Don't confuse what I'm saying with me thinking our drafts have turned out great and we should be overly joyed. Take a look at every other teams' drafts since 2006. How many starters do those teams have from the draft? The results may be surprising. There's a lot of collectively terrible draft records since 2006.
to the bolded: Where did this come from - thin air? A one-time snapshot at Week 16?? MAYBE if you fault them for injuries but that doesn't seem right. On Defense? Mario Williams, Amobi Okoye, Brian Cushing, Demeco Ryans, Zac Diles, Glover Quin, Kareem Jackson. There's 7 on Defense right there. You can argue whether Okoye, Diles and Jackson should be starting or not. Take out Demeco b/c he's injured but that's not fair IMO. Eric Winston, Duane Brown, Owen Daniels, Antoine Caldwell is now starting.. They traded draft picks for Matt Schaub, Kevin Walter and Chris Myers who are starting. Jacoby Jones is getting decent playing time.
I mean I don't want to sound like I'm saying Rick Smith is the greatest EVAARR, but this 4 starters business is ludicrous. I think there's a lot for us to improve on and I expect us to. If we don't that's completely unaccceptable. I'm sorry if you disagree with me, I'm sure most of you will. I'm just calling it like I see it. I'm not happy with the current state of the Texans, this is downright embarrassing.
It's an interesting exerice though to go look at all the other teams drafts since 2006. There's some good ones in there but there's also about 20 or more that are worse than ours.
I'm not saying that's where I want to be, I'm just trying to pull some unemotional opinion into this conversation. In order for us to be one of the best teams in the league... we HAVE to do better than we have. That I can agree with.
http://www.nfl.com/draft/history/fulldraft?type=team