Our Houston Texans trail 14-7 to the Oakland Raiders at halftime. We will start the second half getting the football. We are making several small yet very costly mistakes in the first half of this football game and I look for us to do the following in the second half to have success and get this nice road win... -Reduce costly penalties. This is extremely important to play clean football on the road as I said in my post Thursday. We are having a couple holding penalties on offense that are backing us up and hurting us, and the un-nessescary roughness penalty on C.C. Brown when we had the Raiders on a 3rd down on our 7, and that gave them the first down and they scored the touchdown. We do not have room for these dumb, costly penalites and I look for us to clean that up in the second half of this football game. -Better special teams. Chad muffed a few punts this game already, they were not his best, and he's just having a bad season. Still, we need to get some better ones from him in the second hlaf because field position will be important in a tight game like this. Also, Jerome Mathis had a very bad play on his debut kickoff return, he dropped the ball in the endzone and still took it out only to get to the 4, just a bad play mentally. We need to clean up Special teams in the second half. -Reduce sacks on David Carr. The Raiders defense is a good one, but our offensive line has to protect Carr a little better, and carr has to get the ball out a little faster. He has been sacked 5 times I think this half and we need to reduce those. When he does get sacked, he has to hold on to the football. This cost us a touchdown this game, similar to the game back in Tennessee. Small things are hurting us. You can't have costly penalties and sloppy special teams on the road. Bad teams do that, and we need to improve on this. This is still obviously anybody's game, and I look for our Texans to come out ready in the second hlaf and get a big road win. GO TEXANS
