- 2 days ago
Seth and Sean engage in some hype for Reed Blankenship by reacting to his hype reel as well as the Texans WR room after hearing Steve Smith's comp for Jayden Higgins.
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00:00Reed Blankenship. All right, let's get into some Texans here. The Texans put out a Reed
00:03Blankenship sizzle reel. I did the thing, Seth, that a radio host should do, which is I'm watching
00:08this video. I'm like, this is a cool video. And I said, is there any way to bring this on
00:12the show?
00:13And then I played it again and closed my eyes and said, is this good audio? I thought it was
00:17good audio. It's a sizzle reel of Reed Blankenship making a bunch of plays, saying a bunch of things,
00:23putting his H's up at the end. I am very excited about this signing that they took the one
00:30glaring hole on the defense and plugged it in with this guy.
00:33They went ahead and signed safety Reed Blankenship. The former Philadelphia Eagle will now join the
00:40Texans secondary. They're getting a player that loves to play football. That Reed Blankenship,
00:45I can watch him all night long. And a guy that studies the game really well and has the IQ
00:50to
00:51communicate and get guys lined up. I was able to talk to D'Amico before it all went down and
00:56just
00:56hearing his words, just hearing that I feel like he's more of a player coach. And that's what I
01:01wanted. I feel like a safety is the quarterback of the defense. So you got to direct traffic and
01:08become that air traffic control type guy. Like I said, we just get guys lined up and play hard.
01:14I'm a Southern guy at heart. Coming down here, it feels like home. Watching the Texans defense when
01:19it pops up on the screen, it's just, you know, you got guys flying around. You know, you got a
01:23bunch
01:23of dogs on the defense, but I just want to step in. Don't want to step on anybody's toes. Just
01:27continue
01:28what they're, what they're doing, what they're building. H's up, H-Town. Yeah. See, he knew,
01:33he knew to put the H's up at the end, probably prompted, but it's still, it felt organic to me.
01:37A lot of the guys, you know, I was really hesitant to throw up the H's for a long time
01:41because I was worried that I wasn't getting the angle right. Yeah. On my, on my first. You were
01:46overthinking it very much. I was very much. So between my index finger and my pinky finger,
01:51I didn't know. I was like, do I, do I splay him a little bit? Do I make it look
01:54like I just do it
01:55now? I don't care. You should. I've shown caution to the wind. Sometimes you just got to say WTF,
02:01Seth, throw up those H's. My life has changed immeasurably since I, since I started doing that.
02:08I stopped thinking about the H's and I just started throwing them up. Yeah. It is there for a couple
02:12of
02:12reasons. One is just, okay. Do you have a solid starter that can start opposite of Kalen Bullock? Yes,
02:19you have that. Very much. And then B it's, do you have a veteran player that's known as a guy
02:25that man
02:25in, in Philadelphia, they ask their defensive backs to do a lot of thinking. There's a lot of
02:31adjustments pre-snap and within the play and everything. That's just the way Vic Fangio
02:35runs the show. So D'Amico is the opposite. D'Amico wants guys. He wants to drill them like crazy
02:42to get
02:42them really, really good at their responsibilities, but doesn't want guys to be thinking all that much
02:47because that can slow you down. So I think Reed Blankenship comes from an environment where
02:51he's going to be able to come in here and maybe play a little bit more free, but also at
02:56the same
02:56time is kind of had it drilled into his head about everything pre-snap. And it, and sometimes as a
03:03safety, especially a free safety, which we see, we see Kalen Bullock more in that role, but still,
03:09but as a safety, sometimes your responsibility is to understand what other people are screwing up
03:16their responsibilities. I remember talking to Wade Phillips about this and cause there was that,
03:21he and I were watching a play. It was when we were doing work at the old CSN Houston.
03:26And, and I, and I was like, so this is the corner's fault here. Right. And, and Wade's awesome.
03:32Wade's like, well, you know, technically, but it's a safety's job to make the cornerback, right.
