2023-24 NFL Season Houston Texans Review

Tuesday kicked off our series of deep dives on NFL teams whose power rating increased the most throughout the 2023 NFL season. Today, we start diving in with the Houston Texans, who finished 10-7 and at the top of the AFC South with first year QB CJ Stroud leading the way for a resurgent Texans team. 

Interestingly, despite the Texans overachieving relative to preseason expectations, they were still right at break-even from a betting standpoint, going 10-9 ATS, but were a profitable 7-4 ATS as an underdog last season.

 

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Above, you’ll see the Texans’ TSI rating as it fluctuated throughout the season. You can see that they started with basically no expectations of success and it maybe took the TSI model several weeks to finally calibrate where to rate them, which ultimately landed on league average (0).

Texans Offense

Stroud led the 5 points per game improvement in Texans’ scoring from 2022 to 2023, in what was perhaps as good of a rookie QB year as any we’ve seen, which propelled the Houston offense to #14 in the TSI offensive ratings. The defense was also led by a star rookie in Alabama product Will Anderson, and that side of the ball saw a 3.5 points per game improvement from 2022 to 2023, which in part resulted in the Texans’ D having an above-league-average defensive rating at 22.5 – meaning, they’d be expected to allow ~23 points to the average NFL team. 

Some key stats that were indicative of Houston’s success in 2023: they were 15th in offensive EPA per play after being dead last in 2022, 13th in EPA per dropback (pass play), which was also dead last in the NFL in 2022, and 18th in dropback success rate, which again, was dead last in 2022.

Texans Defense

Defensively, they were 14th in EPA per play (up from 17th in 2022) and 9th in defensive success rate (up from 27th in 2022),  Their 2024 win total currently sits at 9.5, with the over juiced to -140. Seems like oddsmakers are expecting another quality season in H-Town, and I can’t say I blame them. 

I will put out an official win total projection once my preseason numbers are finalized, but for the time being I think I would hold off before laying -140 on the over, and I think Stroud is too good and both sides of the ball took such a step forward last year that I wouldn’t want to bet an under, either.

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