This Couldn't Have Played Out Any Better For The Texans...

14 minutes left in the game and C.J. Stroud drops back and lets it fly 63 yards to KeShawn Booty. Touchdown. Texans are up 38-9 against Los Angeles. That was his fifth touchdown pass of the day and it tied the best game of his career. It ended 44-22 and the Texans are now 3-5 on the season. If that record sounds familiar, it's because it should. This team was also 3-5 last season at this time. Last time this happened, they didn't lose again until January 9th. Nine straight wins and a playoff blowout in Pittsburgh. But this one came against the Chargers, and the Chargers are now 0-8. So which is it? Is it the game that turned around the Texans season, or is it just Houston beating up on a bad team? For most of the first half, this did not look like a blowout. Houston went right down the field on the opening drive, and Stroud hit Xavier Hutchinson from 17 yards out. After that, the drive starts stalling, and the game turned into a kicking contest. Fairburn hit one from 56, Cameron Dickerson kicked three of his own. For the Chargers, his third one made it 10-9 with 5 minutes and 11 seconds left in the half. A winless team, down one point, at their own home field. That's exactly how upsets start. On the very next possession, however, Stroud found Tank Dell for 63 yards. The whole drive only took 43 seconds off the clock. Then with 31 seconds before the break, Booty caught one from 12 yards out. His first touchdown as a Texan. A one-point game became a 15-point game in 4 minutes and 40 seconds. And the Chargers didn't help themselves. They were flagged nine times for 79 total yards. Halftime didn't cool anything down either. Nico Collins caught a 13-yard touchdown in the third quarter to make it 31-9. Then came a 63-yard shot to KeShawn Booty earlier in the fourth quarter, and this one was over. The Chargers scored 13 points in the fourth quarter, and every one of them came after Houston led by 29. And the guy who broke it open for the Texans was the one that the fans were waiting for all year long. C.J. Stroud finished this game 21-35 for 384 yards. That works out to 11 yards every time he threw the ball. Completions and incompletions together. That wasn't a dink or a dunk day. He was pushing it down the field and making huge plays. His five touchdown passes went to four different receivers. Hutchinson, Dell, Collins, and KeShawn Booty twice. The only other time he threw five in a game was as a rookie in a 39-37 shootout against Tampa Bay in November of 2023. Before today, the Texans had only six regular season games ever with five or more touchdown passes. Now there are seven, and Stroud holds two of them, and only Deshaun Watson has more than him all time in Texans history. He did it from a clean pocket too. Stroud was sacked just one time all day long. In the first seven games, that offensive line struggled. He'd been sacked 15 times during that seven-game stretch. Zoom out to the whole season, and the picture gets even better. Through eight games, he has 16 touchdown passes and just two interceptions on the season. Over his last five games, he's averaging 2.6 touchdown passes a game, up from the one he had before that. This is the player people pictured from Stroud winning Offensive Rookie of the Year all those years ago, and his receivers made it easy. Booty caught four passes for 125 yards on just five targets. Tank Dell had 105 of his own. So two different receivers went over 100 yards. Nico Collins, the top receiver on this team, only needed four catches for 55 yards because everyone around him was open as well. As a team, Houston averaged 7.3 yards a play. The Chargers managed to get 4.6. They turned three out of their four red zone trips into touchdowns. And the other two came from 63 yards out. But the side of the ball that won this game might not have been on the offense. Because before this game, DeMeco Ryan said he was going to take this defense back to the basics. And he meant it. Will Anderson Jr. said Ryan took them back to Pee Wee Ball. Reteaching tackling because arm tackling does not work in this league. On Sunday, that defense sacked Justin Herbert eight times. That tied the Texans' franchise record for sacks in a single game. Coming in, they had 21 sacks through seven games. They added eight more in just one afternoon. Will Anderson Jr. had two of them. And so did Jadavion Clowney. The defense had a rough start to the season, and Jadavian Clowney's two sacks were a very loud answer. Will Anderson Jr. is now up to nine and a half sacks, the most in the NFL as of tonight. He's playing like a defensive player of the year, and the season is only halfway done. The secondary got into it too. Derrick Stingley Jr. picked off Herbert in the 16th interception of his career. That ties Kareem Jackson for the second most in franchise history. On third down, the Chargers went 5-17 on the afternoon. Every time the Chargers needed a play to stay on the field, the Houston defense swarmed Herbert. Herbert finished 13 of 23 for 193 yards and lost another 40 yards on those