With a first place finish comes a first place schedule, and the Houston Texans will have to pay that price in 2019.
In Yahoo! Sports’ fantasy football preview, they predict the AFC South champions from a year ago will have a hard time reaching nine wins due to the stiff competition on the schedule.
Houston’s 2019 slate includes brutal road battles with New Orleans, Los Angeles (Chargers), Kansas City and Baltimore and a home date against the defending champion Patriots, a team the Texans have defeated just once in their 17-year existence. The Texans deserved a whole lot better than this shark-infested hell schedule, but sometimes you draw the short straw. Given the murderer’s row that awaits them in 2019, I think nine wins might be a tough ask for Houston.
It isn’t so much that the “first place schedule” is to blame for the Texans’ tough opponents as it is the scheduling formula. Each season teams play two “same place finishers,” teams that finished in the same spot in their respective divisions from a year ago. In Houston’s case, that meant drawing the New England Patriots from the AFC East and the Baltimore Ravens from the AFC North.
Long ago, talking way back to the 2002 realignment and the formation of the Texans, it was decided Houston would play the NFC South and the AFC West in 2019. That is the genius of the scheduling formula that arose from the ’02 realignment. Who knew it meant the New Orleans Saints, Los Angeles Chargers, Kansas City Chiefs, Carolina Panthers, and Atlanta Falcons would be such formidable opponents?
As the offseason wraps up, every team appears stronger than they actually are on paper. The attrition of training camp and preseason ultimately reveals the depth and talent of all 32 teams, and some squads aren’t as daunting as they appeared in July. That could be the case for some of the Texans’ opponents. What Houston has to do is make sure they are as good on the gridiron as they are on paper.
