Brooks Reed: Texans "Weren't Fully Prepared" For Patriots' Hurry-Up Offense

In doing a postmortem of what went wrong for the Texans in New England last Sunday, Paul Kuharsky managed to get the following from Brooks Reed:

Houston struggled with the combination of pace and personnel the Patriots weave together.

"The hurry-up, again we weren’t fully prepared for some reason," said outside linebacker Brooks Reed, who didn’t play in the first matchup because of a groin injury. "It’s extremely hard to get the call in and line up when they are going hurry-up. They’re not going to wait for you. They’ve got plays planned out and one audible and they’ve got their play ready. Whereas we’ve got to get the call from the sideline, get lined up, recognize the formation.

"It takes us a lot more time to get lined up than they do. That’s the challenge and again that’s what kind of got us today. And making plays too, it’s them making plays not just them hurrying up. I think we could have been a little bit more prepared. We knew that was going to happen. We saw it on film, them lining up quick and defenses not being ready. We didn’t think it was going to be us and in some cases today it was."

On one level, this isn't really news. Every Texans fan who watched the game could see the Texans appeared to have no clue how to handle New England when the Patriots didn't huddle after every offensive snap (unlike the Texans' offense, which insisted on huddling no matter the scoring deficit or valuable time wasted..that's a story for another post).

Yet it's still disconcerting to see that opinion confirmed by a player, particularly when said player cites a lack of preparation as a reason for the failure. How can that be the case? It's not like the Patriots busted out some sort of new hurry-up offense. They use it all the time. They used it throughout the Week 14 shellacking they laid on the Texans at Foxborough. How could the Texans not be prepared for that?