Houston Texans: Why Duane Brown must be traded asap

The Houston Texans have gone through three weeks of football without their star offensive lineman in Duane Brown and it doesn’t appear nothing will change any time soon.

The Houston Texans remain steadfast in their position in regard to the Duane Brown situation. Yes, it’s a situation because both sides appear to have not called a truce so that he could return back to the field for the team. Although that Brown has not admitted to this publicly, he’s holding in regard to a contract dispute he has with the team.

Brown signed a six-year, $53 million deal ahead of the 2012 season and he has two years left on it. The contract itself had $22.1 million in guarantees to which he has already been compensated for and the final two years are non-guaranteed. Brown is scheduled to make $9.4 million this season and $9.75 million in 2018. As he transitions to the latter stages of his career, I’d imagine he’d want some of that money guaranteed because he gets hurt, he gets absolutely nothing.

Many will say that Brown’s holdout is doing nothing to help his cause but for all intents and purposes, it actually is. The offensive line was abysmal against the Jacksonville Jaguars in Week 1.

Out of 48 passing plays, the OL gave up seven sacks, four quarterback hits, 20 hurries and 31 total pressures. That is completely unacceptable for a professional offensive line and things were looking toward Brown returning in Week 2.

But that didn’t happen. The Houston Texans continued to chug along with our makeshift offensive line even as the infamous quarterback transition that was made from Tom Savage to Deshaun Watson. Because of Watson’s ability to improvise and his elusive capabilities even under bad protection, he has played well in spite of the offensive line.

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This past week, the offensive line allowed just one sack, two quarterback hits, nine hurries, 12 pressures through 39 passing plays. That’s quite an improvement and gives Texans further leverage to indicate that they won’t need him as things are on the uptick.

This doesn’t help Brown’s cause to return back to the team but skyrockets his value for other teams. Seriously, if the Texans don’t want to have Brown back, they need to trade him so we can get an asset in return. We need draft picks in 2018 to replace to first and second we lost in jettisoning Brock Osweiler and also to acquire Watson. I’m positive that we can get a third-rounder for him as he’s still one of the most productive offensive linemen in this league at this moment.

A good OL is hard to find these days and that’s certainly why his services will be heavily sought after if the Texans shop him around to which I expect that they’re already doing. The trade deadline is Tuesday, Oct. 31 at 3 p.m. CDT so they have a little over a month to make a deal.

The Oakland Raiders would a perfect candidate as they own all of their 2018 earlier picks and more protection certainly would be welcomed for Derek Carr. It’s also possible for the Seattle Seahawks but they’ve traded away a lot of their earlier picks, which is what we’d definitely want for him. They still have their 2nd rounder but it’s going to take a lot of convincing for them to give that up.

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All in all, if Brown doesn’t want to be here and the Texans refuse to cow-tow, then he needs to be traded while his value is high as he has yet to play a down in 2017. It’s truly tough for me to write this as he has been one of favorite Texans through and through but the business element comes into play.

We can’t have a slowly depreciating asset that not being used when it can have value elsewhere. Let’s hope that cooler heads will prevail but I smell a trade coming in the future, we’ll see.

Go Texans.

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