Houston Texans: The team’s salary cap situation is quite puzzling

The NFL recently released their salary cap figures for 2019 and it’s interesting to see where the Houston Texans ranked. It’s quite puzzling. Let’s look.

Houston Texans fans — it’s going to be quite interesting over the next few days as this team will be trimming their roster down to 53 men for the season.  There will be obvious cuts but there will be some tough decisions that will be made at the running backs group as well as the tight ends.

The competition is stiff between Karan Higdon and Damarea Crockett — I think Josh Ferguson has been trending downward — as these men will be complementing Duke Johnson.  Unless a free agent signing or a trade is made for a running back, expect Johnson to be the RB1 for this team.

In the tight ends group, it’s definitely a competition between Darren Fells and Jerell Adams.  Adams is trending strongly to make this team with a series of acrobatic catches, speedy runs, a hell of a stiff-arm and two touchdown catches for the preseason.

Because of the injury to Kahale Warring, it’s possible that both may be carried at the time until he gets back.  Warring hasn’t appeared for the entire preseason so he’s either a safe stash for Bill O’Brien or he may be trying to heal from injuries that he sustained over the offseason.

We’re about to see how healthy he is, especially when O’Brien is required to give injury reports with each coming week and not balk when reporters ask him the tough questions about these guys.

And speaking of general manager O’Brien, the NFL released their latest salary cap figures for each team earlier this week and you’ll never guess where the Houston Texans are ranked.  Well, you can guess but with the way they’re running things over there on Kirby Drive, you’d think otherwise.

Pro Football Rumors (h/t Ben Levine) put together a nice ranking of all 32 NFL team’s cap space and the Houston Texans are ranked 2nd in the league in terms of cap space.  The team has $37 million available in cap money, which has been roughly unchanged since this Spring, proving the Houston Texans want to have the utmost in flexibility.

They trail the Indianapolis Colts, who have $56.6M in cap space, which is not surprising considering how well Chris Ballard is able to cull talent on the cheap.  This same team whipped their butts in the NFL Wild Card Game back in January and should be regarded as a huge embarrassment.

With Andrew Luck‘s stunning retirement announcement, that number has ballooned even more to where there’s no team in the NFL that comes within about $20M of their cap space number.  But if Jacoby Brissett lives up to expectations — to which I think he will — they’ll have to shell out some more cash as early as 2020 because his rookie deal is up after this season.

Brissett is making a paltry $2M base salary in 2019 so they’ll be able to get a ton of production for minimal cost.

But back to the Houston Texans — Jadeveon Clowney knows that this team has the cash to pay

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him and they still won’t do it.  It’s understandable to look at both perspectives but I think Clowney should be offered a fair deal but I think the team is anxious about what they’re going to have to pay Deshaun Watson in the future.  But that’s still three seasons away at best so they could easily pay Clowney now but they won’t.

The Houston Texans act as if the world is going to end if they spend extra money on the guys that they need.  I don’t see any other incentive in them being so tight with their wallet other than that they have a big signing coming up their sleeve with someone we don’t know about.

But that should’ve been done back in the Spring so that’s not likely it.

Regardless, their cap situation is puzzling and this formula that they’re using to save money better pan out or else I’m sure Cal McNair is going to make some heads roll after this season.

We’ll see how that goes — go Houston Texans.