sacks. By the end of the game, Herbert was out and DJ UiLangule was running the offense. Which brings us to the part of the game where Texans fans won't love to hear. The Chargers are the only team in the NFL still looking for a win. Before Quinton Johnson's 58-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter, their offense had gone 36 straight possessions without a touchdown. Their last one had come on October 11th, so that score ended a drought of almost a month. Some numbers in the box score should worry you too. The Chargers ran for 4.6 yards a carry, and the Texans ran for just 3.7. Woody Marks carried it 18 times for 70 yards, under 4 yards a carry, and that won't be enough against Cleveland in November. LA even held the ball longer, 31 minutes to Houston's 28. The run game still isn't where it needs to be. Houston won this game because of big plays through the air. And D'Amico Ryans didn't treat this team like a winless squad either. He said their team is definitely not indicative of their record and said they weren't coming in with any predetermined notions. That's just coach talk. But the Chargers do have Herbert and Harbaugh, and nobody expected this team to be winless through eight games. Beating them by 22 on the road is the minimum. That doesn't mean that Houston is back. And if you want daily breakdowns on your Houston Texans just like this, make sure you hit that subscribe button so you can get daily updates here on Texans Digest. Because the bigger case for this team isn't just one win. It's what this team looked like through the first eight games of the season. Because just five weeks ago, this team was 0-4. After the 19-17 loss in Indianapolis, one analyst wrote that offensive coordinator Nick Hayley deserved to be on the hot seat. Since then, they've gone 3-1. And the numbers don't even look that bad to show that they should have been 0-4 to start with. The Texans have scored 17 more points than they've allowed this season. No other AFC team with a losing record is above zero. The Raiders are minus 30, and the Ravens are minus 47. Even Cleveland, who sits at 5-4 and holds the 8th spot, is at minus 35. That gap comes from how Houston has lost. Four out of five of their losses came down to one possession. Only Cincinnati really beat them. The strange part is where it happened. Three of those close losses came at home, and Houston is 0-4 there. While on the road, they're 3-1, and they scored 104 points in those three wins. In saying that, I'm saying that I'm going to take the 3-5 Houston Texans over the 5-4 Cleveland Browns. And we saw this happen a year ago to prove it. Last November, the Texans lost 18-15 to Denver and fell to 3-5. They won their next nine games, finished 12-5, and went into Pittsburgh in the wildcard round and won 30-6. Same coach, same quarterback, same record, at the same point last season. Nobody is promising another nine-game winning streak. But this team has done it before, they've made that climb before and they can do it again. This is where Houston stands after tonight. At 3-5, they're still 11th in the AFC. One and a half games behind New England for the seventh and final playoff spot. The spot isn't locked down either, because New England just lost 45-27 against Green Bay. Cleveland, Las Vegas, and Baltimore sit between them and that line. And two of those teams are still on the schedule. That means that the Texans can beat their way past them instead of waiting for help by another team. The nine opponents left have a combined record of 34 wins and 42 losses and a tie. Four of them have two wins or fewer. The Colts, Commanders, Eagles, and Titans. The tough ones are Pittsburgh and the 6-2 Jacksonville Jaguars, who the Texans actually already beat, plus a trip to Green Bay in January. The Ravens are another team on the way, and they come to Houston on November 29th without Lamar Jackson. Win four of the games that you should already win, win at least three out of five of the hard games, and you end with a 10-7 record and probably make the wildcard round. It starts next Sunday in Cleveland against a 5-4 team holding the eighth spot. Then four days later, the Colts come to Houston on Thursday night, with a chance to finally win a home game. Win both, and the Texans are 5-5, with a head-to-head tiebreaker over the Cleveland Browns. Losing Cleveland, and the Browns move to two and a half games ahead of you, with only eight games left to play. So my call, they're still in the hunt for the playoffs, but not because they blew out the Chargers. Because they're plus 17. C.J. Stroud with 16 touchdowns and two interceptions. Will Anderson Jr. leading the NFL in sacks. That's a playoff core. The doubt, however, is they just beat an 0-8 team, and the run game is clearly still not there. But we have to watch and see what happens next Sunday against Cleveland, and then the following Thursday against Indianapolis. Because if they sit at 5-5, that changes everything. So I want to know, do the Texans still have a chance at making the playoffs? Let me know what you think in the comments below.