It’s hard to believe that we are already heading into DeMeco Ryans’ fourth season opener as head coach of the Houston Texans. Maybe it’s because the four seasons before him were such torture — the final two seasons of Bill O’Brien doing double GM-head coach duty, the David Culley season, and the Lovie Smith season — and moved so painfully slowly, but the DeMeco Ryans Era is flying by!
For the first time in Ryans’ tenure, the Houston Texans will open the season at home, and for the third time in four seasons, they’ll be opening with one of the teams on the short list of true Super Bowl contenders, with the Buffalo Bills coming to town. This will be a matchup where, on Monday, they’ll winner will be anointed the chalk of the AFC, and the loser will have a Week 2 game that will be framed as a “must win.”
Last season, the Texans started the season 0-3. Given how the schedule lays out, with a brutal, cold weather road schedule during December and January, that simply can’t happen this season. Is it a possibility? In the NFL, anything is a possibility, so let’s start there on the four things to watch for:
**4\. Kicking off a six-week gauntlet**
The Texans have as fun, intriguing, and moderately difficult a first six games on the schedule as you could draw up. Home games with Buffalo, Cincinnati, and Dallas are scattered around the team’s divisional road games in the first six weeks. Make no mistake, and this is not hyperbole, if the Texans fancy themselves as Super Bowl contenders, this game against the Bills is more important than any of their divisional games, because it could decide the tiebreaker for home field in the postseason and seeding position. From an individual standpoint, C.J. Stroud gets a chance to knock off Josh Allen, Joe Burrow, and Dak Prescott in the first four weeks of the season, which would go a long way to flipping the narrative on Stroud in the aftermath of the disastrous playoff loss to the Patriots last January.
**3\. The return of C.J. Gardner-Johnson**
Speaking of C.J., of course, here we have C.J. Stroud. In Buffalo, they employ C.J. Gardner-Johnson, who was a Houston Texan for all of three games to start last season. After the team got off to their 0-3 start, they cut ties with Gardner-Johnson, who was a major culprit in some of the key plays that led to losses against the Rams, Buccaneers and Jaguars to start last season. Gardner-Johnson has been very outspoken about his ouster in Houston, blaming the front office, the coaches, teammates’ contracts — he pretty much blamed everyone but himself. Expect the Texans to try to take advantage of Gardner-Johnson’s possible over-exuberance and catch him trying to make more happen than he should.
**2\. Josh Allen’s House of Horrors**
The good news is that Reliant Stadium (under its name NRG Stadium) has been a house of horrors for Josh Allen and the Bills. Including the postseason, Allen has a career 0-4 record in Houston against the Texans, including two high profile losses in the regular season in each of the last two seasons. In 2025, the Texans sacked Allen eight times en route to a huge Week 12 win on a Thursday night. They also did an outstanding job of preventing Allen from escaping the pocket and hurting them with his running ability. They’ll need the same discipline on Sunday to come away with a win.
1. **Is the offensive line overhaul real?**
While C.J. Stroud was getting a lot of the attention this past offseason, in terms of “areas of improvement,” the fact of the matter is, unless the offensive line improves, it will be difficult for Stroud to recapture some of the magic of his rookie season. The combination of five players that they’ve landed on probably wasn’t the group they drew up on the chalkboard, when they signed Wyatt Teller and Brady Smith in free agency back in March. Neither of those two are in the starting lineup, as Teller has been a disappointment and Smith is on injured reserve, but even before he got hurt, he’d been beat out by Trent Brown at right tackle. The bottom line is that the Texans must run the football better, if the offense is going to shoulder its share of the load. Sunday is their first test.
**SPREAD: Texans +1.5**
**PREDICTION: Texans 24, Bills 19**
**SEASON RECORD: 0-0 SU, 0-0 ATS**