The Houston Texans are picking in the back half of the first round, so it's a bit harder to predict what they will do, or even what strategy they will go with. Your first round pick is your most important one, so deciding what you're going to do comes with pressure.
And, there are really two ways to go about it -- do you draft for need, or do you take the best player available? Despite being a team competing for a championship, the Texans do have quite a few needs that will have to be addressed in the 2025 NFL Draft. Now, they don't have as many needs as their divisional opponents in the Tennessee Titans, Jacksonville Jaguars, or the Indianapolis Colts, but they have more needs on their radar than the casual fan may think.
Getting the pick right in a win-now year is crucial. So, what do they do? What is their strategy?
"Very similarly, if we go through the process of stacking the board, we're grading the player based on what we think the role potentially is going to be in our system, and we're just going to pick the best players that we feel fit the Houston Texans," Nick Caserio told Texans All Access.
"So there are no positions that are really off limits. We've never really approached it that way, and really don't foresee that change in here this year, so try to get good players with the right mindset that have a good physical skills skill set and inject them into our system and it's seen how quickly we can bring them along, we've talked yet."
If the Texans are going to go with the best player available method at 25, they could end up getting a player who won't see the field for them. Let's say Malaki Starks or Mike Green, a safety and an edge rusher, fall to 25 -- that's two positions the Texans have no business spending a first-round pick on, but if they fell to 25 would easily be the best player available.
So, yes, you have to use some strategy of need, no matter what happens. Let's hope they go with the best player available strategy for all of the positions they consider to be first-round needs. That would be any offensive line position, wide receiver, and defensive tackle, for the most part.
But only time will tell what will happen.
