At the start of the offseason every year, or just when he needs to use it, there’s a picture that Texans defensive coordinator Matt Burke will flash up on the screen as a reminder to his players. And he goes way back into his coaching history to find it, all the way back to his first NFL job, and the five years he spent as a lower-level assistant for Jeff Fisher in Tennessee.
“I’ve told people this before, the standard in my career is always Kyle Vanden Bosch, the way he trained and played and practiced,” Burke said Friday morning. “I always put his picture up when I talk about effort. And I’m like, Until someone does it better, this guy is going to be my flag bearer.”
That’s been the case, as Burke’s NFL trail has taken him from Nashville to Detroit to Cincinnati to Miami to Philadelphia, New York and Arizona. And, finally, someone may be ready to take the torch from Vanden Bosch, 13 years after the former All-Pro retired.
Will Anderson has been that tough, that hard-working and that plain old relentless. And as the pro football world saw Thursday night, the rest of the Texans defense that Burke and head coach DeMeco Ryans have built over the last three years has fully followed suit.
In fact, what you saw in Houston’s historic bludgeoning of reigning MVP Josh Allen, and the mighty Buffalo Bills on Thursday night was simply a window into what Burke’s unit has become over the course of the 2025 season. The Texans finished the evening with eight sacks and three takeaways, the first such performance by any NFL defense since Houston did that almost a year ago. Their opponent passer rating (72.2) for the season is the NFL’s lowest in four years. They’re leading the NFL in total defense and scoring defense.
And while the Eagles, Broncos and Browns might try to make an argument for whose defense is the best of the bunch this year, the statistics show the Texans to be more complete than anyone. Burke’s crew is second in the league in takeaways (19), third in sacks (34.0), third in pass defense (172.1) and fourth in run defense (92.2).
This, of course, is about talent, first and foremost. You don’t get into that rarefied statistical air without elite players, and Anderson and Derek Stingley Jr. are right there with the very best at their positions. Their respective bookends, Danielle Hunter and Kamari Lassiter, aren’t far behind them. What’s more, around those four, there are waves of depth, blending young homegrown talent with smart veteran imports.
But what was on your TV on Thursday was more than just ability.
It was the standard Burke referenced being upheld on a down-to-down basis, and brought into full color for the rest of us with an unmistakable play-style.
The Texans defense ranked 14th in Ryans’s first year and sixth in his second year, leaving a talented young core looking for what was next over the summer. Being the NFL’s best was in sight. How they’d get there was the question.
The answer was simply getting everyone on the same page.
“I remember in training camp, just having a conversation, like, Hey, you guys say you want to be the best defense in the league—well, this is what that looks like,” Burke said. “Since then, the buy-in of what our standard is, what we have to play to and how they have to prepare to do that, I mean, it just pervades the whole unit. We have leaders at every level of the defense, and guys that you can point to and, Hey, that’s the way to do it, at every spot.
“So, as you’re integrating younger guys and new guys coming in, it’s very easy to say, Do it like Will, do it like [linebacker] Azeez [Al-Shaair], do it like Sting, like Kamari.”
In three specific spots against Buffalo on Thursday, it very vividly showed up.
Three Plays Where the Texans Defense Shined Against the Bills
• The first one set the tone early in the third quarter, on a third-and-6 from the Bills’ 43-yard line. At the snap, Anderson blew right past Bills right tackle Spencer Brown (who was a Texans piñata all night), and grabbed Allen with two outstretched arms, only for Allen to fight through and scramble toward the boundary to the offense’s left. Anderson fell to the turf on the right hash, gathered himself, chased Allen to the sideline, then reversed course when Allen turned back right, ran him down and buried him for an 18-yard sack.
Will Anderson Jr. was relentless on this sack 😤
— NFL (@NFL) November 21, 2025
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“So everyone’s clear—he practices that way too,” said Burke. “I’ve been around very few people that play and prepare and practice and approach the game the way Will does. And that’s every second of every day he does that. So that makes it very easy to use him as [the example]. Hey, Will’s going to do this and pop off of the ground and run. And if you watch that play, Mario Edwards is chasing to cut it off and he spins back the other way and the whole D line’s going. That whole group takes on that persona, that personality, man.”
• The second came on another third-and-6, this one from the Bills’ 14 on Buffalo’s next possession with Houston still clinging to a 20–16 lead. At the snap, Al-Shaair was mugging up on the line between the left guard and tackle, and fellow linebacker Henry To’oTo’o was stacked behind the line. Allen sent James Cook in motion out of the backfield, then brought him back in to try and get a coverage indicator. The two linebackers didn’t move.
