Why Have The Houston Texans Not Cut Randy Bullock?

I don't get it. Ron wrote the post about the Texans bringing three kickers in for a tryout and, more importantly, showed Randy Bullock's statistics this year, which in turn conclusively demonstrate why the Texans should be in the market for a new kicker.

Randy Bullock has missed eight (8) field goals in eight (8) games so far in 2013. I don't care how old he is, or how great he's been on kickoffs, or that the Texans burned a fifth round draft pick on him in 2012. A success rate of 61.9% on field goal attempts is unacceptable under any metric, and certainly so at the halfway point of the season. We're not talking about a kicker having a rough couple of games. There's a sufficient sample size to make a decision now.

That's why it was so troubling to read Mark Berman tweet and then report this after Neil Rackers, Shayne Graham, and Justin Medlock all kicked for the Texans yesterday:

"We all hit the ball really well, but they told us they were not ready to make a move at this point," Rackers said in an interview with FOX 26 Sports.

Not ready to make a move? What's it going to take? Bullock's conversion rate dropping below 50%?

On some level, I can understand that the Texans may be in somewhat of a holding pattern given Gary Kubiak's situation. But for a kicker who is missing nearly 40% of his field goal attempts? You can make that move with Wade Phillips in charge. You can make that move with Dom Capers in charge. We're not talking about splitting the atom.

And please spare me the argument of, "This season's already lost, so you might as well let Bullock see if he can work through it." How can any business willingly accept below average performance when there are literally guys on the street who have a sustained track record of doing much, much better? Sean Pendergast says it best:

When it comes to cutting bait, I don't get the mentality of this organization. They held on too long with Matt Schaub as the starting quarterback, and now they're about to do the same thing with Randy Bullock. Loyalty has its place in the world, but at crucial positions on NFL rosters, in a season with only 16 games, loyalty can be costly.

Someday, this team will realize that over-loyalty to underperforming players is the functional equivalent of disloyalty to top performers. How is it fair to J.J. Watt and Andre Johnson that Matt Schaub and now Randy Bullock were/are allowed to fail royally for a month longer than either should have, costing the team precious wins in the process?

For Texans management, the pain of punishing bad performance exceeds the pain of enduring it.

And that's a huge problem.

I always try to remember that players and coaches, like the rest of us, have families, feelings, mortgages, and various other things we as fans tend to overlook when we're evaluating our team's performance. So I don't say this lightly: Randy Bullock should have been cut on Monday. Instead, all signs point to him kicking for the Texans when they play the Cardinals on Sunday. That is inexcusable. More distressing is that Bullock's continued employment, like that of special teams coach Joe Marciano, only fuels the narrative that the Texans' current decision-makers lack the ability to demand consistent performance and accountability from the people below them.

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