Alan Truex: Texans owner McNair trades away protection for Watson in a fit of pettiness

HOUSTON – Unless you’re a Houston Texans fan, it was a good weekend to be in the USA’s fourth largest city.  While the Astros were smacking the LA Dodgers to reach the brink of a World Series championship, the Texans plunged into the Great Distraction their owner was trying too hard to avoid.

The previously soft-spoken, seldom-quoted Bob McNair burst into infamy following a not so private business meeting with his fellow NFL oligarchs.  Frustrated with professional football players not standing in proper attention for the national anthem and its accompanying pregame flag display, McNair blurted: “We can’t have the inmates running the prison.”

Texans left tackle Duane Brown said that view is “ignorant” and “embarrassing.”  He explained: “To use an analogy of inmates in prison, that’s disrespectful.”

But hardly astonishing.  Chris Simms, NFL quarterback-turned-NBC analyst, said McNair’s gaffe “just confirms what players feel.  As a white player, I felt the same way, too, I was one of the inmates.  That’s the way they look at you.”

The appropriate cliché for McNair would have been “inmates running the asylum.”

In America it’s politically correct to make fun of people for being crazy, but not for being black.  

The NFL players, 70 percent of whom are African-American, thought McNair went out of his way to disavow any consideration of their concerns about racial justice.

A couple of Brown’s teammates, No. 1 pass catcher DeAndre Hopkins and No. 3 draft pick D’Onta Foreman, abruptly departed the Texans facility on Friday, when they heard of McNair’s notion of the owner/employee relationship.  That evening, the players met and pondered an appropriate team response.

They considered scraping the red white & blue decal from their helmets.

And then they thought better of that.

They considered a mass walkout but settled on bonding as a team, and as a city.  They were aware of Astros stealing their thunder, with football in retreat across much of the country.

The Texans promised each other they would not lose cohesion over a few careless words.  After a meeting with McNair, the players agreed to fly to Seattle as scheduled on Saturday.

McNair apologized to his players.

Sort of.

He told them he used the term “inmates” to refer to the aides to Roger Goodell in the NFL office in New York City.

Brown and other Texans players doubted McNair’s sincerity.  But it’s true – if not much reported at the time – that McNair, Jerry Jones, Bob Kraft and more than a dozen other football-franchise owners are gravely unhappy with Goodell’s management of the anthem crisis.

Couldn’t he give the players a platform for protesting injustice that didn’t involve iconic symbols of the republic?

At any rate, on Sunday afternoon as the anthem played in CityLink Field, 40 of the Texans were kneeling together.

Then they played some of their best ball of the autumn, between those steep, deafening walls of CityLink.  They came within 21 seconds of overcoming the Legion of Boom in the most challenging football arena in America.  

Well it wasn’t the World Series but it was close enough.

If it hadn’t been for an insanely optimistic straight-ahead dive play on third-and-4, the Texans might have beaten the mighty Seattle Seahawks, who for four consecutive years have advanced at least to the second round of the NFL playoffs.

The failed running play, which presented Russell Wilson one last scoring opportunity he could not ignore, was not as conservative as it appeared.   Bill O’Brien, who combines, for better and often worse, the two jobs of head coach and offensive coordinator, took the blame for the decisive blunder.

Sort of.

“I didn’t communicate the play very well,” he said.  Apparently he was trying to call a play with options other than up the gut.  If the middle was closed, Watson could swivel into something else.  But message not received.

Still, it was an admirable effort by a 6 ½-point underdog.

And one of the keys to this near-victory was Brown, 3-time Pro Bowl selection in his first appearance following a contractual holdout.  For one day he provided blindside protection for Deshaun Watson.  Which happened to be the day the rookie pheenom threw for 402 yards and led his team to a most respectable defeat, 41-38.

So the next day the Texans traded Brown to the Seahawks, who had seen enough of him in three hours to learn he was infinitely better than the LTs they had.

It wasn’t as if the Texans didn’t need Brown.  Despite nimble feet that allow him to escape pursuit, Watson has been sacked 19 times in seven games.  That projects to 43.4 for the season.

Andrew Luck, who’s the gold standard for quarterback abuse in the NFL, has not been sacked more than 41 times in any of his five years of playing for Indianapolis.

It seems absurd that McNair would skimp on a shield for his most valuable asset, a 22-year-old quarterback who already is compared to Hall of Famers.   It’s impossible not to suspect that Brown’s candor was not appreciated by McNair, that he’s letting pettiness override business judgment.

It was noticed that Foreman, for doing like most Houstonians and leaving early on Friday, dropped from second-string running back to third.  Alfred Blue got the five carries Sunday when Lamar Miller was on break.

Like many other Texans fans, I don’t know what to make of McNair.  He’s 79, from North Carolina, so maybe he’s old school and Old South.  He’s benevolently Republican, having given $1.5 million to Mitch McConnell and $4.5 million to Make America Great Again.

I don’t know where he is on the race card.  I do know that the top place on the Texans’ executive pyramid is occupied by an African-American, Rick Smith, the general manager.  There have been reasons enough to fire Smith, but McNair has stayed with him.

I’ve interviewed McNair and found him to be thoughtful and engaging, whether talking about his football team or his racehorses.  I’m surprised and disappointed that he’d speak so dismissively of any of his employees.

One thing I am sure of.  This incident will not be quickly forgotten.  When the next class of free-agent football stars look for a place to land, it’s now less likely to be Houston.   This is the distraction that keeps giving.  See Jadaveon Clowney on social media in the Halloween costume of a prisoner.  Not a statement on McNair, of course, just coincidence.  Whatever, it’s a cloud.  One that’s not leaving soon.