The Texans might’ve found their gateway to Josh McCown

TLDR; Texans may not fire Lovie but fire Pep. McCown is an interesting candidate for the OC position if that's the case because not only does he have the necessary knowledge but he's also got a relationship with the Texans already while other young OC prospects may not want to work under Lovie. This is just a possibility, not what I'm saying will happen or want to happen.

Let me be clear, this is not what I'm advocating for. I like McCown but I don't particularly like taking more risk at this point in the rebuild.

However, with reports about the infatuation in the last hiring cycle and McNair having to be the one who said no, it's possible that McCown is still on Caserio's list… but maybe not as HC.

The case for Lovie Smith:

I think it's very possible that we keep Lovie Smith around as head coach. Yes we've won less games but many of these games were winnable if the offense would be at least halfway decent. Lovie doesn't have the personnel to fully run his scheme and Caserio knows that better than any of us. However, he's coached up the secondary to an adequate degree and all the young defensive players are trending in the right direction. Lovie has also gotten enough fight out of the team to occasionally punch above their weight. But really what might save Lovie is that the Texans wouldn't want to fire 2 coaches in back to back years as one and dones- especially not black coaches. Also McNair apparently really liked Lovie and wanted to keep him so I'm not sure if that's changed yet.

The Case to Fire Pep:

You could argue that Pep also lacks weapons but the problem is 2-fold- the first being that he hasn't been able to adjust nor adapt to anything. For example, the OL is bad but the problem gets compounded because defenses just send blitzes down the middle with no worry of Pep attacking spaces where the blitzes come from. Now defenses are teeing off on 3rd downs, obvious passing situations and any formation that isn't an obvious run formation, which Pep also has a habit of showing. He also hasn't schemed to Mills' abilities to process, instead constantly spamming quick passing games concepts that take away cerebral abilities from the QB. This has been put on tape over and over again making the offense fairly predictable and 1 dimensional. He also failed to get Collins more touches early on when it was clear that he was better than Cooks this season. He's hurt the development of a lot of players with his lack of ability to adjust and even DP is carrying his run game. The second is that he hasn't shown much to justify wanting to keep him. His best trait is that he can in fact game plan but after the first half of falls apart. If he just ran a normal passing scheme I think there would be a legitimate argument to keeping him but his passing game is worse than TK's and it goes beyond the roster, it's about how he's scheming and his inability to address weakness whatsoever. There's been very few bootlegs and rollouts, no attacking blitzes other than with screens and most of his play calls center around run, screen, slant, out and comeback. He's even now using Driskell to make up for his play calling inadequacies. It's hard to trust Pep with a new QB and new weapons.

This is where Josh McCown could make his entrance. Not many young guys will be willing to come work under Lovie who has insisted on how he wants the offense to be ran and could potentially be fired next year if things don't work out. Not exactly the most promising job prospect when there will be more attractive offers around the league, speaking from the OC perspective. McCown by the way, is certainly qualified. Not only has he seen just about every offense but he's done a bit of play calling, coached up other players, sat in game plan meetings and more for years. He's got the knowledge that any offensive assistant would have and more because he's also played the game. He wouldn't need the HC intangibles even though some suggest he does have them, just the knowledge he already has. Not only does he have the knowledge but right now, he's breaking down various offenses, understanding them and potentially stealing the best concepts from around the league. Unlike Pep, he also understands what he calls "connected play calling". That's building drives with plays that look similar to keep the defenses off balance, which Pep has not done. McCown is an interesting prospect for OC and the Texans already have that infatuation. We'll see but I think this is a possibility to look out for.