The Matt Thomas Show with Ross - Brian T. Smith On What We Could See Sunday Vs The Titans

Episode Date: December 27, 2019

This is the Matt Thomas Show. 202 on the Matt Thomas show for a Friday. We have the best of believe it or not, which Ross is going to work on, and we'll have it for you coming up in about 50 minutes from now. Right now it's our weekly Friday visit with our good friend Brian T. Smith from the Houston Chronicle. All right, BTS.S. So the Texans are in the locker room, and they've got the big screen television on, and they just watched the Kansas City Chiefs secure the number three spot with a 27 to 10 win over the L.A. charges.

Who's not playing and who is playing at 325 on Sunday afternoon? I don't know why in the world Deshawn Watson would take a snap for you if they're locked into the four-scene mat. Sounds like DeAndre Hopkins is sick. If he's not 100%, why have him play? And you can just go down the list from there. I do believe in momentum. I believe in rhythm. We have the evidence, which is damning last year, that the Texans did not have any rhythm going into the playoffs, and they were down 210 to Indianapolis, and they were boot off the field. But the Texans also had rhythm not that long ago after beating the Patriots on Sunday night football, and what happened? Denver happened, and they've been inconsistent all year.

So one game isn't going to change anything. Tennessee definitely has something to play for on Sunday. If the Chiefs win, I would not allow Deshaun Watson to touch the field because far too much of the fake and the downside, the potential downside far outweighs a little upside. And, you know, and I will give Bill O'Brien credit on this. You know, he wants to win the game. I don't think there's any doubt they would like to win it.

But he has been asked a variety of different ways about who's playing and who's not playing, and I think he's in a very effective job of not putting his foot in his mouth, not lying, but also not giving away many details. There is such a difference on whether or not what you play for and who plays based on what happens in the previous game. I think it's a no-brainer. And I think Bill O'Brien understands that, Bill, or Brian, that there's no way in the world that the meaningful starters who have been nicked up under any circumstance get valuable playing time this Sunday. No, and Bill set it up perfectly, and he obviously been reading the Chronicle,

because I wrote about this earlier in the week before Bill started saying that. Initially, he said, we want to win this game. If they need to win the game, they should play to win the game. If they do not need to win the game, you protect Deshawn Watson. If they're playing Buffalo, you need a healthy emphasis on healthy Deshawn Watson against Ed Oliver and Company Energy Stadium. They win that game. That would be a tough one, but I would pick them if Deshawn Watson,

healthy, everybody's healthy. They win that game. And then, you know, you have Deshawn Watson and DeAndre Hopkins and potentially maybe the return of Wolf Fuller. You have Carlos Hyde, Duke Johnson, a steadily improve up the line, a good defense with potentially

JJ Watt. That's an interesting team. I mean, it doesn't guarantee anything, Matt, and they were pretty good last year and just flat-faced against the Colta Energy. But you would think at some point they will break through in the playoffs, and I mean really break through with Watson and Hopkins,

whether it's Bill O'Brien's a coach or somebody else. Maybe this is the year. Deshawn has to be healthy, obviously, for that to happen. I'm going to give you the question, and the answer is C. So I'm giving you it ahead of time. J.J. Watts return in the first playoff game. Either A is going to be something that's going to lift the franchise

to extraordinary levels, and everybody's going to be super motivated, and it's going to be the J.J. Watt that intercepts the pass against Andy Dalton, the playoff game almost a decade ago and becomes a megastar. Option B is he re-injures himself. He walks to the sideline, helmet in hand, head down, clinical depression kicks in. Or C, he's out there.

We get fired it up. But at the end of the day, he is still recovering from a peck injury. So tell me what you expect a week from Saturday when they play that early game against the Buffalo Bills. Yeah, that's a hard one to read because it was supposed to be season ending, and JJ's dealt with multiple season ending injuries, major injuries

in three of the last four years, and he was good this year. He wasn't the JJ Watt from whatever, 2000, it's hard to remember anymore. 2013, 2014, you know, the one-man wrecking crew, the next Lawrence Taylor. He was good this year. He wasn't that guy. Somebody had that fast will tell you he was fantastic,

but he wasn't single-handedly destroying offenses like he did before. That's a hard reason. I think if anything, if you're JJ Watt and the Texans, anything is a plus, right? If he's playing and he's healthy and he plays all four quarters and he disrupts some plays and he gets the crowd into it at home and the Texans win that game, he'll have played a significant part of that. And if he can play in the divisional round and he's healthy and he can get to Tom Brady,

Lamar Jackson, or whatever it's going to be, you will take that if you're the Texan. So it's a two-part solution to this. He has to remain healthy when he's playing for the. rest of the season. It doesn't backfire. And he actually does something for the Texans. But I think if JJ Watts on the field and the medical staff and Bill O'Brien give him the thumbs up, JJ Watts doing something significant on the field. Brian T. Smith with us from the Houston Chronicle here on Sports Talk 790. What else has piqued your interest this week? Are you finding that the one-person podcast about

Russell Westbrook being traded now that every NBA blog in America is grabbing some of this and saying, oh, the Rockets are we trying to move him? Yeah, the Rockets to me all season have just been inconsistent. I mean, I think that's the one thing. And the one thing I will never do in the NBA unless it's a playoff game, but in the one through 82, in the regular season, I've learned for years to not overreact to one game. I mean, they can lose that Warriors game that was a horrendous,

embarrassing nationally televised loss, but it's one of 82, and they had actually been putting it together Westbrook and Hardin before that. It's going to be the long play. I think the thing that gets really interesting about all of it is, you know, is Tillman Furtita and how does he view this? Darryl Morey, on and on and on. Those are the things that really matter. They're not going to overreact to one game, and I don't see them in any way deciding to trade Russell Westbrook just because, you know, a one loss on television.

