“It’s just a lot of different things and different people that make certain mistakes. It’s all about making progress on things you can control, and when we get out of our own way, we can focus on beating the opponent opposed to beating ourselves.”
Losing to Tennessee put the Texans in a must-win predicament. Defeating the Jaguars would give them an 8-4 record going into the bye week. When they come out of their weekend off, it’s like they’ll be stepping into a hurricane. They play the Dolphins at home, the Chiefs on the road and the Ravens at home on Christmas Day.
Ryans knows what he wants from his team in all three phases, each that contributed to the loss to the Titans.
“Too many times in games that haven’t gone our way, it’s been solely because of us and things we can control,” Ryans said.
The Texans have suffered offensive problems during their recent struggles, especially their inability to score touchdowns in the second half. They are 16th in yards (336 per game), including 20th in rushing (114.6) and 15th in passing (221.4).
The offense has one second-half touchdown in the last six games, one fewer than the defense. Stroud has been pressured a league-high 191 times. The Titans recorded seven unblocked pressures on him. He’s been sacked 39 times, one more than his rookie season. He has four consecutive games with a sub-80 rating. His season rating is 87.3.
The Texans should be able to move the ball and score points against the Jaguars, who are 32nd in defense (413.7), 26th against the run (135.5) and 32nd against the pass (278.3). They’re allowing 28.7 points a game.
When offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik had his weekly interview session with the media this week, the primary topics were the lack of success scoring second-half touchdowns, getting the running game back on track, the interior offensive line and Stroud.
Specifically on the Tennessee game, he said, “We’ve tried all kinds of different things (and) we’ll continue trying a lot of different approaches in a lot of different areas until something fits.
“In the second half, we had an immense amount of penalties. We were bad on third down, and we couldn’t run the ball. Every second half hasn’t been bad (but) the ones that have been bad, we’ve played bad football.”