Rookie contract hero: Deshaun Watson is everything Bill O’Brien needed to save his job

Bill O’Brien’s head coaching tenure in Houston has been mostly good, occasionally terrible, and with a baseline reading that clocks in somewhere around “mediocre.” His teams have been good enough to crash the playoffs and win AFC South titles, but even a dominant defense hasn’t been enough to make the Texans anything other than an easy out in the AFC’s Divisional Round.

One man can change all that. And, to O’Brien’s delight, he’s the same guy that can do this:

Deshaun Watson isn’t the only reason a Texans team that went 4-12 last season is in the running for home-field advantage in the AFC heading into Week 17 (it’s gonna take a whole lot of weird circumstance to get there, but it’s possible). A revitalized J.J. Watt and the high-impact linebacking trio of Benardrick McKinney, Zach Cunningham, and Jadeveon Clowney have made the Houston defense formidable again. Lamar Miller is quietly churning out nearly five yards per carry. DeAndre Hopkins has been DeAndre Hopkins.

But in the middle of this year’s resurgence is Watson, the eye of the swirling hurricane that is the Texans’ pass blocking. Few players in the league, save for Andrew Luck, have had the opportunity to see just how valuable they’ve been in 2018 by missing hefty chunks of 2017. And with Watson in the lineup, a team destined for a top 10 draft pick now looks like a legitimate Super Bowl contender.

Watson’s first season was the kind of otherworldly effort small children in Texas will roll their eyes about after hearing its story in hallowed tones at family gatherings in 2070. The former Clemson star erased all doubt about whether his high-impact playmaking would translate against the more athletic defenses of the NFL. His pro debut and the first career start that followed set the foundation of a cautious mobile quarterback.

But two games was all it took to prove swapping him in for incumbent starter Tom Savage was replacing water with gasoline. Watson quickly became the savior of the Texans and fantasy rosters across the universe.

His second career start, in the hostile confines of Gillette Stadium, saw him push the defending champion Patriots to the brink of defeat in an eventual 36-33 loss. In the four games that followed, he threw 16 touchdown passes and added a 17th on the ground.

And then he tore his ACL, and a Savage-T.J. Yates platoon at quarterback guided the team to a 1-8 finish. Any cold comfort from that death spiral was wiped away by the fact the top-five draft pick Watson’s injury guaranteed had already been traded to the Browns in the deal that allowed Houston to scoop up the dynamic quarterback with the 12th pick of the 2017 NFL Draft.

The Texans had the latitude to fire their head coach last winter, but they didn’t. Instead, O’Brien survived a four-win season thanks to the potential of his budding young quarterback. An 0-3 start to 2018 cranked up the BTUs under his seat once again — and then an increasingly comfortable Watson showed what Houston was capable of with a mostly healthy roster.

The confluence of Watson’s growing strength and a weak midseason schedule sent the Texans from the AFC South basement to a spot competing for a postseason bye. The team’s scoring rose from 19.7 points per contest in the three-game losing streak that kicked off 2018 to 27 in the nine-game winning streak that followed.

During that span, Watson’s tried to do less, but made his passes and scrambles count more. Here’s how his numbers stack up from his team’s start to its past dozen games.

Extrapolated over 16 games, Watson’s resurgence would put him at a 4,000-yard, 28-touchdown season with a 108.3 passer rating. Those aren’t quite MVP numbers in the midst of a season where quarterbacks are recording 300+ yard games with absurd regularity, but it’s certainly strong enough to put him in the running. Watson hasn’t been the high-impact player he was as a rookie — those numbers were always going to be unsustainable — but he’s cut down his interception rate from 3.9 percent to 1.9 percent. The end result has been a much more stable quarterback who can still turn on the jets for big plays downfield, just not if it means forcing the ball into a bad situation.

That midseason strength has manifested in some major performances this year. He churned out 416 total yards and three touchdowns in an otherwise ugly overtime win in Week 4 against the Colts. A 16-of-20, 239-yard, five-touchdown performance marked a blowout win over the briefly contending Dolphins. He added 280 total yards and three touchdowns (two passing, one rushing) in a vital 34-17 victory over AFC South rival Tennessee.

And, if last week’s losing effort in Philadelphia is any indication, he’s only getting stronger.

Hopkins has toiled away in Houston for six seasons, recording three Pro Bowl invites and a pair of All-Pro honors for a team that’s never advanced as far as an AFC Championship Game. As a rookie his quarterback was Matt Schaub, who fell off a statistical cliff that season and played worse than a debuting Case Keenum.

Keenum went 0-8 that year.

This set the stage for the next four years of his career. The Texans maxed out at nine wins while Hopkins did his best to elevate players like Ryan Fitzpatrick and Brian Hoyer, either of whom can be reasonably argued as the best non-Watson quarterback with whom he’s ever played. In between those journeyman backups cosplaying as starters came appearances from Yates, Savage, Brandon Weeden, and Ryan Mallett. Before Watson’s arrival, the player he’d caught the most career passes from was Brock Osweiler.

