The NFL is rigged to promote competitive balance, but its push for parity seems to be failing in the AFC. For a second consecutive postseason, the Kansas City Chiefs, Baltimore Ravens, Buffalo Bills, and Houston Texans advanced to the divisional round. And while Houston seems like it’s a bit out of place in that group of elite contenders, this is the AFC final four most of us expected to see when the season kicked off in September. The Chiefs, Ravens, and Bills have mostly met expectations this season. The Chiefs had a run of close games against inferior opponents in the middle of the season, but won 15 games and cruised to home-field advantage. The Bills and Ravens have been led by the league’s top MVP candidates, and steamrolled into the playoffs after some early-season hiccups.
Meanwhile, the Texans have been a disappointment. Quarterback C.J. Stroud didn’t make the leap into superstardom in year two after the team added Stefon Diggs to an already-talented receiver room. That position group getting rocked by injuries hasn’t helped. Diggs went down for the season in late October. Nico Collins missed five weeks around the same time. And second-year receiver Tank Dell was lost for the season when he suffered a scary knee injury against the Chiefs in Week 16. Houston’s offensive line has been healthier this season than it was last season, but is somehow performing worse than it did when it was hit with historically bad injury luck in 2023. The passing game has been broken by the combination of receiver injuries and sloppy penalties, and offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik has failed to get the run game going for a second straight season. In an AFC divisional round headlined by dominant quarterbacks and elite offenses, Houston is an outlier.
DeMeco Ryans’s defense, coming off a dismantling of the Los Angeles Chargers and Justin Herbert in a 32-12 win in the wild-card round, does belong on this stage. Houston got four interceptions against Herbert after he’d thrown only three during the regular season. The Texans pass rush pressured him on 53 percent of his dropbacks and sacked him four times, according to Next Gen Stats. The Texans run defense shut down the Chargers ground game after the first two drives. From there, Houston dominated and even scored as many points as Los Angeles’s offense thanks to a pick-six by safety Eric Murray. (And Derek Stingley’s 54-yard interception return into the red zone set up another Houston score.) It was a 99th-percentile playoff performance this century, as measured by defensive EPA per snap, according to TruMedia. The Texans defense hasn’t been that dominant throughout the season, but it was one of the league’s best units in 2024, ranking in the top five in yards allowed per play, EPA per play, success rate, and DVOA.
NFL Divisional Round
Ryans has built a championship-level defense, but Houston’s offense isn’t ready for prime time yet—which is probably why the NFL put its biggest draw, the Chiefs, in the early Saturday broadcast slot this weekend. It’s a mismatch on paper. With a line of 8.5 points in favor of the Chiefs, the Texans are the second-biggest underdogs in the divisional round. And at 44-to-1, they have the longest odds of winning the Super Bowl, according to FanDuel. This is the team that nobody actually believes in and the offense is to blame. It’s the worst single unit left in the entire playoff field, and doesn’t look capable of scoring enough to beat Patrick Mahomes in a playoff game. That’s a job for a top passing game led by an equally talented quarterback who can match Mahomes throw for throw. And the only two passers who can presumably do that will be playing in Buffalo on Sunday night.
But history also suggests you won’t beat Mahomes in a shoot-out, anyway. The Chiefs quarterback almost always comes out on top in a game of dueling quarterbacks—even when the other guy doesn’t seem to miss. In the five playoff games against the best opposing passers, based on expected points added, he’s 4-1, according to TruMedia.
Best Playoff Passing Performances Vs. Chiefs Defense Since 2018
The loss to the Patriots in the 2018 postseason, Mahomes’s second playoff game, is still the only time Mahomes lost a playoff game in which he had a positive EPA average. His first playoff game, a 31-13 win over Indianapolis in the snow in January 2019, was the only time he’s won with an EPA average in the negatives. Otherwise, when Mahomes has played well, using a positive EPA average as the benchmark, he’s gone 14-0 in the postseason. When he’s played poorly, the Chiefs have lost. That’s really happened only twice: against Tampa Bay in February 2021, in his only Super Bowl loss, and against Cincinnati in the AFC championship game a season later.
To knock Mahomes out of the playoffs, you need a defense that can force him to play poorly. Houston does check that vital box.
In many ways, it feels like Kansas City’s ticket to this year’s AFC title game is already booked, and it’ll be up to the winner of the Bills-Ravens blockbuster to keep them out of the Super Bowl and prevent a chance at a three-peat. But to get there, the Chiefs will have to get through a Texans team that shouldn’t be dismissed. Styles make fights in the NFL postseason, and the defense Ryans has built in just two seasons in Houston may be better equipped to take down the reigning AFC champs than even Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson.
