Houston Texans: Why Chris Thompson could be the special teams answer

The Houston Texans are trucking along, albeit slowly to a 4-6 record and hopefully a respectable finish to the 2017 season. But there’s one guy on the special teams unit that could certainly render to be the eventual answer to their production woes at times.

The Houston Texans special teams unit has historically been a mixed bag of production — some good, mostly bad but a lot of mediocrity in-between. Joe Marciano, the long-time special teams coordinator did the absolute best he could with the guys we’ve had but we’re still looking for that guy to jump off the page with impressive levels of production.

We are, of course, in the Bill O’Brien era and Larry Izzo is the man in charge of this particular unit. He has had his faults in regard to having this unit prepared to play with each and every game but things have been ho-hum has of late. There hasn’t been any significant gains in yardage in kick/punt returns as of late. Your headliners — Shane Lechler and Ka’imi Fairbairn have been largely reliable this season. Mistakes can and will happen but as long as they’re minimized, that’s whole ballgame in a nutshell.

But, in my opinion, the Houston Texans were able to snatch another diamond in the rough with signing Chris Thompson out of training camp. Another among the plethora of undrafted free agents that we have on this team, Thompson has shown some flashes of brilliance with his innate ability to elude.

The versatile yet talented wide receiver has proven that he can be a reliable option on kick returns, especially when Will Fuller is sidelined dealing with whatever injury he’s dealing with. Thompson, a 5’11,” 171-pound prospect out of Florida, has been timed at running a 4.58 40-yard dash.

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He started out the season on the practice squad but was quickly promoted when injuries warranted his need to be on active roster. Although he’s been dealing with a knee injury of his own, he’s expected to be ready to go for Monday night’s game against the Baltimore Ravens.

Although the sample size is small, Thompson has returned 10 kicks for 227 yards, averaging 22.7 yards per return which is by far, impressive than any other guy we’ve had in a long time. If Thompson can handle the load, I think we have our kick return guru and this will take the load off Fuller, who can just concentrate on catching the deep ball.

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I was quite fond of his performance in training camp and this guy continues to shine. These remaining seven games will certainly be more a dress rehearsal to see if he’s our guy that should be out there. But you know what? I think he will be just based off of what we’ve seen so far.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

Go Texans.

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