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Kenneth Le
With both Anthony Richardson and Bryce Young missing Week 3 with injuries, all attention in the rookie quarterback race was on C.J. Stroud. Honestly, it felt like a minor miracle that Stroud was healthy, too.
Entering last week, Stroud had been sacked 11 times and hit 19 times, tied for most in the league. Stroud was drawing praise for his grace under fire and his decision-making ability, but there was a lot of “this isn’t working yet, but the building blocks are there” discussion. Because he was working with four backup offensive linemen, Stroud had to stand tall against pressure, do his best to just get the ball out on time, and hope to squeeze the ball into difficult windows. And because his rushing attack was providing nothing of any value (a rushing VOA of -46.7% in the first two weeks, second worst in the league), it was essentially all on Stroud to make anything happen. You’d be hard-pressed to design a worse situation for a rookie quarterback to be working from, and he still had the Houston passing attack at a 2.3% VOA through two weeks.
It seemed like this was going to be the story for the foreseeable future. Until the return of Laremy Tunsil, Tytus Howard, Kenyon Green and Juice Scruggs, Stroud was going to have to keep running for his life, turning in an impressive read or two, and generally scraping himself off the turf. Recognizing pre-snap pressure had been one of his weaknesses as a prospect, after all, and playing with whichever four scrubs the Texans could scrape up certainly wasn’t going to help. Up against a Jaguars team that had brought Richardson down four times in Week 1 and pressured Patrick Mahomes on one third of his dropbacks in Week 2, the hope was just that Stroud would survive.
Instead, Stroud and the Texans thrived.
The Texans had a passing VOA of 80.7% against Jacksonville, the sixth-highest mark of the year so far and second in Week 3 behind only the Dolphins’ 70-spot. The ramshackle offensive line played out of their minds, giving Stroud a clean pocket to work from. And given the opportunity for the first time as a professional, and with an adjusted game plan that put more of the responsibility on his shoulders, Stroud turned in a gem of a game. The raw numbers – 20-for-30 for 280 yards and a pair of touchdowns – only scratch the surface. Stroud looked like a stud. Not good for a rookie, not promising for a prospect, but a legitimately star-making performance. It got lost a little in the midst of the record-setting blowouts and the massive upsets Week 3 brought with it, but Stroud and the Houston offense as a whole deserve to get their own share of flowers before we move on to Week 4.
The sacks were really doing Stroud in before Week 3. He entered the week with a -4.0% passing VOA overall (ranked 19th), but jumped up to 40.7% (fifth) if you ignored sacks – the biggest jump for any quarterback. It was Stroud, not Justin Fields or Sam Howell, who led the league with -240 YAR lost on sacks. Sacks are, by and large, a quarterback stat, and Stroud does deserve criticism for turning about one in every four pressures into a sack. He has just two throwaways under pressure this season, after all. But the pressures, by and large, have not been his fault. Stroud is not holding on to the ball forever – his time to throw this season is 2.90 seconds per Next Gen Stats, and that drops to 2.66 seconds when he’s pressured. Compare that to, say, Bryce Young (3.00 seconds) or Justin Fields (2.87) and you can see the difference; Stroud is generally not causing his own pressure by being indecisive or hesitant in the pocket. He’s not completely without blame, but he’s been the best quarterback in the class at not getting himself into trouble in the pocket so far.
That’s significant because, when Stroud isn’t on the ground? He soars.
Stroud has yet to throw an interception this season. His 121 pass attempts without a pick through his first three career starts are the most in NFL history; he’s throwing more often than Dak Prescott did as a rookie on his way to setting the record at 176 straight attempts to start a career. He also isn’t getting by with dinks and dunks; he’s only thrown 17 failed completions and his 78.2% success rate on his complete passes ranks eighth among qualified passers. That places him just ahead of Richardson’s 76.7% success rate and far above Young’s 59.5%. Nor is that hiding a bunch of incomplete passes; he has a respectable 64.5% completion rate and a +1.8% CPOE – once again, ahead of Richardson (-5.8%) and Young (-1.7%). He also leads the rookies in aDOT (8.1 to Richardson’s 4.9 and Young’s 7.9) and ALEX (-0.8 to Richardson’s -4.4 and Young’s -0.8).
(CPOE: Completion Percentage Over Expected; aDOT: Average Depth of Target; ALEX: Average distance of throws comapred to the sticks.)
What all this muddle of numbers is saying is that when Stroud has time in the pocket, he’s playing not only much better than his first-round compatriots, but like a top-10 passer, period. And we finally got to see what that was like for a full game this week, with Stroud clocking in with a 50.7% VOA, 130 passing YAR, and plenty of exceptionally pretty passes like this deep shot:
And great examples of him throwing the ball with confidence and anticipation:
And even when Jacksonville did get pressure, Stroud did a better job finding ways to throw his way out of it:
You don’t need to be a film expert to be excited by what Stroud did on Sunday. The level of confidence and competence from a quarterback in his third career game was astounding. It’s backed up by the eye test, it’s backed up the numbers, and it’s backed up every time Stroud is kept clean.
Credit, too, goes to offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik for changing up the gameplan against Jacksonville. With the running game still stuck in neutral (Houston had a -19.5% rushing VOA in Week 3), Slowik dialed up more early passes to avoid long down and distances. In the first half against Jacksonville, Slowik called a pass on 57% of first downs, compared to just 40% the first halves of the first two games. It’s not a coincidence that that dropped Houston’s average second down to having 6.3 yards to go, a full yard shorter than it was in their first two games. Houston had a VOA of 33.0% on first downs (ignoring the three false starts) in the first half, compared to -0.6% in the first two weeks. Lean on Tank Dell and Robert Woods and keep the offense moving.
And, of course, a tip of the hat to the makeshift offensive line of Josh Jones, Kendrick Green, Jarrett Patterson, Shaq Mason and George Fant; if we’re going to keep talking about how Stroud was kept clean, we should mention the guys who did it. Jacksonville’s pass rush may have more name value than success this season, but they’re an athletic bunch who should, under normal circumstances, be more than enough to handle a squadron of backups. To limit them to just four hurries on the day is phenomenal and unexpected (and cost me some victories in DFS so, y’know, thanks guys). I doubt they’ll be able to keep this up on a regular basis before the starters return, but they gave Stroud a chance this week and he delivered.
Not all days will be like this – the Steelers next week are a very tough draw, and having the Saints and Falcons before the bye week isn’t exactly a gift, either. And Stroud still does need to continue improving on days when his offensive line does let him down; I would love seeing him throw the ball away more when the pocket collapses. But for the first time since having a 24-0 lead over the Chiefs in the 2019 divisional round, Texans fans can have justified optimism for the future.
