HOUSTON – The Texans are 0-3 to open the season. One day after an especially frustrating loss to the Steelers, Bill O’Brien spoke to the media about what the team needs to do to turn it around in Week 4.
The most important thing to get the Texans back on track
Recommended Videos
“We have to play better, complementary football," said O’Brien. "We go down at the end of the half and we have a really nice 2-minute drive, take the lead, then we go in at halftime and then we come out second half – the defense did some good things in the second half, but offensively we didn’t complement them at all. We didn’t complement offense with return yards. There was more return yardage out there for us, punt return, kickoff return. We’re just not doing enough of that. We do it at times but not enough, so we really need to understand that and really do a better job of that.”
Although they lost to the Chiefs, the Texans ran the ball pretty effectively. Why weren’t they able to do that against the Steelers?
“Different defense," explained O’Brien. "Totally different defense. Different scheme that we used that night. It’s just different. Yesterday was a lot of 8-man box, 3-4 defense, nickel defense, blitzing nickel – things that we obviously saw on tape and we felt like we had some good things for it, but just didn’t get it done. We need to do a better job for the players. We’re going to try to do that this week.”
Has tackling improved?
“I think the tackling has improved," said O’Brien. "At the end of the game there, Eric Murray made a really good tackle that almost caused a fumble through the end zone. B-Mac (Benardrick McKinney) made some good tackles. Zach Cunningham made some good tackles. But then we missed a couple. We missed one, third-and-10 early in the game, had a chance to stop them there, missed a tackle. There’s still improvement that needs to be made, but I do think it has improved.”
Is there anything new addition David Johnson can do to pick up some more yards?
“No, there’s nothing that David can do differently. I thought the run blocking – I think we have to, as a coaching staff, we have to do a much better job of scheming it up and just doing a better job.”
Were there any positive takeaways in the loss to Pittsburgh?
“We played pretty good complementary football in the first half," said O’Brien. "Obviously, we’ve played three really good teams. We’re not there yet. We didn’t win any of those games but feel like we’ve definitely improved, and we need to try to play 60 minutes of that type of football. I think if we play 60 minutes of that type of football we can win. But we’ve got to get it going here very quickly. Like I said last week, we’ve got to get it going.”