Texans Coach Bill O'Brien Got Pantsed by the Pats on National Television

If you happened to watch last night's football "contest" between the Patriots and Texans, you know that by the third quarter it became a festival of pillow fluffing for New England. A 10-0 lead continued to climb on the heels of a kickoff fumble, and at that point it was all over but the plaudits for Patriots head coach Bill Belichick.

Left unsaid in all that was the fact that Belichick didn't actually have to do much to win this game. Oh, sure, he tactically targeted some key weaknesses for the Texans that hadn't been exposed by the Bears and Chiefs. But Texans head coach Bill O'Brien, puzzlingly, never even bothered to change gears in his game plan. This wasn't a situation where one coach was playing checkers and the other was playing chess, because that would imply that O'Brien was actually making moves. It was Belichick playing chess and O'Brien watching TV and half-heartedly continuing his failed plan after it was exposed in his first three moves.

Belichick set the Pats to base out of Cover-2. So, there were two deep safeties on the field at all times, limiting the kinds of throws that Brock Osweiler had been completing against the Chiefs last week. Belichick was not willing to let DeAndre Hopkins or Will Fuller play the contested catch game against his cornerbacks, because he knew that was dangerous.

O'Brien's countered by going to the running game. But the Texans offensive line is down two would-be starters in tackle Duane Brown and center Nick Martin, and the Patriots defensive line was stacked with mismatches in their favor. Though running back Lamar Miller had a few good runs here or there, the Texans weren't able to sustain any drives with him. And, down 10-0, O'Brien's response to this was…well, there wasn't one. He just kept doing the same thing over and over again. Eventually the score got bad enough that Osweiler had to throw dumpoff passes to Ryan Griffin, but that's about all the Texans had in the bag.

There are plenty of reasons to praise Belichick's work here. His offensive game plan had the Pats targeting the weakest tacklers in Houston's secondary and daring them to play physical, often with hilarious results. Misdirection plays helped rookie quarterback Jacoby Brissett play a passable game. And, as always, special teams were a big factor for Belichick's domination.

But this wasn't a complicated beatdown. There was no back-and-forth. This was just one coach outclassing another. Houston's game plan never gave them a chance to play from behind. All O'Brien did last night was march the Texans out to get Crying Jordan'd into smithereens.