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The hits just keep coming for your Houston Texans. When the schedule was announced last week, a variety of NFL pundits weighed in quickly on game outcomes for the Texans. It wasn’t pretty. Since legalized gambling on NFL games became a thing, a lot of sites have focused intently on providing odds and over/unders on each pro football franchise. According to the people who make betting odds, not only are the Texans unanimously at the bottom in the AFC South, they are at the bottom of the AFC as a whole. In fact, they’re alone in the basement in many takes, sharing some humiliation with the Detroit Lions in others.
Sporting News has Houston at a league worst 4.5 wins, with the Lions barely ahead at 5.0.
Action Network, a site dedicated to sports gambling, is less hopeful, with the Texans coming in at 4.0 wins.
Fox Sports has H-Town at 4.5 also.
Draft Kings shares the lack of optimism, placing a familiar 4.5 wins on Houston’s hopes and dreams as well.
Here’s an even more despondent spin on things.:
According to multiple sportsbooks, the Lions and the Texans are not favored to win a single game this season. The Texans are underdogs in every game at Westgate sportsbook. Trevor Lawrence and the young Jaguars are dogs in all their matchups as well… except for their two divisional games against Houston. The Cleveland Browns were the last team to go winless in 2017. The Lions also went 0-16 in 2008. So, could the Lions or Texans be the first teams to go 0-17 in NFL history?
If Urban Meyer, Tim Tebow, and Trevor Lawrence show up at NRG Stadium in Week One and blast through Nick Caserio's team of competitors, it will certainly signal a long season to come. While Romeo Crennel and J.J. Watt made it a habit of feasting on rookie quarterbacks, neither is able to make any real impact on this game. It’s also probably true that the Texans have never faced a rookie quarterback like Lawrence in a season opener.
If the Texans do go 0-17, maybe that’s what it will take for Janice McNair to realize Kyle Cal McNair and Jack Easterby need to go. Or perhaps the McNairs would finally just sell the team.
We can only wonder what the over/under on that is.