Houston Texans take unique ‘win now’ approach for 2024 | NFL News, Rankings and Stats

• Houston trades reveal intriguing strategy: Wide receiver Stefon Diggs is a one-year rental and Joe Mixon is a running back with plenty of mileage, but they both immediately improve the Texans’ offense.

• Comparing the Texans to the Lions: Detroit wants to make sure its Super Bowl window stays open as long as possible, while Houston seems to be trying to throw as much out the window the second it opens.

• Check out PFF’s Fantasy Football Mock Draft simulator: Enter your league settings and plan your draft strategy to perfection.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

THE Houston Texans were the surprise of last season, but now they’re behaving like contenders looking for a chance to win a championship before pieces start falling off the bandwagon.

Quarterback then rookie CJ Stroud helped catalyze the transformation, and Houston has already had to deal with an inevitable byproduct of success: other teams coming for pieces of the winning formula. After just one season running the offense, the team had to give offensive coordinator and former PFF senior analyst Bobby Slowik a raise to keep him in town and convince him to wait another year for a head coaching opportunity.

We may view the Texans as a team whose window for success has only just opened, but they seem keenly aware that this is the last season before critical individuals are picked off by other franchises looking to launch their own transformations.

That might explain the approach the team is taking this offseason, which seems much more like that of a perennial contender looking to get over the hump than a team just arriving at the big leagues.

No move embodies a “win now” mentality better than trading for Steve Diggs. Receiver was far from a position of need for the Texans, and while the trade to acquire him was extremely reasonable from the team’s perspective, Diggs has already worked his way out of his two previous teams. Introducing this kind of potential headache on purpose was always likely to be a short-term decision.

This became inevitable after the team effectively erased the remaining years of his contract, with the revised deal keeping him in Houston only through 2024 for $22.5 million.

NFL teams generally hate trading one-year rentals, but the Texans appear to have deliberately orchestrated one.

Edge defender signing Danielle Hunter in free agency is another move that speaks to a much more aggressive mentality than emerging teams typically possess.

Hunter is a great player, but the team had an opportunity to re-sign Jonathan Greenard and instead chose to get older and more expensive (and better, in their defense), at that position.

This is an unusual direction for a team to take. Hunter recorded 80 quarterback pressures last season compared to Greenard’s 53, but they were much closer in pressure rate (13.4% to 12.8%). Hunter receives nearly $5 million more per year than Greenard and is nearing age 30, while Greenard turns 27 this summer.

The next move that screams shortsightedness was trading for a running back Joe Mixon.

HoustonLast season’s running game wasn’t great. The team ranked 25th in the league in average yards before contact and 22nd overall in rushing yards on offense. Twenty-seven teams have won more rushing first downs than the Texans.

We know that Slowik wanted a better running game than the first year, and athe acquisition of Mixon cost almost nothing in commercial terms. Houston gave up a seventh-round pick (which ultimately became a safety pick) Daijahn Anthony Since Ole Mademoiselle), effectively to avoid the free agent queue for a player the Bengals were otherwise going to release.

His contract was reworked with a three-year extension worth $27 million, but Mixon will turn 28 before this season starts and is coming off heavy workloads over the past three years. Houston could have targeted a running back in the draft to take those snaps, but they didn’t select one until the sixth round (Jawhar Jordan, Louisville). Mixon has a lot of mileage on his clock and most running backs do their best early in their career. But again, the Texans saw value in the immediate boost he should give to an offense that is already in a good place.

The bottom line here is that this is an unusual attitude and strategy. I’m not even saying it’s a bad approach, but it stands in stark contrast to a team like Detroit Lionswho came within a few games of a Super Bowl but were determined in their approach to building long-term success without putting too many eggs in one basket.

The Lions want to make sure their Super Bowl window stays open as long as possible, while the Texans seem to be trying to throw as much out the window the second it opens.

Whether this approach is justified will become apparent over the next couple of seasons, but the fact that two burgeoning franchises can have such divergent plans of attack for a similar problem is what makes this league so fascinating.