NFL Week 3 Preview: Houston Texans at New Orleans Saints

Houston is flying high, but the Texans will face a big test as road underdogs at New Orleans. Frank Doyle takes a look.

We’ve all been waiting for Houston to deliver. The team always manages to be less than the sum of its parts, but they’ve been building carefully, patiently for years. Now, with Indy failing to pieces, Tennessee rebuilding and the Jags being very much the Jags, has the Texans time come at last?

Houston is a -625 NFL betting favorite for the AFC South this year, a long way ahead of Tennessee at +600. The Texans are 2-0 straight up, 2-0-0 against the spread for the season so far, having massacred Indianapolis in Week 1 and cruised past Miami without ever really having to hit the gas.

But the Texans will need all the gas they can muster at the Superdome this weekend when they face a New Orleans team (1-1, 1-1-0 ATS) that bounced back from a bad beat at Green Bay to hammer the daylights out of the Bears in a statement win. The statement being, you count out the Saints at your peril.

So can Houston step up to the Saints’ level, or will we be saying same old Houston on Sunday night? Houston is a +4 road underdog on Sunday, in a game that has a over/under total set at 53.5, the second-highest on the board after New England at Buffalo’s 54.

The over/under is interesting because Houston currently has the best total defense in the National Football League, giving up 271 yards per game. It’s not at all common for the team with the best defense in the League to play games with totals over fifty – less than forty is pretty much the norm for the great defensive teams like the Steelers or the Ravens.

All of which means that Houston’s defense mightn’t have undergone the thorough examination from Kerry Collins and Chad Henne that it’s going to get from Drew Brees. The Texans’ offense will face the rampage from the Saints’ rush that so bothered Jay Cutler last week, but for a team with the name of being pass-happy, the Texans have a very balanced attack – 36 running plays against 29 pass attempts at Miami last week. (Compare with the Bears 12 rushes against 45 pass attempts at the Superdome last week).

Drew Brees will test the Texans’ defense far more than it’s been tested already, but the best way to defend against that is to eat up the clock and control the ball – exactly what a good ground game will do. If the Texans can do that, they could be on the road to the playoffs in the tenth year of their existence.