Demeco Ryans: The Texans’ pass protection is not good enough, we have to fix that

Texans quarterback CJ Stroud took a career-high eight sacks in Thursday night’s loss to the Jets, and Texans coach DeMeco Ryans says that’s not acceptable.

“I’m not sure what happens up front, we’ll watch the film and see what it is, but obviously you give up eight sacks and every dropback or pass situation it looks like we’re in scramble mode, so it it’s just not good enough when we can’t operate on time, and we have to get that fixed,” Ryans said. “Every time you get fired that many times, it’s not good enough. We don’t want that our quarterback is getting hit, as many hits as he was taking. It’s not good enough. We’ve got to change things going forward.”

Stroud didn’t play very well even when he had time to throw, but Ryans indicated he believes the pass protection, not the quarterback, was the problem.

“Any time you get pressured that much or get hit, it’s going to affect any quarterback. That’s always the defensive game plan is to try to confuse the quarterback, and that’s what they did,” Ryans said.

At 6-3, the Texans remain the clear favorites to win the AFC South. But Ryans knows that if his team wants to make noise in the postseason, it has to be a lot better than it was Thursday night.