With a 20-16 win over the Los Angeles Chargers on Saturday night, the Houston Texans punched their ticket to the postseason for the third consecutive season, marking the first time in franchise history that they’ve made the Playoffs three straight years.

The victory — Houston’s eighth in a row after a disappointing 3-5 start to the season — was typical Texans football, combining swarming defense and with just enough offense to defeat another one of the hottest teams in the league. But surprisingly, after the win, Pro Bowl linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair made a comparison that is typically reserved for the darkest moments of a season, when the walls have caved in and players or coaches begin to lash out in frustration through the media.

Al-Shaair compared the Texans to a high school football team.

“When you get to this level of football, you’ve been through college, you’ve been through high school. … When you get to the pros, you can become kind of worn-out emotionally from the business side of things,” Al-Shaair said after the game, according to Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic. “The best way I can describe it is like when you were playing high school football with your guys. That’s the best way I can describe how it feels out there. Every day, whether it’s at practice or the meetings, it just feels fun.”

This admission, as unorthodox as it may seem, should be a warning to the rest of the NFL. Now that the Texans have officially clinched a Playoff berth, we can officially say that this may be the most dangerous team in the NFL, because if a team with this much talent is playing free, loose and unencumbered by the pressure or restrictions of professional football, the rest of the league better look out during the month of January.

And for the record, that’s exactly what was on display during Saturday’s win in Los Angeles.

Two big scoring plays early in the 1st quarter — a 75-yard touchdown pass to Jayden Higgins and a 43-yard touchdown pass to Jaylin Noel — put the Texans up 14-0 in the blink of a eye, and it proved to be enough output for the Texans to sustain their lead even as the offense began to stall and turn the ball over.

From this point on, the Texans D did the rest of the heavy lifting, forcing a red zone turnover late in the 2nd quarter and putting constant pressure on Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert throughout the entire game, sacking the Pro Bowl quarterback five times and pressuring him on seemingly every dropback.

But the play-by-play of the game doesn’t tell the story of this Texans squad nearly as well as the quotes from the individuals involved do. Because frankly, even though this win clinched Houston’s Playoff berth, it’s been a gradual climb from the midway point of the season that has put the Texans in this position.

“Off the field, it’s not a particular moment that the guys showed me that, ‘Oh, this was our turning point.’ It’s just– when you see the way our guys show up to work with joy every single day– everybody enjoys working together,” Ryans said after the win. “Everybody enjoys the process of working, whether it’s meetings, practice— when guys show up that way: with joy, smiles on their faces, excited to work, like, you can accomplish anything, and that’s what I see from our guys, and that’s why we’re here now.”

One player who embodied this on Saturday for the Texans was cornerback Kamari Lassiter, who exited the game briefly with a lower leg injury, but lobbied to return not only because he wanted to be on the field for a potential clinching scenario, but also because that’s exactly what you do when you have that high school football mindset that Azeez Al-Shaair spoke of.

“A lot of guys were dealing with pain, injuries, guys went down on the field. I go talk to Kamari Lassiter, he’s coming up to me [saying] ‘Coach, there’s no way I’m coming out of this game,'” DeMeco Ryans said. “That’s the mindset of all of our guys. It’s all on the line.”