Smith: Texans defense played “our worst game”

Houston’s defense garnered no pressure on Justin Herbert, was torched in the air, could not get off field on 3rd down

Houston Texans head coach Lovie Smith was trying to focus on the positives of his team’s 34-24 loss to the Los Angeles Chargers Sunday, but there wasn’t much to find positive about the team’s defensive performance.

“Defensively, it was our worst game we played on the season, defensively. I don’t think we’ve given up over than 20 points before that game, 23, I guess. Third down conversions, we didn’t take the ball away, explosive plays, it just wasn’t a good day for us defensively. You can’t win games if you play that type of defense and we don’t plan on that happening again.”

Smith said communication continues to be an issue that isn’t easily solved by just changing players:

“We evaluate, as far as personnel, each time we play. That evaluation is always going. You can always plug somebody and give someone a little less, someone a little more. It was more than just personnel. There were some communication breakdowns. We had a couple wide-open guys, things like that. That shouldn’t happen in those situations. That really hurt us.”

Lovie maintained his defensive schemes are correct, the execution of them is not:

“Absolutely. Most of the time, there’s something going wrong; it’s about execution. Everything we do is sound, so it is execution.”

Smith acknowledged his defense is just not making those critical plays when they need to in crucial situations, but that these failures are correctable:

“I don’t think we played really bad defense like that. The points have been down, we’ve been kind of taking the ball away, we’ve been pretty good on third downs. We haven’t played the run as well as we’ve needed to but yesterday was different. Critical moments, we had a few breakdowns, but we just didn’t make some plays that we had an opportunity to. We had interception early in the game. We had a chance. That could’ve given us momentum going a different way. Some of the runs we had, there was a third-and-1 and missed a tackle in the backfield. There are some critical moments like that eventually, we’re going to stand up and make plays during that time. We didn’t do that. Then it still came down to, there’s one drive. In the second half, the first three (drives), we played good ball, good defensive football. I think the first three drives of the second half. But the one drive when we needed to make a play, we let them convert on fourth down, and they were able to score on that one. There are all things, of course, we can point out, and we all kind of know what happened a little bit, but these things can be corrected.”