Texans head coach DeMeco Reigns said Sunday that he did not consider A quarterback change occurred in the divisional round loss to the Patriots despite C.J. Stroud’s four first-half interceptions.
On Monday, Reigns was asked to provide an overall assessment of Stroud’s performance during the 2025 season.
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“The quarterback position is going to get the most eyes, the most attention,” Ryans told reporters. “We understand that. In this league, that’s the way it is. C.J. understands that, too. Throughout the season, I thought he did a really good job of learning a new offense, new plays. I thought he learned well. As the season went on, we got better and he made some plays that won us a lot of football games. I’m not going to let a bad performance come out of that game. [against the Patriots] Tell me who CJ is. I know who CJ is. I know what he’s capable of. We just keep looking to get better. No one feels worse about this situation than CJ, and he feels terrible about the team. He felt like he let the team down and I just told him, ‘Keep your head up and keep going. ‘We all want it to be better. We can’t now go back to that game and rerun it and play it again. We just learn from it. What did you learn from it? My main message to him was, what did you learn from this? How do you make it a priority and address it, improve and get better? “
So what improvements does Reigns hope to see from Stroud in 2026?
“I talked to CJ today and my message was the same,” Reigns said. “Right now, it’s just about him flushing this out. It’s going to be a lot of negative talk, a lot of focus on him. He can’t listen to all of that. He’s got to get back to work in the offseason, get back to the basics, the fundamentals of playing the quarterback position, playing well, understanding how we need to play the game to win games. He’s got it…
“I just told him, ‘Don’t listen to anything. Put your phone away. Don’t listen to anything because there’s going to be a lot of negative talk out there.’ Specifically, I just told him to go away and clear his mind. Because right now, at this moment, I know he’s going to get a lot of attention, a lot of negative press, and there’s going to be a lot of questions about him today. Question. That’s the thing, he understands the position he’s in. As a quarterback leading a team, there’s a lot of expectations on you, a lot of eyes on you, so when things don’t go well, there’s a lot of negative things said about you. He understands that, and he just can’t let other people’s opinions be a measure of who he really is on the inside.”
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There is no doubt that the Texans will receive the fifth-year option on Stroud’s rookie contract. The question is whether they’re willing to give him a second contract before or after he has a chance to prove he can handle not one but two bad games in the 2025 playoffs; Reigns generally declined to discuss an extension on Monday.
Last week, there were five fumbles (two of which were fumbles) and one interception. This week, there were four interceptions. There were a total of seven turnovers in the two games. So while Stroud may indeed flush it, the question is whether it will go down the drain — or if it will resurface in 2026.