Yeah, I just, I think it's just so easy. It's like, you know, somebody called it today, got to fire this, got to fire that. Well, you weren't, nobody was calling that after they beat the Clippers. on the LA home floor. That's how NBA fans are. It's so much of, well, you don't ever give them credit for beating somebody really, really good, yet you want to fire them when things are bad.

And I think, frankly, Bill O'Brien has gone through a lot of that this year. Yeah, I mean, the thing with the NFL's week to week, and so the media and the fans and the players and the coaches themselves, they go more on a week-to-week type of roller coaster type, you know, bouncing around, pinballing around. If you're Darryl's, if you're Tom and Fratita, If you're Tad Brown, if you're the Rockets, you've been through all this. You know it's at stake.

You know it's pretty much championship robust. And, Matt, it was before the season started. So, you know, Westbrook has been good. He hasn't been great. Has he been better than Chris Paul was? Yes, in some ways, no and others. This team can play better. But they were playing better before the Warriors game.

If they don't blow that Warriors game, everyone's like, hey, great road trip. They're starting to find it. you know, that the NBA season has now really started. Again, I'm not going to overreact to one game. And, you know, it's the NBA and the Twitterverse. It's all you need to do is say, hey, someone might get traded and 50 blogs, you know, turn up and we're talking about on talk radio. So until there's some real smoke with that, I don't believe it at all.

All right. You know, one thing that Ross and I have not neglected today, and it's really our fault, we have not talked about the national semifinals of the college football playoff this weekend. Big games, Matt. There really are good games. I think Oklahoma probably is, you know, if there was one fish out of water, that would be them. But Jalen Hertz knows what is like to play in the most important games of the life.

So to think that they can't at least be competitive for a while might be foolish on people's parts. But LSU, I mean, this, and again, we have so many LSU fans that listen to show, this might be the greatest LSU team in the history of LSU football, which is saying something for a very proud program. Right now it is. They need to win two more games. If they went two more games, Joe Burrow will have a statue outside of Tiger Stadium by February, and he will become the governor of Louisiana.

It's not that hard to be the governor of Louisiana, but he will be the governor of Louisiana. He'll be the president of Louisiana. I mean, Joe Burrow, E-A-U-X, is on the verge of doing just the absolutely unthinkable. I've covered a couple of LSU games this year. I was at Tiger Stadium when they destroyed, emphasis on destroyed A&M. Joe Burrow can do no wrong, but look, you're going to have a layoff. They're starting running back and dealing with an injury issue, and they need to find a way to win Oklahoma, and then there's going to be another layoff.

The college football playoff is weird. I mean, just look at Alabama and Clemson last year. Look at somehow some of these situations have gone. So LSU needs to win. I think LSU wins. The one that's really hard for me to pick Matt is Clemson in Ohio State. I mean, Clemson is just sitting there, and they're either going to be for real. and very dangerous, or they're going to get bowled over by Ohio State.

Ohio State has injury issues. So I'm really looking forward to Saturday, sitting down, watching a couple, hopefully, good college playoff games. But I will be surprised if LSU is not playing for the National Championship in New Orleans on January 13th. And it's so funny because Davos Sweeney has gone with his whole storyline of all year. No one's respected us. No one's done this. No one's done that.

You know, I don't know if it's self-motivation for his own squad, but Clemson is certainly always in the short list of National College Football Conversation, and they've got a quarterback who will be, not this year, but next year, the number one overall pick in the NFL draft. So plenty of respect. And Trevor Lawrence did it last year. I mean, Joe Burrough has been incredible, but he's still got to prove it in the next two games with, you know, basically a month layoff, a month plus.

Trevor Lawrence has done it before at the highest level. So I think there's still a lot to be written and said the next two games, but, you know, 15 and O, Joe Burrow, LSU. He will soon be, if that happened, he'll be the governor of Louisiana. We'll leave it that. BTS, we'll talk again next Friday. Looking forward to the early first wildcard game, Buffalo versus Houston. Agreed?

That's probably going to have, I'll be, I will be shocked if Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reed in Kansas City lose to the Chargers at home. I mean, that's got a 1% shot of happening with everything that's on the line. So, yeah, Texans bills and, you know, the return of Ed Oliver. to Energy Stadium. That's going to be a lot of fun. He's had some of his best games, frankly, in that building over the years. All right, thanks, PTS. We'll talk to you next week.

All right, take care, Matt. That's Brian T. Smith of the Houston Chronicle. You can check him out on Twitter at Cron Bryant Smith.