useless to focus on the discussion of it.

The point is, let’s not assume we’ll keep catching good breaks and get angry over the bad ones we’ve caught in the past or are sure to catch in the future..