The Houston Texans were the first team to fire their coach on Oct. 5, and it has given them a head start in identifying potential candidates to succeed Bill O’Brien on the sidelines.
One of those candidates may already be in the building.
According to Ian Rapoport of the NFL Network, the Texans are evaluating interim coach Romeo Crennel for the job, which would make him the fourth full-time coach in franchise history.
While they are still more than a month away from conducting the search to fill their head-coach opening, sources say that one strong possibility is to turn to Romeo Crennel as their full-time coach. It’s currently being debated inside the organization.
Crennel — now the interim coach — is a well-respected, affable, long-time defensive coordinator who has been a head coach in the past. For the Texans, he could serve as a stop-gap coach, allowing the team to get to 2021 with some stability and pushing their true coaching search to the following offseason when COVID-19 restrictions would allow for a traditional in-person search.
No one knows what the country will be like in January, but flying around the country and interviewing several candidates may be challenging, even on private planes. It’s possible that coaching candidates will be interviewed on Zoom. That means a team could invest $30 million or $40 million in a head coach they’ve never met.
One concern in hiring Crennel as the full-time coach is it went horribly for the Kansas City Chiefs in 2012. After going 2-1 with the Chiefs at the end of 2011, including handing the 15-1 Green Bay Packers their only loss of the season, Kansas City gave Crennel the full-time job. He followed it up with a 2-14 record, although he had Matt Cassel and Brady Quinn as his starting quarterbacks, not Deshaun Watson.
What Crennel has infused into the team is a sense of fun, but that may not be enough in 2021.