The fact Hopkins was able to record a single 1,000-yard season with that lineup is impressive, but the fact he had three 1,200+ yard campaigns with that depth chart of jamokes is amazing. And now with Watson targeting him as more than just a wing-and-a-prayer deep threat, he’s better than ever.

DeAndre Hopkins deserves to thrive. Deshaun Watson is giving him more opportunities than ever before.

Watson’s dirt-cheap rookie contract is already paying dividends. Watson’s cap hit over this season and the next is a shade under $7 million. That’s peanuts for a starting quarterback — especially on a roster where Hopkins, JJ Watt, and six other players all cost $7 million or more in cap space in 2018 alone.

Watson may only make $6.9 million in 2018 and 2019, but his level of play suggests he’d be worth roughly $50 million on the open market. The gap between his performance and his salary has created at least $43 million of excess value, and those savings are going to be paramount to extending Houston’s window of contention. In 2019, the extra cap space he creates could be the value that allows the team to sign Jadeveon Clowney to either a contract extension or one-year franchise tag deal that allows him to prove he can reach his All-Pro potential in Houston. His bargain salary could be the leverage his team needs to find him a third receiving weapon to accompany Hopkins and Will Fuller.

His status as a former first-round pick also locks him into a below-market team option for his fifth season as a pro — the Texans would only need to pay him $13.79 million in 2021 to keep him from free agency. That’s a boon in a season where the club could be facing a financial crunch, but it’s unlikely Houston lets him even get that close to free agency. O’Brien and general manager Brian Gaine will be eager to lock Watson down before he takes the field in that fifth-year option season.

Retaining the electric quarterback’s services won’t be cheap. Decent quarterbacks reset the “highest-paid player in league history” record all the time, which means even guys whose ceilings are set closer to “good” than “great” are able to lock down nine-figure contracts without much worry.

Watson’s going to have to answer concerns about his durability — even without his 2017 ACL tear, mobile quarterbacks always earn more scrutiny due to the wear and tear that comes with four or five extra hits per game — but he’ll also have an extra arrow in his quiver when it comes to negotiations. He does things players like Derek Carr, Matthew Stafford, and Jimmy Garoppolo, all of whom have inked record-setting contracts in recent years, simply can’t.

2018’s highest-paid quarterback is Aaron Rodgers, who reset the market in a major way with four-year, $134 million extension before the season. He’ll take up between 14 and 16 percent of his team’s estimated cap space over each those four years — a hefty tax for a franchise player, but obviously a justifiable one for a player so strongly embedded as the identity of his team.

That will be the benchmark for which Watson’s agents aim when his team meets with the Texans’ reps to hammer out a deal. Watson has been the much-needed rain in a desert of poor quarterback play, the end to a drought that started when Schaub disintegrated in 2013. The young quarterback doesn’t have Rodgers’ bonafides, but if the choice comes down to paying a franchise QB like a franchise QB or letting him leave, Houston won’t balk at the former.

The salary cap is set to rise from $177.2 million to between $187 and $190 million in 2019. Assuming steady growth of approximately seven percent for the foreseeable future, Houston will have somewhere around $217.5 million to spend for the 2021 season. Watson’s Rodgers-esque deal would clock in at five years and $170 million, with $95 guaranteed — a slight concession in guaranteed cash due to the QB’s limited experience so far.

That’s so, so very much money, but that’s what it’s going to cost for a top five quarterback when the salary cap is comfortably more than $200 million. In fact, an accelerated QB market, kicked into gear by Rodgers’ massive extension, could wind up pushing Watson into the $180 million range. With two more seasons before Houston starts thinking extension, there are plenty of ways this could unfold.

The Texans will be keeping an eye on their cap sheet in the interim; not to afford Watson, but to surround him with talented players while he’s still dirt cheap. So far it’s worked out — and there’s only room for the club to get better in 2019 and 2020.

Other rookie contract studs who upped their value in Week 16:

Chris Carson, RB, Seahawks (116 rushing yards, 2 TDs in win over Chiefs)

Robby Anderson, WR, Jets (140 receiving yards, 1 TD in loss to Packers)

Leighton Vander Esch, LB, Cowboys (15 tackles in win over Buccaneers)

Sony Michel, RB, Patriots (116 rushing yards, 1 TD in win over Bills)

Zach Cunningham, LB, Texans (14 tackles, 1 forced fumble in loss to Eagles)

Sam Darnold, QB, Jets (343 passing yards, 3 TDs in loss to Packers)

Week 1: Michael Thomas

Week 2: Matt Breida

Week 3: Myles Garrett

Week 4: Patrick Mahomes II, Tyreek Hill, and Kareem Hunt

Week 5: T.J. Watt

Week 6: Saquon Barkley

Week 7: Darius Leonard

Week 8: James Conner

Week 9: Marcus Peters

Week 10: Mitchell Trubisky

Week 11: Jadeveon Clowney

Week 12: Marcus Mariota

Week 13: Tarik Cohen

Week 14: Nick Mullens

Week 15: Chris Jones