03:37And the safety didn't make him right here. So when he had a, when he should have seen what was
03:42going
03:42on. So Wade, I felt like Wade would have, you know, obviously you got to coach up the cornerback,
03:47but like, you know, cornerbacks are cornerbacks and then safeties are supposed to be the smart
03:51guys in the room. So you want the veteran smart guys that can see everything, catch out of their
03:56peripheral when a guy's lost leverage or something and, and make everybody else. Right. And I think
04:02Reed Blankenship is kind of that type of player that you take a Texans defense that was top five in
04:07just about every statistical category, except for explosive plays allowed. And hopefully helps
04:13kind of maybe smooth out some of the rough edges in that regard. Kalen Bullock too, I think is going
04:19to develop into that type of player, but he's, he's young and it has nothing to do with, it has
04:25nothing to do whether he's smart enough to do it or anything. He's just, he hasn't had as many reps,
04:29you know, Reed Blankenship's probably had twice as many reps in his career as Kalen Bullock has at
04:33this point. So Kalen's going to continue to get better at that. And then Reed Blankenship is a
04:38veteran player who hopefully can just be there for 17 games. Yeah. The, the, it kind of shows you
04:43how good the defense is. Like I am super excited about Reed Blankenship and that signing, especially
04:48with the price they got him at. And he's probably the ninth best player on that defense. You know,
04:53like he's, I'm stoked. This is a signing. I'm most excited about where, where'd you get him on the
04:59defensive side of the ball? The guy's a strong safety. He's amazing. He's going to be really good for
05:02the Texans. Where is he in the pecking order of players on the team? He's probably like the 10th
05:07best defensive player on the team. You know, it's really, if you think about it, it's almost like
05:11a car that's, that's super fast and running really well. And you're doing all of this with a bum spark
05:16plug that, okay. If you just, you just swap out that spark plug and all of a sudden all those
05:24pistons are really humming. Yeah. It's, I hesitate to say, okay, wow, they're going to be even better
05:29than they were last year because they were lucky with injuries last year. Yes. So, so if you had
05:35taken, if you had just said, you know what, we're going to run it back. Let's say it was the
05:38exact
05:38same defensive tackles and they got all those guys back and you're going to run it back and maybe
05:43they stay healthier than they did last year. You're still, you got to account for the fact
05:48that at some point this year, most likely one or two starters are going to go on IR. It's just
05:54not
05:54going to be such a glistening stretch of healthy and consistent play by all of your starters.
05:59So this, this combats that a little bit because you know, if you come back this year, you're still,
06:04if you still had issues at that one safety spot and then meanwhile, you also miss a couple of
06:10starters for good chunks of the season, it's not going to be as good a defense. So this year,
06:15hopefully, you know, combined with hopefully better depth and some of the younger guys being a year
06:20older, they could conceivably be better. Yeah, no doubt. Let's flip over to the offensive side
06:26of the ball. Here was Dalton Schultz on Texans All Access. He was asked about year two with Nick
06:32Kaley, year four with CJ Stroud. How about year four with CJ, year two with Nick Kaley, the continuity,
06:38a lot of good playmakers coming back. There is a lot of good playmakers coming back and I'm excited
06:44just to see kind of like Kale settle in and bring some new wrinkles in and like see what,
06:51see how we kind of develop this stuff. You know what I mean? There's always a big jump from any
06:55offense from the first year you do it to the second year. And I'm just, I'm excited to see
07:00what kind of, uh, what kind of comes out in these, in these next few months as we get into
07:04OTAs.
07:06The, uh, the, the Nick Kaley in the second year effect, and I call that an effect almost as if
07:13it's going to be a good thing or something. We still don't know. Um, I think that if you watch
07:18last year, it was really a process of figuring out a couple of things is a, who are our offensive
07:26linemen? That was kind of an issue. And B, what are our offensive linemen good at? And what can we
07:31do
07:31with Woody Marks when he's the running back, all of that? What the, what you would hope is that
07:37you go through that process every year where you kind of try to figure out, okay, who are we this
07:42year? What are we going to be good at? They've got a better idea of what some of the guys
07:46can do well.
07:47I mean, with Braden Smith and Wyatt Teller, regardless of how well they perform individually
07:53this year, you've got a good idea of what they can and cannot do. Um, and I do think that
07:58a lot of
07:59the smash mouth talk that we heard during training camp that the Texans tried over and over again,
08:04and just couldn't get it working during the season, but then you started to see it catch
08:08on towards the end. I think you start in on that process right from training camp this year,
08:13you're going to be able to play a more smash mouth version of football. Yeah. It has. It's just,
08:17they're like, they're, they've got the better, they've got better guys in there to do it on the,
08:22on the offensive line and in the, in the backfield with the running back. It cost them the season last
08:26year because that, that, that was what the issue was early when they were going three and five or
08:32whatever it was to start the season. The issue was on the offensive side of the ball. They finished
08:3612 and five, but they were losing games because of the offense. If they win a couple of those games
08:41and they're not going through this transition period with the offense, maybe you're playing at
08:45home in the divisional round instead of going to New England. Honestly, we kind of jokingly said
08:50after the Patriots game, man, if you just kneel on the ball, or if you just had Cade Stover do
08:56the
08:56tush push every play, you, you, you probably win that game. And I said, it kind of is an exaggeration.
