Tom Savage Getting Majority Of First-Team Reps At Texans OTAs

The Houston Texans‘ organized team activities are now in their third week. No roster positions are set in stone, but we’re starting to see a picture of what head coach Bill O’Brien and the coaching staff‘s initial plans for the roster are.

Of course, the majority of the media focus is at the quarterback position. The Texans have Tom Savage as the incumbent and first-round draft pick Deshaun Watson fighting for playing time.

ESPN’s Sarah Barshop is reporting that Savage is getting the majority of the reps with the first-team offense.

Savage, 27, is in his fourth season with the Texans. He got two starts in 2016 when Brock Osweiler got benched, finishing the year with a 63% completion rate (46-73) with zero touchdowns and zero INTs.

Savage talked about the advantages of getting first-team reps in building up chemistry with the receiving corps.

“Just repetition and stuff we’re doing after practice and extra meetings,” Savage said of how he's building chemistry. “We get a limited time and we all have to meet extra a little bit after if we want to get better. That’s what it comes down to.”

It’s that lack of chemistry that most likely prevented Savage from taking over the starting quarterback position sooner last season. The Texans committed to starting Brock Osweiler and gave him the lion's share of reps during the preseason and regular season — right up until Osweiler was benched. Savage was deprived of starting in the playoffs because he wasn’t able to get first team reps under the concussion protocol.

Now for Watson, this may simply be the time in which he watches and learns. The former Clemson quarterback will still have plenty of time to win the starting job. The question will be whether it happens during the preseason, during the regular season, or sometime after that (2018?).