Houston Texans Favored To Win Less Than 5 Games This Season

• The Houston Texans won four games in the 2020 season.
• They have an O/U line of 4.5 in 2021.
• For various reasons, they are widely expected to be worse in 2021 than in 2020.

LAS VEGAS – The Houston Texans have fallen hard since their last playoff appearance in the 2019-2020 season.

They finished near the bottom of the league in 2020, and then their star QB demanded a trade, and was accused of a pattern of sexual assault by more than 20 different women.

On top of this, their poor finish in 2020, which would normally have yielded a draft pick, instead gave the Miami Dolphins the third pick in the draft, due to a previously made trade.

Everything has gone wrong for the Houston Texans since that playoff appearance, and the sportsbooks believe there are no signs of anything changing.

The Texans are sitting with one of the lowest win total over/under lines in the entire NFL, at 4.5 wins.

In addition to that, the under is slightly favored, meaning bettors are expecting them to not even reach this line.

A litany of situations have gone wrong for the Texans, but there are three that stand out as the major reasons for this, and one of those stands above all the others.

Deshaun Watson

Deshaun Watson is one of the most talented quarterbacks in the NFL. Deshaun Watson also does not want to play for the Houston Texans.

Deshaun Watson is also being accused of sexual assault by more than 20 different women with remarkably similar stories about how he acted towards them.

Watson’s attorneys maintain his innocence of the charges brought by these women. This situation makes it incredibly unclear if Watson will ever play in the NFL again. He’s lost sponsorships with Nike, among others, and the situation is starting to look dire in terms of whether or not he steps on an NFL field again.

Even with Watson, the Texans only won four games in 2020. They can’t reasonably be expected to exceed that without him.

The Laremy Tunsil Trade

The trade the Texans made for Laremy Tunsil still hangs over this franchise – and it cost them in 2020.

Tunsil is a good player, but the Texans gave up their 2021 first round draft pick in that trade, expecting to be a good team for the foreseeable future. They weren’t, and they would have been due for the third pick in the 2021 NFL Draft, a player that could have turned their franchise around.

Instead, the Miami Dolphins get that pick, and the Texans are left out in the cold.

The DeAndre Hopkins Trade

This is well-worn territory, but it still hangs over the Texans franchise, as the trade was recently named the “Best Sports Transaction of the Year” by MIT’s Sloan Conference.

One problem – it was the “Best Sports Transaction of the Year”….for the other team involved in it.

There are a lot of reasons to doubt the Texans, and making a trade that bad is certainly one of them. Hopkins is, obviously, excelling with his new team, the Arizona Cardinals. The returns from that trade have done very little for the Texans.

NFL betting fans interested in this wager would do well to consider what possible scenarios could result in the 2021 iteration of this team outperforming the 2020 version.