Then, at the snap, Al-Shaair and To’oTo’o both dropped into coverage, but by then Allen had adjusted the protection to account for Al-Shaair blitzing to his left. In doing so, and because the linebackers sold it, a one-on-one was created to his right—Brown on Hunter, the defensive tackles running a game inside to create traffic. Hunter won, and got credit for a sack, but the detail everyone played with created it.
“Sometimes when we pop out too early [from disguise], they can slide their front, slide their line in certain ways and change up protections,” Burke said. “But we had a couple of shots where we were able to hold our looks and not give it away—and then that freed up our line to get loose on some one-on-one blocks.”
• The third wasn’t a play, it was a sequence. And it wasn’t schematic, it was cultural.
The defense’s first big breakdown came at the start of the game, on Cook’s 45-yard touchdown run, which wound up being Buffalo’s only offensive touchdown of the night. The second was on fourth-and-27 with 51 seconds left, when the Bills perfectly executed a hook-and-ladder—with Allen throwing it to Joshua Palmer, Palmer pitching to Khalil Shakir, and Shakir busting up the sideline for a 44-yard gain, giving the Bills life.
Burke saw the fatigue on his guys’ faces, and flat out asked Al-Shaair, “Do you need a timeout here?” In an honest moment, the linebacker answered that the defense did. Ryans called one, and they retreated to the sideline.
“I just remember when the guys were coming over, just catching their breath, there was no one blinking or anything,” Burke said. “I was, like, ‘All right.’ We always try to preach, man, you can’t play the game you want to play, you got to play the situation that happens. So, whatever just happened, that could have been a first-down play that broke out on us, O.K., this is the situation, where we’re on the 30-yard line or wherever we were, there’s 40 seconds left, we’re playing this situation right now. Let’s reset.
“Fourth-and-27, we expect to end the game there. But the guys just set their jaw and it’s like, Let’s go back to it here.”
Four plays (and four yards) later, the defense slammed the door shut on Allen and the vaunted Bills, with second safety Calen Bullock registering his second pick of the night to clinch it.
On Friday morning, Ryans, Burke and the rest of Houston’s staff were already looking back at what could be fixed from Cook’s run, the hook-and-ladder and whatever else went wrong Thursday night. Nitpicking after a win is normal for coaches. What might be a little different here, as Burke sees it, is how eager the players are to jump in with the coaches to make changes.
To the Texans, that’s how they’ll go from really, really good to truly great as a group.
“The guys are receptive—we win a game and, even when we’re playing decent, it’s like, Hey, take these six plays, man, we’ve got to be better at this, that’s not our standard,” Burke said. “Because of their focus on what they want to be and what their standard is and how they want to be remembered, how they want to play, all that stuff, you can coach those guys hard. We coach them hard. DeMeco’s very demanding.
“We can have a great game and hold a team to 10 points, or we have a shutout early in the year, and it's like, Hey, that’s not good enough. Like, man, we gave this up, we shouldn’t have done this here, this could have cost us more. And they don’t bristle back at it because they want to be great.”
Burke then joked, “It’s not rolling your eyes at it—Hey, man, we just had a great game last night, and Albert Breer’s writing articles about us.”
Of course, this particular article will point out just what the Texans are doing on defense, and a few things Burke wouldn’t. For one, that unit is supporting an offense that’s got a first-year coordinator, rookies at key spots and has had a rash of big injuries, not the least of which is the concussion that sidelined quarterback C.J. Stroud for the past three games. As that OC (Nick Caley), those rookies (Jayden Higgins, Aireontae Ersery, Woody Marks) settle in and the QB returns, Houston’s ceiling is high.
But for Burke to acknowledge that the defense has grown in getting the offense through some patches would be to bypass the bigger factor—that’s not how, or why, the defense is playing the way it is.
It’s happening because that’s where the level of expectation has been set. And it’s been set not by coaches, but by players, and especially Anderson, which is what’s made all this go.
So much so that Burke isn’t afraid to look in the future, and see something else.
“Don’t tell Kyle this,” he joked, “but Will’s picture is going to be up there someday, if I'm fortunate enough to keep coaching long enough.”
And by the looks of Thursday, Anderson’s planning to bring a bunch of other guys with him.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as How Will Anderson Jr. Is Taking the Texans’ Player-Driven Defense to Another Level.
