00:00Here was David Montgomery, one of the newest Houston Texans, newest running back on the Houston Texans,
00:05on his Zoom call with the media last Friday.
00:08I love this answer. He was asked, hey, why the Houston Texans?
00:11Definitely. Houston was definitely the place that I wanted to go if that was the case, which it was.
00:16I think for me, it just, you look at the whole organization as a whole, right?
00:20I was in Detroit, was a very successful organization, and I practiced against Houston a couple of times,
00:27and they've always been the hardest team to practice against.
00:31You can kind of tell the morale and kind of mentality that both sides of the ball
00:35and that Coach Ryan brings to the table, too.
00:38You also get to look at yourself like, dang, if I ever had an opportunity, I would love to play
00:42for a guy like that.
00:43And look, I'm here now getting to play under a guy like that,
00:46and I want to kind of come in and show these guys that I can kind of hang with the
00:50big dog.
00:51Okay.
00:51Yeah, no, him actually being impressed by the way the Texans practice
00:55and him citing the culture and all of that got me really excited.
01:00I just, it's not the typical thing he, that might be the first time I've ever heard a new player
01:06talking about the intensity of another, the intensity of a team's practice
01:11as one of the reasons he was excited to come there.
01:13Yeah.
01:14So, and this, you might just say, well, that's just lip service or whatever.
01:18All the stories I've heard about David Montgomery are that he's that guy.
01:21Dan Campbell had a clip a couple of years ago after he had a huge game.
01:26I think it was versus the Cowboys.
01:27Remember, he went off.
01:28It was at Green Bay.
01:29One of those, a couple of years ago, Montgomery had a huge game.
01:32And Campbell just gushed about him, about how much he loves the guy,
01:38almost like he was talking about him like he was his own son or something.
01:41And I think that that's appealing to a guy like D'Amico,
01:44because D'Amico and Dan Campbell, I think, expect the same types of behavior and play out of their players.
01:50No question, no question.
01:52So, it got me thinking, Seth, the combination of David Montgomery's quote that we just heard
01:58and the segment we did yesterday where we went through the,
02:01I think it was about eight stereotypes of sports talk radio hosts to see which ones you and I fit.
02:06And there were several, including we see ourselves as people that do talk culture on this show.
02:12Yeah.
02:12And highlight the culture of our various teams, good or bad.
02:15It did get me thinking about this with that David Johnson cut and guys wanting to come here
02:21and guys talking about, especially on the defensive side of the ball, you know,
02:24Reid Blankenship talking about it as well.
02:26Wow, I'm going to be playing on this defense, playing for D'Amico Ryans.
02:29Is this the best that this franchise has been from a culture standpoint right now,
02:37like compared to previous eras, compared to any point in Texas history?
02:40I don't know.
02:41And maybe culture I'm also including, like, kind of how they're viewed around the league by free agents and things
02:46like that.
02:46Right, right.
02:46I don't know.
02:47I think that's tough.
02:49Back in 2011 and 2012, I think people really thought that was a great culture.
02:54I think the way, I mean, that was a very lovable defense.
02:57And then offensively, they just had so many studs.
03:00So I'd say maybe since then.
03:03And I think that part of it is that D'Amico is a guy that talks about culture like most
03:11coaches will talk about culture.
03:13But then very few coaches actually seem like they know how to establish a culture.
03:18And where they fall short, I think this is where Bill O'Brien, this is the category I'd put Bill
03:22O'Brien as.
03:23I think Bill O'Brien cared about the culture and he would talk about the culture,
03:26but the personnel decisions didn't follow suit.
03:30And I think that there were times where his idea of culture was, like, he just didn't know how to
03:37create it,
03:37partly because he would make compromises on the types of players that he wanted or who he would pay and
03:44all of that,
03:45to where it's really hard to talk the talk.
03:48But then when you're not walking the walk and when you've got some of your highest paid guys
03:53who are guys who don't necessarily fit the culture you're talking about, it's really hard to establish that.
03:57With D'Amico, remember I asked him during training camp when I interviewed him, I said,
04:01hey, that first year you used the term energy vampires.
04:04And we would hear that from players about how you don't want any energy vampires out there.
04:08But I haven't heard you talk about it a lot since then.
04:11And he said, we got rid of all of them.
04:13And in my mind, I started going through, oh, yeah, who are the energy vampires that they've gotten rid of?
04:19But they just, he doesn't want the energy vampires around.
04:22I think that's why C.J. Gardner-Johnson was let go very early in the season.
04:27D'Amico doesn't want to deal with energy vampires.
04:30And that's something that over time builds.
04:32And I think they've gotten a lot closer to whatever his ideal version of it is over the last couple
04:38years.
04:38I agree with you.
04:40I think that the 2000, I'll call it like the 2009 through 2012 Texans.
04:47I know they started making the playoffs in 2011.
04:50But that was largely the same nucleus of guys in that period.
04:55And I remember, you know, covering that team, I think even still to this day,
04:59because a lot of those guys still live here in Houston.
05:01And you run into them and you see, that was a very, very tight-knit group.
05:05You know, that group with Schaub as the quarterback and you had Andre Johnson and Owen Daniels,
05:11that whole offensive line was all guys that played together for at least three or four,
05:17sometimes five years in the case of some guys, Eric Winston, Chris Myers.
05:21And then on the defensive side, hell, D'Amico was one of them on the defensive side of the ball.
05:25You know, maybe D'Amico got some of the culture lessons from playing early on with those Texans team.
05:29Who knows?
05:29You were in the building.
05:31You were with Kubiak the first year he was here.
05:35Do you notice something like that as a veteran player when you get a new first-time head coach like
05:39that,
05:39of him trying to establish a culture?
05:41I thought the thing that I was really impressed with by Kubiak was that first year, you know,
05:47he would talk about what he expected from his veteran leaders and the way he wanted the team to operate.
05:55And it was cool for me because I got injured that year relatively early on.
06:01And then I just, I wasn't around the team a lot because I despised the defensive coordinator so much.
06:05Right.
06:05So, but, so when I came back in 2012, it was really cool to kind of see that a lot
06:13of the things that he had been talking about early in that first season,
06:16I felt like, oh, that's happening now.
06:19The level of veteran leadership on this team, I can tell, is a lot more like what Kubiak was talking
06:25about.
06:25So, yeah, yeah, I definitely noticed that his, you know, kind of him as a former player who was a
06:32head coach,
06:33his spin on it or the way he approached it was that he really is, he really respected the value
06:39of having really good veteran leadership.
06:41And I thought that they had that.
06:42Yeah.
06:43I, you know, I think it's, I think you, you framed it perfectly.
06:46I think it's, it's definitely the best it's been since that era of Texans football, that 2011, 2012.
06:51And it's just, it's crazy to think how quickly it flipped once D'Amico got here.
06:55You know, he's, he's the, he's the catalyst for all that.
06:58We heard Dalton Schultz say that to Jim Rome last week.
07:00It's, you know, that's D'Amico is the, is the big catalyst for all that.
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