Bear and Bull Cases for the rest of the season.

I'm curious what everyone's Bear case and Bull case for the rest of the season is. I'd like to make it a discussion – feel free to agree, disagree, expand, or refute my thoughts.

Let's start with the bad –

The team is 2-4, they've lost to every "good" team they've played, you could make the argument that the Jags are mid, but I still think they're decent this year. The only 2 wins have come against the Titans and the Ravens. The Titans are clearly deep in the middle of a rebuild, and the Ravens have the worst defense they've ever had. After the back to back wins and a week 6 bye, there was an opportunity to get back to .500 and beat a good Seattle team to put the season back on track for making a run at the playoffs. It looked like the offense was finally finding a rhythm (outscoring opponents 70-10 through 2 games is impressive regardless of how "bad" those teams are, they're still professional football teams, and winning NFL games is still hard, more on that in the Bull case). Clearly the bye week seemed to possibly hurt more than it helped (something something momentum).

The reality is that the OLine is just still bad. They had seemed to be improving, but last week looked like a huge step back. CJ lost the snappy release that he seemed to have in the last 5 quarters before the bye. His vision went back to what we saw in weeks 1-3, and he looked shaky and uncertain in the pocket again.

The reality is – the schedule doesn't really get significantly easier either. The 49ers are 5-2 despite being physically broken, and they're an extremely well-coached team. The Broncos are solid, also at 5-2, the Jags did lay a bit of an egg against the Rams, but they've still been much improved this year. Then it's the Titans again, which could realistically be our next chance to go into a game favored.

Continuing on the current trajectory, I see this team potentially finishing 5-12 or 6-11 as a very realistic floor. This is accounting for wins against the Titans, Raiders, and Cardinals, and probably 1 other stray win throughout the remaining schedule. Even in the bear case, I find it hard to believe that this defense won't manage to win some games.

Bottom line – the offense needs to improve to average at the bare minimum to avoid the "bear" scenario. Yes, the only teams we lost to are good teams, but to be a good team you have to *beat* good teams too.

Now for the "Bull Case" –

Sports are about momentum. The Texans felt like they were finally capturing some momentum before the bye. I know conventional wisdom would lead you to believe that a week off would be good for the team to rest and recover after a good win. I would argue that it would've been better for the team to go into a bye 1 or 2 weeks later after they had really actually established offensive rhythm. Let's not forget that the offense only looked fully put together for a single full game (the Titans game looked *bad* until the 4th quarter). Obviously, teams and coaches can't control when they get their bye, and historically, teams with early byes usually perform well, because it gives them an opportunity to turn around if they have a bad start. In this case, I would argue that our bye actually came at the worst possible time, as it seemed to happen right as the team was starting to turn things around, and actually interrupted the momentum. Think about how sometimes *cough cough 2021 Titans cough cough* the #1 seed loses in the divisional round because they had a week off before the playoffs.

If we go with the above theory, its possible that the team could start to rebuild that momentum again and hopefully start to perform better.

Let's look at the losses by numbers – Rams, Bucs, Jags, Seahawks

Cumulative record of opponents: 19 – 9,

Outscored 78-65.

Average point diff 5.25 pts.

As a mirror to the point above – yes, we've only lost to good opponents, but also, you gotta beat good opponents to be good. However, to expand upon that, you also have to take into account how close some of these games were. Our defense is playing out of its mind and keeping us in some really really close games. With all the miscues on offense, it really felt like we had *no business* being within a score of Seattle last week, but we managed to hang around and almost sneak a win. Our defense can keep us in games, if our offense can manage to improve just enough to get us over the hump, some of these games that are coming down to the wire are bound to bounce our way in the end. Weeks 1-3 were all lost on 1 single play not quite going our way. Dare's fumble and Nico's fumble as we were getting into scoring position to take a late lead, and the big scramble given up to Baker to set the Bucs up for a last second win. We even had shots at the end of the Seattle game that were blown due to poor offensive play calling.

Bottom line – If Houston can begin improving and start looking like an average offense by the end of the 49ers game this weekend, there's a legitimate chance that the momentum could start building and save the season. Best case scenario sees the offense bump up just enough to pull a 2018 Texans and go 9-2 to finish the season. I think that's likely the most hopeful scenario though, and much more likely even if things start to come together we're looking at 8-3 or 7-4 and either just barely making or missing the playoffs.

The neutral take –

So, realistically, I think that the season will fall somewhere between the full-on bear case and the full-on bull case. I think the team is now operating on a razor-thin wire, and I just don't think the offense is going to improve enough to avoid dropping more than 3 games for the rest of the season. I'm expecting to see the team get somewhere between 4 and 7 more wins this season as the most likely outcome. I am expecting to see *some* improvement, but I think the environment this season really makes clawing back hard, with the way that the Colts (and kinda the Jags and other WC contenders) are playing, it would take a colossal collapse (which, I'm still kinda half expecting), for an opening to appear that the Texans can take advantage of.

Then again, who the f**k knows? The Texans could also legitimately just go 0-11 or 11-0 for the rest of the season, this year is weird as f**k.