Look, I don't want to make fun of anyone's pain, but in reading stuff like this and this, I'm thinking maybe a few deep breaths are in order here. I'm not a Texans fan (nor am I a Longhorn fan, so I have no particular feelings about Vince Young, either), but I do recall Reggie Jackson coming to Yankee Stadium in 1982 as a member of the California Angels, receiving his usual "Reg-gie! Reg-gie!" cheer from the crowd, then hitting an upper-deck home run to help his team win, which in turn kicked off a long round of "Steinbrenner sucks!" chants. So I have some idea of how y'all feel, but seriously. It'll pass, I swear.
I can't tell you exactly why I never got into the Texans. As of the early 1990s, I'd become a fan of the Rockets and Oilers. I had no trouble rooting for Hakeem and company against my former favorites, the Knicks, in 1994. I suffered along with everybody else when the Oilers had their meltdown in Buffalo in 1993. And I was seriously pissed when Bud Adams took a dump on the city and moved his team to Tennessee. I guess by the time Bob McNair had done his thing, I'd just gone back to rooting for the Giants as before. I follow the Texans, as I follow the Astros (I've never stopped rooting for the Yankees; among other things, my family would disown me if I did), but I have no passion for them. I sympathize, especially with folks like 'stina and Stephanie, but I'm just not as deeply vested in what happened this past Sunday.
I do have one nit to pick, with a typically clueless assertion by John Lopez:
But if the Texans have replaced New Orleans as the longest-running NFL joke, they should consider the Saints the model franchise for turning things around.
Um, when did anybody replace the Cardinals (last non-wild card playoff victory: 1947) or the Lions (last playoff victory of any kind: 1957) as the "longest-running NFL joke"? Seriously, I know the Texans have it bad, but they haven't even approached Tampa Bay Buccaneer-level of futility yet (14 straight losing seasons, 1983 through 1996).
Those are definitely some teams that have had rough stretches, no doubt. But Tampa has since won a Super Bowl. You're wrong on the Lions, who won a playoff game against my Dallas Cowboys in 1992, regularly appeared in the playoffs (at least) in the 1990s, and certainly had their share of exciting moments with Barry Sanders. And even the woeful Cardinals have had the occasional winning season (okay, very occasional, they really have stunk under the Bidwill "leadership").
The Texans have... nothing. No success on the field and no marquee players really (unless you want to count DeMeco Ryans as a marquee player in the making), despite some advantages that the Texans enjoyed as a new franchise in the salary cap/free agency era that other expansion franchises did not enjoy. The fact that the franchise is young really doesn't change the fact that it's done a really really bad job. Lopez may have overstated things a bit, but clueless? I don't know. This franchise has gotten a lot wrong and squandered a lot of advantages.
Posted by: kevin whited on December 12, 2006 6:21 PMYes, Tampa did win a Super Bowl, and the Giants won two of them, after they both stopped sucking. The point I'm making is simply that each of those franchises was utterly hopeless for longer than the Texans have been in existence. And that's why I think Lopez was clueless.
I'm just saying that the Texans haven't been around long enough to be the longest anything in the NFL. And present miseries aside, they're at least trying to be a good franchise. All things considered, given a choice, I'd rather be a Texans fan than a Cardinals fan, that's for sure.
Posted by: Charles Kuffner on December 12, 2006 6:37 PMI think Houston fans must feel the same thing that Portland Trailblazer fans felt in the 80s when they had the 2nd pick in the draft and passed over Michael Jordan to pick.....wait for it.....Sam Bowie. Houston had the first pick that year and took Hakeem. The blazers picked Bowie over Michael Jordan because they already had a shooting guard by the name of Clyde Drexler.
I was going to college in Portland during the early 80s and remember those years well. And, of course, later in the early 90s when Chicago kept blasting the Blazers out of the championships with Jordan running right over and through Drexler.
I don't think Bowie played more than one year with the Blazers before washing out completely.\
And yes, everyone knew Michael Jordan was that good. OK, maybe no THAT good, but he was the college player of the year his senior season.
Posted by: Kent from Waco on December 12, 2006 7:17 PMI can tell you exactly why I never got into the Texans: The name. It is easily the most boring major league team name in America, surpassing even the Browns, on the tiebreaker point that "Houston Texans" is archetypically redundant, and no other contender is.
Plus I don't consider Texanness to be a universal good.
So, while it has that name, I will happily cheer each time the team gets embarassed.
(I favored the Houston Toros, which acknowledges Houston's important Hispanic heritage, plus there are not already any football Bulls. Plus it would set the team up to hate the Cowboys, and that is a universal good.)
Posted by: Greg Morrow on December 13, 2006 1:38 PM