09:02I started thinking about the Cade Stover part of it. I'm not, I, I'm not so sure that wouldn't
09:07have worked there, but, um, uh, one of our listeners, big ounce on Twitter had a really
09:14good reply to this next, uh, TJ Houshmanzada. Oh, this cut we're about to play. Yeah. Let's play
09:20this from Houshmanzada. Okay. And, uh, big ounce had the perfect response. This was TJ Houshmanzada,
09:25former receiver on the speakeasy with Emmanuel Acho talking about CJ Stroud. All they got
09:30to do is not lose the game on offense. Yeah. And CJ knows that he, he knows that. And the
09:36weapons that they have on offense, it's almost hard to kind of rein it in because their receiving
09:41core really good led by Nico Collins. Can you stay healthy? If he doesn't stay healthy,
09:48you still got Higgins there. You still got Hutchinson there. You got, got tank Dale coming
09:53back. Finally, you traded for my gut. You got guys that can really go offensively. And so for
10:01me, it's can the coordinator and CJ get on the same page because there's just no way in the playoffs.
10:09We had these type of turnovers are this late in the season. And so for the Texas defense is going
10:15with number one this year, there'll be number one next year, but now the office going to have
10:19do they part. Okay. What do you do? Who's the Twitter follower?
10:23Big ounce underscore big ounce. And actually it was a different clip of Houshmanzada where I think
10:27he said something like, you know, CJ could have just kneeled on the ball and big ounce said they
10:31literally couldn't run the ball in that game. Like that's that. And that is, that's where I was,
10:36I was, I was joking when I said they could kneel on the ball. That was the huge problem really
10:40in
10:41that game and cold weather. And where I give, I don't give CJ a break for the interceptions,
10:46especially, especially the six, right. I don't give him a break on that, but you do have to
10:52remember, man, they couldn't run the ball. They were getting stuffed, just running into a brick
10:58wall at the line of scrimmage. And that makes everything more difficult for everybody to operate.
11:03And that you're just, it wasn't as simple as, Oh, if they just run the ball, every single play
11:08that they were going to win that football game, the, the, the, the sum total of the offense
11:14with or without CJ Stroud, it was rough because of it, because they couldn't run the ball in that
11:18weather. Yeah. I don't have the box score in front of me, but you can check me on this audience
11:23and
11:23Seth, if you want to, cause I have a committed to memory. I will never forget looking at the box
11:27score and seeing 14 carries 17 yards for Woody marks. Yeah. I can guarantee, I can virtually guarantee
11:36you that's what his numbers were in that game. Cause it was so painful to watch. It was looking
11:40at the box score right now. Give it to me. Woody marks 14 carries 17 yards. Thank you. Is that
11:50the,
11:51that was the, who wants to be a millionaire? Oh yeah. That was good. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Nick Chubb.
11:56Yep. Four carries for 14 yards. Oh my God. CJ Stroud obliterated his previous rushing stats that he'd gotten
12:05after his concussion. Cause remember after the Steelers game, it was, he had rushed 17 times for
12:1118 yards or something in that 19 carries for 20 yards. That's another one. That's what it was.
12:16Yeah. Yes. Uh, in the Patriots game, two carries for 11 yards with a long of 10, he had that
12:22one,
12:2210 yard, uh, that's called a scamper is what we call that. Cade Stover though. Cade Stover two carries
12:29for six yards. See, they should have, they should have Stover pushed it more. Should have just kept
12:34put Cade Stover between the guards, baby. If you wanted to, if you wanted the tush push band,
12:41if the Texans had just lined up Cade Stover for 30 carries in that game and one, because of it,
12:46I think that, you know, would have, you know, would have been lobbying to ban it at that point.
12:50Like quarterbacks. Yes. Oh yeah. All right. Seriously. Seriously. Look, look, uh, this,
12:57uh, this can't be a recipe for winning. We need to be important again. Um, so that TJ
13:02Huchman's out of clip that we did play hot that, that had about as high a praise as I've heard
13:07anybody have for the non Nico Collins weapons on the Houston Texans. When you listen to him,
13:14they go, he brings up Nico. And then one of the other guys in the room says he's injured a
13:18lot.
13:18And he says, but yeah, but look, they got Jaden Higgins and they got tank Dell coming back,
13:22which, you know, we'll see. They got to, they traded for David Montgomery.
13:26He names Xavier Hutchinson. That's as enthusiastic as I've heard anybody about
13:30the Texans weapons, non Nico Collins. Uh, okay. You're going to hear somebody even more enthusiastic.
