Houston Texans: Nick Caserio may have the toughest job in the NFL
Nick Caserio may have the toughest job in the NFL as GM of the Houston Texans.
The Houston Texans have one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL on their roster and locked into a long-term contract, yet somehow they have one of the least enviable situations in the entire league heading into the 2021 NFL offseason.
The Texans have “zeroed in” on their general manager candidate, and they’ve landed someone who has been high on their priority list for a long, long time.
New England Patriots executive Nick Caserio is leaving his post as de facto GM of the Patriots (Bill Belichick has the final say there) to be the one building the roster in Houston.
From @GMFB: The #Texans pulled off a big move, hiring respected former #Patriots executive Nick Caserio as their new GM. pic.twitter.com/j9fjTpRC2U
— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) January 6, 2021
What Caserio is stepping into in Houston is a multi-year project with a win-now quarterback. Texans legend JJ Watt recently apologized for the team ‘wasting’ a year with such a special quarterback on the roster.
Bill O’Brien’s aggressive mentality when he took over as both head coach and general manager has ultimately set the Texans up to need to overachieve in 2021 if they are not going to ‘waste’ another one of Watson’s seasons.
O’Brien traded away so much premium draft capital for left tackle Laremy Tunsil that the Texans didn’t have a first-round pick in the 2020 NFL Draft and they won’t have a first- or second-round pick in the 2021 NFL Draft.
With the NFL salary cap projected to go down to $175 million due to the impact of COVID-19, the Texans are projected to be nearly $21 million in the red when it comes to their 2021 salary cap space.
One of the likeliest cap casualties on the roster is Watt himself, but the Texans don’t exactly have a plethora of young talent on both sides of the ball to build around.
Without young stars in place already besides Watson, gymnastics required to get in the green when it comes to cap space, and no 2021 NFL Draft assets in the top 64 selections, Nick Caserio is a truly brave soul.
Having Watson certainly should make the Texans a contender sooner rather than later, but there is no question that the undertaking is massive.
Not only will the Texans have to make difficult cap cuts, but they will also have to go bargain shopping in free agency or find ways to get players on extremely low year one cap hits.
That is not impossible to do, but it’s clear that the rebuilding project that needs to take place in Houston has to be quick. Caserio doesn’t have much room for error.