Brady, Patriots pound Texans, move on to AFC title game
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – Earlier this week, Tom Brady was told that the national pregame perception of his team’s contest against the Houston Texans was that it would be a blowout. Advantage, Brady and the Patriots.
Not so, said Brady.
“I view it as the biggest game that we've played all season against the best defense that we've played all season. I don't see any letdown from us,” he said. “That's ridiculous to think that.”
Well, really, what else could he say? To state what just about everyone else was thinking would have been to play the part of the ungracious host to the guests who would soon be arriving.
In the end, though, the scoreboard read exactly what most thought it would as New England beat Houston, 34-16, in their AFC divisional game.
But it wasn’t until the fourth quarter – thanks to a Patriots interception of quarterback Brock Osweiler and touchdown two plays later – that New England got some breathing room.
The Texans, though, seemed determined to give the Patriots breathing room throughout the game. In the first quarter, after a 14-play, 62-yard drive that took 8:12 off the clock resulted in just a Nick Novak field goal, cutting Houston’s deficit to 7-3, Patriots running back Deon Lewis – who left his mark all over this game -- ran the ensuing kickoff back for a 98-yard touchdown. Talk about a momentum killer.
“I think our guys battled hard. Give the Patriots credit,” said Houston head coach Bill O’Brien. “They are a great team and you know, when you turn it over, you give up a kickoff return, you turn it over, you’re not going to beat the Patriots. You know, we talked about that all week. Give our guys credit – they fought. They fought hard and just didn’t do enough.”
“I feel like we battled as a team,” Osweiler said. “Every guy who was on that field was giving it everything that they had. They were fighting, but at the end of the day we didn’t capitalize on opportunities and when you don’t do that, you’re not going to beat a good football team like the New England Patriots.”
It was not exactly a shocker for the Texans to suffer the fate they did. In eight previous meetings, Houston was 1-7 against the Patriots, 0-4 at New England. They were winless in their previous four meetings, falling by a combined 130-51, since 2012.
Houston lost the previous two meetings – Week 14 in 2015, Week 3 this season – by a combined 54-6, with Bill Belichick protégé O’Brien as head coach.
In their most recent meeting – a 27-0 shellacking -- Brady was still serving the third game of his four-game suspension and the Patriots were led by quarterback Jacoby Brissette, New England’s third-round pick this season who was making his first career start.
While the Texans kept Saturday night’s game closer than in the previous meetings, the effort wasn’t good enough. The offense had trouble mounting any kind of consistency. Osweiler had just one touchdown with three interceptions. The red zone efficiency – or lack thereof – was just 33 percent, 1 for 3.
“I think we did good,” said defensive end Jadeveon Clowney, of competing against Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. “[We] hit him when we wanted to. We were getting to him. We were messing him up, disguising, moving around. I don’t think – what was he, like 3-for-soemthing on third down? Yeah, when you’re playing that good, you expect to win games. [We] just didn’t get the outcome that we wanted.”
The Texans dominated overall time of possession, 32:30-27:30. In the first half they controlled the ball for 12:06 in the first quarter, 18:40 overall. But they had difficulty converting that into points. Kicker Nick Novak accounted for 10 of Houston’s 16 points.
“You just can’t play bad football at critical moments,” said nose tackle Vince Wilfork, who began his career in 2004 with New England before joining the Texans in 2015. “We fought but the Patriots did what they had to do to win the game tonight. I think we controlled the game for the most part, mostly the whole game until towards the end when it kind of got out of hand.”