13:37Okay. Because Steve Smith. Hey Ben, do you have the Steve Smith creepy voice talking to Bryce Young,
13:43uh, anywhere up there? Not right now. Is that a drop? Okay. Oh yeah.
13:49We'll have to play that. If we can, uh, the first, okay. So this is Steve. Sorry,
13:53Seth. The creepiest drop we have is Peter Schrager saying the Texans are a fun young team.
13:58Texans are a fun young team. That's as creepy as we get. Yeah. Steve Smith talking to Bryce Young
14:02was creepier. Cause he was doing it to his face. This is Steve Smith getting kind of creepy about
14:07Higgins route running just the way he runs his routes, how it gets in and out of breaks.
14:12He's just a smooth route runner. And he's a big man who can drop his weight and get in and
14:18out of
14:18breaks pretty impressively is he's been working on that, right? Big guys don't drop their weight and
14:24shift and become shifty. Like he has and learning multiple positions in the beginning does slow you
14:34down because you're thinking and it's going to take a little bit of time for you to get more
14:38comfortable. But once you get comfortable, once you know what's going on, that's why things have
14:43opened up for him. He gets so horny talking about receivers, man, drops it. Like it's hot.
14:52Okay. So this is the cop. I had said this yesterday, but maybe people don't remember or didn't hear it.
14:57Some people don't listen to the show for all four hours. This is Steve Smith on his 89 podcast with
15:02our friend James Palmer. It's a really good podcast. Yeah. This is Steve Smith with a,
15:08an interesting comp for Jaden Higgins. And I said, beginning of the season,
15:12he was very robotic. He was, he was just running his routes. Oh, they said run this. And then as
15:20he
15:20started, he started to get more comfortable. He started to get back to what he was in college,
15:25where he started to put his style and his flavor on the route that he was running.
15:29And all of a sudden it just things start opening up. Shorehands. Some people would put them in the
15:41same category. I don't know if I would yet, but he damn sure has those traits of shorehands like a
15:50Larry Fitzgerald. Oh, right. You just know when you're throwing a football, snag it high points,
15:57the ball does a great job. See this, this needs to happen now in training camp. If we interview
16:02Jaden Higgins, are you the next Larry Fitzgerald? He needs to be, we need to see if he's seen this
16:07clip and see if he exercises humility when asked about that clip, about being comped to a future
16:16hall of famer, Larry. We'll have to, uh, and we'll miss, we'll, uh, we'll mischaracterize it.
16:21We'll say, Hey, Steve Smith said you are the next Larry Fitzgerald.
16:24Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's important to mischaracterize. Take it out of context. Yeah.
16:30It's a, and Jaden Higgins first nine games, he had 29 targets, 19 receptions. Um, and then, uh,
16:40you know, the, the big one was that the Buffalo game. Well, the Buffalo game, he was targeted nine
16:44times for four receptions, but you know, like, uh, and then the Indian, Indianapolis game,
16:51I think he just, he started to his targets and receptions didn't necessarily go way up,
16:57but I think the CJ trust factor did go way up. And that's where I think that he just became
17:04more
17:04fully integrated in the offense. And with, with Higgins, you know, one thing that I was concerned
17:09about, I don't, I don't have concerns the right word. I thought it was interesting that when he
17:14was going through the draft process, I saw an interview with him where he said he liked to
17:17watch a lot of Keenan Allen film. And the thing about Keenan Allen is he's a little bit unorthodox.
17:24And that's not always awesome, especially with a young quarterback and, or the type of system where
17:30you really want precision out of your wide receivers early in the season, you see Jaden Higgins,
17:36you know, kind of add a little line up to some of his route running and he pulled like a
17:40little
17:40hezzy step and everything. And there were throws that looked like they were errant throws from CJ
17:45Stroud, but that when I would talk to receivers about it, the receivers would say like, nah,
17:52Higgins got to be more precise with that. CJ's expecting him to be a yard wider by that point
17:56in the drop and everything. And I think that's part of what Jaden Higgins had to learn was,
18:01all right, there's a, there's a place, there's a place for a little bit of improvisation,
18:06but first and foremost, you got to be a really crisp and consistent route runner.
18:10And I think that's where CJ started to trust him as his Jaden Higgins started to get that message.
18:14Yeah. And if he fixes that this year, if he's more on point, you know, kind of like we're talking
18:18about the offense as a whole, just coming into the season a little bit more crisp. And, you know,
18:23we were talking about more about the run game before, um, but guys like Jaden Higgins and Jalen
18:27Knoll, you know, the, the learning curve, them being on a learning curve was yet another thing
18:33you can, you can point to as to maybe why the offense was slow getting out of the gates last
18:37year. You don't have to worry about that this year.
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