Texan’s Fans are Living in an Epilogue to Inception

I assume many of you like me are targeted by your friends and family as a source of Texans information and have had long discussions with close friends and family about how the Texans can seemingly make every wrong decision over the last couple years, and the number of incidents has been accelerated in the past few months. Promoting Jack Easterby to GM, firing Amy Palic, ignoring the advice of the committee he paid for to hire Nick Caserio, angering Deshaun Watson to the point where he has openly requested a trade off the team, not interviewing a top candidate for the vacant HC position, only interviewing the other top candidate once over zoom that your angered QB requested you hire, hiring a candidate that no other team interviewed, parting ways with beloved staff that were with the team before Bill O’Brien, parting ways with the President of Texans who helped turned the youngest franchise in the NFL into one of the most valuable. It seems like an impossibly dumb series of actions that have no motivation behind them other than to destroy this franchise. With all of the uncertainty surrounding the Texans, but to me there is only one answer, Cal McNair has been incepted into destroying this team. I don’t know the reason but at this point in time it is the only logical answer.

Bear with me for a moment, if you have not seen or need a refresher on the movie Inception I will fill you in. But if you haven’t seen Inception at this point in time, pause reading this and go watch it…seriously… this will still be here in three hours. It is a really great movie.

The movie revolves around Cobb and his team who are “Extractors” who make a living stealing secrets from a person's subconscious through the use of experimental military technology. Cobb is contracted by Saito to do what seems to be an impossible task, rather than steal from a person he seems to implant an idea into a person’s subconscious, aka “Inception”. Saito is the billionaire head of a large company, and his main competitor is owned by Maurice Fischer, who is in poor health, and his son, Robert Fischer, stands to inherit his empire. Saito wants to contract Cobb to implant the idea that he wants to dissolve his father’s empire.

Cobb accepts the seemingly impossible contract assuring his partner that the task is possible and assembles his team. The team assembles a structure to attempt to implant the idea into him. Cobb and his team believe their best way of doing this is to press onto him that his father was disappointed in him and wished that Robert would be his own man. At the end of the movie, the inception appears to be successful, Robert seems convinced to follow through with this idea that he should tear down his father’s empire to build something himself.

At this point in time, Cal McNair, like Robert, seems hell bent on destroying everything his father has built just to make it his own. Cal too has been gifted a golden goose. Despite being the youngest franchise in the NFL, the Texans are top 10 in net worth. Jamey Rootes was pivotal in making this franchise as valuable as it is. It may seem like common sense, but things like the Texans tailgates do not exist for many other teams. I personally have attended games in Denver and Dallas, neither of which come close to what happens every home game on Kirby. It would be foolish to part ways with a man that has made you more rich than many of us could imagine.

The relationship between Rootes and the McNair family is well documented. Jamey even went so far as to consider Bob McNair a second father to him and considered Cal to be like his own brother. Jamey was fiercely loyal to the McNair family and sat on the panel to help choose the next General Manager of the Texans. The panel recommended Omar Khan for the job, he has been instrumental in retaining assets, acquiring free agents, keeping the salary cap in a good situation, all while maintaining a competitive roster. Cal chose to ignore the advice of not just his panel but the advice of one of the people that his father entrusted with making this franchise successful. Is it possible that Cal could be jealous of a man that was more successful than him?

As we all know Cal McNair has chosen Nick Caserio to be the General Manager of the organization. Nick is very well qualified for the position except for one glaring issue, his relationship with Jack Easterby. Easterby, despite having almost no qualifications, is the VP of Football operations. There have been two excellent articles by sports illustrated summing up the terrible atmosphere and even worse decisions that have let the Texans down a path of self destruction only possibly compared to the Jed York mishandling of John Harbaugh’s tenure. Neither Cal McNair or Nick Caserio can even tell you what value he offers this team. With intense media and fan scrutiny, Jack Easterby's termination should be the easiest decision that an NFL owner has ever had to make.

Many have attributed all of these poor decisions to Jack Easterby, and rightfully so, but his continued employment with the franchise is still impossible to fathom. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous character Sherlock Holmes said, “When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” What remains is the fact that Cal, despite being gifted a franchise that would earn a ludicrous amount of money and a reasonable amount of success considering Watson's level of talent if only he made even the most modest of good decisions has done the opposite. These actions, even considering Easterby's involvement are impossibly dumb. What remains is that Cal McNair has a deeply rooted idea that has led him to continually making the worst possible decisions for his franchise simply to make it his own.

It is almost like this idea must have come from someone else.