Saturday’s game in Kansas City will be the first time Ryans will call plays against Mahomes in the postseason, but he has coached against him in a Super Bowl—as a defensive assistant with the 49ers. The Chiefs won the game, but San Francisco’s defense made it a frustrating night for Mahomes, pressuring him on 41 percent of his dropbacks and holding him to 5.2 yards per dropback over the first three quarters. Defensive coordinator Robert Saleh called a steady diet of soft zone coverage, and the defensive line, spearheaded by Nick Bosa, dominated the line of scrimmage, giving Mahomes little time to find open receivers from the pocket. If not for some Mahomes magic and poorly timed misses by Jimmy Garoppolo, it would have been a winning plan for the Niners defense.
Ryans took over as defensive coordinator a year after that game, when Saleh left for the Jets head coaching job in 2021. Ryans didn’t tinker too much with what Saleh had built and maintained the 49ers’ defensive success with the help of a talented roster headlined by two perennial DPOY candidates in Bosa and Fred Warner. After two successful seasons on the job, Ryans got the call from Houston in 2023, to return as head coach to the place where he spent six years as a standout linebacker after being drafted in 2006. While Ryans was viewed as one of the league’s sharpest defensive minds when he was hired—a rarity for a young coach on that side of the ball—there’s always a concern when a coordinator of a Super Bowl contender leaves for a less talented team. Ryans wasn’t bringing all that Pro Bowl talent he coached in San Francisco to Texas.
Turns out, he hasn’t needed much time to get the Texans defense playing like his old 49ers teams. It’s already a near-perfect replica of those defenses he ran in San Francisco. The statistical similarities are uncanny.
Even the strategic tendencies are nearly identical.
It’s the same defense! And the formula remains simple: stop the run on first down, make teams one-dimensional on second and third downs, and then let the pass rush, led in Houston by Will Anderson Jr. and Danielle Hunter, attack the quarterback. With the defensive line teeing off and crushing the pocket, ball hawks like cornerbacks Stingley and Lassiter are lurking and looking to get their hands on the football. There isn’t a defense in the league that creates more havoc. The Texans are the only team in the NFL that finished the regular season in the top five in both sack rate and interception rate, according to TruMedia. Houston plays a lot of soft zone coverage behind a four-man rush, which is typically regarded as a more passive approach to defense, but there’s nothing passive about this team. It plays attacking football and solves its problems by running faster and hitting harder than anyone else.
It starts up front, where Ryans took his two biggest swings when building the defensive roster. His first big move was the trade-up to take Anderson out of Alabama with the third pick in the 2023 NFL draft. The trade was widely panned and seen as “bad process” based on the tenets of analytically-backed draft strategy, which say you shouldn’t trade up for a non-quarterback, no matter how much you may love the prospect. History tells us that teams are overconfident in their ability to evaluate talent and separate the top player at a position from the second- or third-best player. It would have been more prudent for Houston to wait for a pass rusher, whether or not it was Anderson, to fall to them at the 12th pick rather than going up to get their guy. Ryans’s conviction has ultimately paid off. Anderson has been a perfect fit for his scheme, and in his second season, he already looks like a future defensive player of the year candidate.
Ryans’s other big swing came last offseason when he made the somewhat controversial decision to let edge rusher Jonathan Greenard, a homegrown talent coming off a big year, leave in free agency and replace him with the older and more expensive player in Hunter, a free agent from Minnesota. Hunter may have been the better player at the time, but NFL teams almost always go for the younger and cheaper option. So, once again, Ryans went against the book to build the best version of his defense for 2024. And that defense required an edge defender capable of wreaking as much havoc on the backfield as Anderson. Now that the two have shared the field, it’s easy to see what Ryans was envisioning when he paired them up. Hunter and Anderson were meant to play together.
Ryans and the Texans splurged on those two additions, but he’s gone bargain-hunting to fill out the rest of Houston’s defensive line, which he says is the foundation of his scheme. The Texans rebuilt the defensive front this offseason, bringing in a horde of veteran free agents on modest deals. They paid Folorunso Fatukasi for $1.5 million in base salary after he was cut by the Jaguars. He’s been the team’s anchor against the run. Mario Edwards Jr. (one year, $1.2 million base salary) and Denico Autry (two years, $20 million) have contributed as interior rushers after signing in free agency. Ryans also kept Jerry Hughes around as a rotational pass rusher and claimed former first-round pick Derek Barnett off waivers from Philadelphia last season to help fill out the defensive line depth chart. It didn’t take Ryans long to build a defensive line as talented and deep as the one he coached in San Francisco.
“[Our defense] understands why we’re built the way we’re built,” Ryans said after the Chargers win, in which five Texans recorded a QB hit. “It’s for our D-line to dominate. When our D-line plays this way, not only does it help our defense, but it just brings enthusiasm to our entire team. So they understand that from the moment they sign up to play here for the Texans, we’re heavily dependent upon our D-line.”
Houston’s stout interior gives the star edge tandem license to play downhill. That was on display against the Chargers. Watch this first-down play from early in the game. Pay attention to where Hunter and Anderson are looking before the snap (at the ball, rather than for any run keys) and how easily they dismiss Herbert’s play-action fake.
