Week 7: Houston Texans at Tennessee Titans

HOUSTON TEXANS @ TENNESSEE TITANS

Vegas Line: Texans + 3

Rob’s Line: Texans + 3.5

These two currently own the AFC South and one of them will wind up as division champion and that’s the easiest of predictions, even after just six weeks of the season. However, it’s Tennessee in the box seat and with the first opportunity to stake a claim for a home playoff game, albeit in the wildcard round as they’re up against the Patriots, Ravens, Chargers and Raiders to claim one of the top two seeds, which guarantees a home game in the divisional round of the playoffs, thus avoiding wildcard weekend.
Houston is without its best two players, wide receiver Andre Johnson and linebacker Mario Williams, a grave setback that would crush many teams. For example, imagine the Detroit Lions without Calvin Johnson and Ndamukong Suh; it’s a season changing scenario and the Titans, fresh off a bye week, can, and should, take advantage of this. Not unrelated to the injuries is the fact that the Texans are on a two game losing skid and a loss on Sunday puts them a game and a half behind Tennessee.
Not that the Titans aren’t dealing with their own injury crisis, although theirs is limited to just one player, wide receiver Kenny Britt. They initially weathered this particular storm when winning easily in Cleveland, but the subsequent trip to Pittsburgh wasn’t pretty and they were dismantled 38-17. They have all the incentive they need to win on Sunday as, following this clash, they remain at home for a further two weeks, hosting Indianapolis and Cincinnati, meaning they could be sitting at 6-2 halfway through the season with one foot already in the playoffs.
Tennessee’s courting, and subsequent signing, of free agent QB Matt Hasselbeck from Seattle has proved to be revelatory and it figures they’ll need to turn to him to win this one as the Titans rank dead last in the league in rushing and that’s with Chris Johnson at running back. Quite how this has come to be and they sit at 3-2 is one of those brilliant statistical quirks the NFL throws up and he’s bound to have a breakout game any week now, but to do it against this Houston defense with genius coordinator Wade Phillips pulling all kinds of technical strings (even without Williams at OLB) does seem unlikely.
The Texans are able to unleash both Arian Foster and Ben Tate on the ground, but Tennessee ranks tenth overall against the run so this is a tight contest to call and because of that, I’m taking any points on offer. I take the Texans with trepidation as this is their second consecutive road game and it comes against a rested Titans after their bye week, but these are two evenly matched teams (at least playing in Tennessee) so I like the team with the field goal start.