​Houston Texans Set to Break Own Record for Worst Team to Host a Playoff Game

By any available metric, the Houston Texans are a terrible pro football team: Coming into Week 14 they ranked 30th in Football Outsiders DVOA, 27th in Simple Rating System, 28th in yardage offense and 28th in yardage defense.

But after their 22-17 win over the Indianapolis Colts, they're just three weeks away from hosting a playoff game.

We've seen this movie before—last year, in fact, when the 9-7 Texans hosted a playoff game and got demolished, 30-0, by actual playoff-caliber team the Chiefs. At that time, the Texans ranked 18th in DVOA, 16th in SRS, 19th in yardage offense, and 30th in yardage defense.

Yes, that's right: The Texans are significantly worse this year than they were in 2015. And yet, with just three games left to play, the 7-6 squad is leading the awful AFC South. Four of their seven wins have come against division "rivals," and two of their remaining three are against the Jacksonville Jaguars and Tennessee Titans.

Should they complete the feat—sweeping their wretched division, and going 3-7 against the rest of the NFL—the Texans will claim their second-straight AFC South title and fourth in the last six years.

But that title betrays just how terrible of a year they're having. The Brock Osweiler Experiment has been a complete and utter failure; the young free-agent signee was 31st in NFL passer efficiency rating before going 14-of-24 for 147 yards, no touchdowns and one interception this Sunday.

After allowing perennial Defensive Player of the Year J.J. Watt to rush back from back surgery and end his season, the Texans defense has been not so much fearsome as fearful—holding opponents to around the league average in scoring through effective deployment of the bend-but-don't-break strategy.

Even tailback Lamar Miller, whose 107 yards against Indianapolis got him over the 1,000-yard mark, hasn't been a huge success as much as a plodding failure-to-be-a-failure. He's the ninth-leading rusher in the NFL on the sixth-most carries of any back and the Texans still can't string together long drives; their 30.7 percent scoring rate ranks just 26th in the NFL.

As it did last year, and as at least one division seems to every year, the Texans' forthcoming division title and playoff bid will kick off another round of "ZOMG No Why" and "NFL Plz Fix This" articles, and maybe this year the league will actually listen?

The title will also result in a double-digit-win team from a far tougher division coming into their house and beating the shit out of them. Yet again.