Demeco Ryans: The Texans’ pass protection isn’t good enough, we need to fix that

Texans quarterback CJ Stroud recorded a career-high eight sacks after Thursday night’s loss to the Jets, and Texans coach DeMeco Ryans says that’s not acceptable.

“I’m not sure what’s happening up front, we’ll watch the film and see what it is, but obviously you’re giving up eight sacks, and every dropback or pass situation seems like we’re in scramble mode, so that it’s just not. good enough if we cannot operate on time, and we have to get that resolved,” said Ryans. “Any time you get fired that many times, it’s not good enough. We don’t want our quarterback to get hit as many hits as he got. It’s not good enough. We have to adapt. We have to change things in the future.”

Stroud didn’t play particularly well even when he had time to throw, but Ryans indicated he thinks the pass protection, not the quarterback, was the problem.

“Any time you get pressured like that or you get hit, it affects every quarterback. That’s always the plan defensively, to try to confuse the quarterback, and that’s what they did,” Ryans said.

At 6-3, the Texans remain the clear favorites to win the AFC South. But Ryans knows that if his team wants to make noise in the postseason, it has to do a lot better than Thursday night.