With the defensive line wreaking havoc like that, Houston doesn’t have to get creative on the back end with its coverages. While Ryans does have some more innovative calls in his playbook, he tends to stick to staple zone coverages to defend the pass. That’s always been the hallmark of the defensive system he learned under Saleh, who hails from Pete Carroll’s coaching tree. Back in 2020, 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan explained that the system’s simplicity is why he chose that style of defense when he got his first head coaching job.
“That’s the defense I wanted because I know if you have talented players, then there’s no way to really trick it,” Shanahan told Chris Simms. “If you have talent, it’s too sound. You have to earn everything. ... There are some holes [in the coverage] when you start drawing up seven-step drops with three hitches. And that’s why it’s so important to have the pass rush that we’ve eventually gotten—that Seattle has had. When you don’t have those pass rushes, then you need a less sound defense.”
The Texans have the pass rush and an equally talented secondary, which also helps. Even after losing Jalen Pitre and Jimmie Ward to season-ending injuries, the Texans secondary is still turning in dominant performances thanks to key contributions from the star of the secondary, Stingley, and two rookie contributors in Lassiter, a physical corner who can make plays at the catch point, and safety Calen Bullock, another ball hawk who’s made key strides as tackler late in the season. Ryans has also gotten good play out of his linebacking corps, led by free-agent pickup Azeez Al-Shaair, who wears the green dot as the unit’s chief play caller and pre-snap traffic cop. Pre-snap alignment is a big deal in Ryans’s defense, and Al-Shaair is the player tasked with getting everyone lined up correctly.
When watching Houston’s defensive film, it isn’t the X’s and O’s that stand out—which is not to take anything away from the job Ryans and defensive coordinator Matt Burke do as play designers. Those two are scheming their asses off. The coaching jumps off the tape initially. There isn’t a more organized defense in the NFL—from how the defensive front is always correctly set to the offensive formation to the spacing of the zone coverages—and the right players always seem to be in the right spot at the right time to make a play. According to Burke, Ryans’s knowledge of the defensive personnel, and how it fits in his scheme, is the secret behind that.
“When we look at it, [we ask] ‘OK, these are our guys and the skill set and the talent—like how do we deploy those guys best?’” Burke said earlier this month. “And he’s just got a really good knack for understanding the strengths of all of those guys and where to put them to have those opportunities. You can’t create the play, or you can’t make a guy make a play … we’re fortunate that we have a lot of players that we feel can make plays when we put them in those spots.”
Small tweaks to the weekly game plan make big differences on game day and are why Houston’s defense is so difficult to play against despite its simplicity. The run defense overwhelms opponents, the pass rush seemingly gets home instantly, and the coverage unit is rarely out of position. It’s the ideal defense to take on the offenses dominating the modern game, as Shanahan, perhaps the league’s most influential offensive mind in recent years, can attest.
“When you get that pass rush, if you have that sound defense, man, you make people earn it,” Shanahan said in that 2020 podcast with Simms of this style of defensive scheme. “And that’s what I don’t like going against. I want somebody who’s unsound. I don’t care if you blitz us. You’re going to get some [plays] but, man, are you going to give us an opportunity to get someone wide open. And that makes it a lot easier. I’d rather just have one big play.” This style of defense forces the quarterback “to go 10-for-10” to score, Shanahan said.
With Anderson and Hunter caving in pockets in a hurry, the Texans haven’t had to play unsound to get the throw quarterbacks off their game, which could make them a more dangerous matchup for the Chiefs than any of us are giving them credit for.
The defenses that have managed to beat Kansas City during the Mahomes era have been those that have pressured him without having to take too many risks on the back end. In Super Bowl LV, the Buccaneers pressured Mahomes on over half of his dropbacks while blitzing on just 9.6 percent of plays. In the AFC title game in January 2022, the Bengals sacked Mahomes four times, often using a three-man rush and flooding the field in coverage. In Mahomes’s first postseason loss after his breakout 2018 season, the Patriots pressured him on over 50 percent of his dropbacks with a combination of simulated pressures and safer zone blitzes. There’s been a clear blueprint for beating the Chiefs, but it’s difficult to pull off. Houston, more so than any other defense in the league, is built for the job, though.
This will be Houston’s second chance at beating Mahomes this season after Kansas City’s star got the better of Ryans’s defense in a 27-19 win in December. Only Lamar Jackson had a better game against the Texans by EPA this season than Mahomes did that day. Outside of those two games, which were played in a span of four days around Christmas while Houston’s linebacker corps was limited because of an injury to Fatukasi and Al-Shaair’s suspension for his hit on Trevor Lawrence, Houston’s defense has been outstanding. The defense we saw in those two games is not the defense we saw the rest of the season in Houston, and it won’t be the same defense Mahomes sees this weekend.
Most of us are already looking past the Texans and forward to the Chiefs’ game against the survivor of Ravens-Bills to see whether Jackson or Allen can take down Mahomes, end his reign over the AFC, and start a championship legacy of their own. But Ryans has had a knack for spoiling a quarterback’s plans throughout this season. If he can pull it off again this weekend, it could be the first major triumph of his own championship legacy.
