This year on This weekend in NFL stupid, we’re focusing on one extremely stupid winner with an honorable mention or two on a weekly basis. To close out Week 7 of the 2015 regular season, we look back on a season-dooming injury suffered by a Pro Bowl running back.
The winner: Houston Texans head coach Bill O’Brien
Logically, the more snaps a player participates in, the greater the chances he’ll get hurt. That’s why smart coaches rest star players in blowouts, especially if those star players are relatively old and coming off of other injuries.
And yet O’Brien ignored that logic Sunday against the Miami Dolphins, keeping 29-year-old star running back Arian Foster on the field for an entire second half in which the Texans trailed by as many as 41 points.
When Foster finally tore his Achilles, there were four minutes left and Houston still trailed by 24 points. It was no longer a realistically winnable game, and Foster shouldn’t have been close to the field at that point.
I realize O’Brien feared falling to 2-5, but that was almost inevitably going to happen as soon as it was 41-0 Miami. The odds of the potential reward associated with coming back from that deficit were far too low to rationalize the risk associated with leaving a fragile Pro Bowler in the lineup.
And now the Texans’ season is as good as over.
Runners-up: Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive coordinator Leslie Frazier and head coach Lovie Smith
Houston didn’t know how to handle a huge deficit, while Tampa Bay didn’t know how to deal with a huge lead against the Washington Redskins. Tampa led 24-0 late in the first half, but then the overly-conservative Bucs went into extreme prevent mode too early and too often, costing them a victory.
The laid-back D gave up back-to-back touchdowns in the third quarter and then played a wimpy zone on Washington’s game-winning two-minute drill to cap the fourth. To kick off Washington’s game-winning drive, Tampa Bay basically conceded seven consecutive underneath completions that any quarterback in football could have made. That set the ‘Skins up at the Tampa 24-yard line with 58 seconds to play, which is when they finally even considered taking a shot. That was successful and two plays later they were in the end zone with only two of Kirk Cousins’ nine final-drive completions picking up more than 10 yards.
Too easy.
