In this series, I will be looking at the history of coaches, quarterbacks, rushers, and receivers for all 32 franchises. For coaches and quarterbacks, I will be looking at how much their franchise’s career records (regular season only) would change if we removed the games with that person. For rushers and receivers, I will note how many times that player was the team’s leading rusher/receiver over the course of their time with that franchise (regular plus postseason).

Previous Teams:

AFC East: Dolphins, Bills, Jets, and Patriots
NFC East: Cowboys, Eagles, Giants, and Redskins
AFC North: Steelers, Browns, Ravens, and Bengals
NFC North: Packers, Vikings, Bears, and Lions
AFC South: Jaguars, Colts
NFC South: Panthers, Falcons

The Texans have only had three real head coaches in team history. Bill O’Brien has been Houston’s coach for the last five years, and has a 42-38 record. Gary Kubiak was the team’s longest-tenured coach and he went 61-64; he was fired with three games left in the 2013 season, and Wade Phillips replaced him and went 0-3 down the stretch. But the first coach in team history was Dom Capers, and he went 18-46 in four years. The Texans are 30 games under .500 for team’s history, and nearly all of that was due to the Capers era. He has dropped the team’s winning percentage by 5.0%, the largest amount of any coach in NFL history. Of course, he happened to coach the expansion version of the league’s newest franchise, so we can cut him a bit of slack.

At quarterback, Deshaun Watson is well on his way to becoming the best quarterback in franchise history. He’s not the best quarterback in Houston history of course, but he’s the only Texans quarterback that is more than five games above .500. Matt Schaub ranks as the top quarterback in team history by this metric, by virtue of how bad the team was with quarterbacks not named Schaub. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the list we have Capers’ top man, David Carr. The Texans had a 0.293 winning percentage in games started by Carr, a 0.445 winning percentage in all games, and a 0.503 winning percentage in games started by anyone but Carr. That’s right: the ABC Texans have a winning record! At -5.8%, Carr has — by a wide margin — the biggest negative impact on his franchise’s winning percentage of any quarterback in NFL history. Of course, as with all quarterback records, Carr played just a small part in his team’s record during his starts.

At running back, Houston has Arian Foster, one of the star players of the first half of the ’10s. He was the best running back in the NFL or close to it for a long stretch, and ranked as a top-5 fantasy running back in four of five seasons from ’10 to ’14 (including a first-place finish in 2010). The second-best running back in franchise history is probably Dom Davis who changed his last name to Williams so late in his playing career that he was cut before ever playing a game with his legally changed name.

Now we get to the two best offensive players in Texans history. Andre Johnson and DeAndre Hopkins have both led the Texans in receiving yards in 60% of their games, an impressive metric that’s even more amazing given the 31-game overlap between the two players. Johnson built a Hall of Fame caliber career with the Texans despite playing on pretty poor teams. Nuk, as early as his second-season, has been a dominant receiver in all facets of the game.

That’s it for the Texans version of this series. Please leave your thoughts in the comments.