The Texans are locked into the No. 4 seed in the AFC playoffs, so the result of their Week 18 game against the Titans won’t have any bearing on their placement in the postseason tournament.
Head coach DeMeco Ryans believes the game will have bearing on how they play in the postseason, however. The Texans were destroyed 31-2 by the Ravens on Christmas and Ryans cited that performance as the reason why he plans to play the team’s starters for at least some of their game against Tennessee next Sunday.
“Going into this game I mentioned to all our guys that everybody has to be ready to go, and that’s where we are,” Ryans said, via Aaron Wilson of KPRC. “Everybody will be out there playing. We’ll see how the game goes, but for us, right now, we gotta go play better. Our last outing on the field was not good enough, not representative of who we are defensively, offensively. It’s not a good representation of our team entirely. We gotta go out and play better football.”
The Texans won a home game in the playoffs last year and they’ll be hosting a wild card game again this year, but getting the same result will take a much better effort than they had against Baltimore their last time out.