Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud took a career-high eight sacks in Thursday night’s loss to the Jets, and Texans coach DeMeco Ryans says that’s not acceptable.
“I’m not sure what’s happening up front, we’ll watch the film and see what it is, but obviously you give up eight sacks, and every dropback or pass situation looks like we’re in scramble mode, so it’s just not good enough when we can’t operate on time, and we’ve got to get that fixed,” Ryans said. “Any time you get sacked that many times it’s not good enough. We don’t want our quarterback getting hit, as many hits as he took. It’s not good enough. We’ve got to adjust. We’ve got to change things moving forward.”
Stroud did not play particularly well even when he had time to throw, but Ryans indicated that he thinks the pass protection, and not the quarterback, was the problem.
“Any time you’re getting pressured that much or getting hit, it’s going to affect any quarterback. That’s always the game plan defensively is try to fluster the quarterback, and that’s what they did,” Ryans said.
At 6-3, the Texans remain the clear favorites to win the AFC South. But Ryans knows that if his team wants to make noise in the postseason, it has to be a lot better than it was on Thursday night.
