Coach of the Year Voting was Off the Mark

Each year, I’m more and more convinced that the NFL’s Coach of the Year Award goes to the most improved team without regard to actual coaching ability.

As expected, the Coach of the Year Award came down to Tony Sparano of the Miami Dolphins and Mike Smith of the Atlanta Falcons, who took over teams with a combined five wins in 2007 and turned out a pair of 11-5 records.

As expected, the man who did the best job in football got absolutely none.

Sparano and Smith’s accomplishments aside, how was Gary Kubiak was not even a candidate? You want to know why? His team did not improve in the standings.

Okay, Bill Belichick got one vote even though his team dropped from 16-0 to 11-5, but that was after Tom Brady went down during Week One. Oh, and the Patriots are routinely under the spotlight.

Houston? If it were not for this article, I doubt you’d remember that its season was doomed from the start.

As the Texans were preparing for its Week Two game against the Baltimore Ravens in Reliant Stadium, Hurricane Ike was moving across the Gulf of Mexico towards Galveston as a Category two storm.

The NFL made the decision to postpone the game, eventually rescheduling it for Week 10, Baltimore’s bye-week. The Texans moved their game against Cincinnati from Week 10 to Week eight, the bye for both teams.

Ike tore through the Houston metropolitan area with winds that were one mile-per-hour shy of being considered a major hurricane. Street lights went down, trees were uprooted across main street, windows were shattered out of almost every major building, houses were destroyed.

One of my friends who stayed had part of her roof dislodged, water pouring in as she lay down every towel and sheet to sop up the water to keep her floors from rotting.

Least of all, the roof of the Reliant Stadium, a retractable-dome stadium, had a few measly panels blown out.

And the players came back to all of this.

Well, sort-of. The team played its next two games on the road, having already lost at Pittsburgh. And those two teams had both made the playoffs in 2007.

Couple that with a collapse in the homecoming on October 5 against the Indianapolis Colts, and the Texans were 0-4 with 30 percent of Houston proper and nearly half of the greater Houston area still without power.

Comparisons were being made to the Saints lost season of 2005. After Hurricane Katrina, the Saints were forced to play home games in three different states, one of which you could barely call a home game. Their Week Two game against the New York Giants was played in Giants Stadium at the Meadowlands.

To further the allusion that the Saints were the home team, one of the end zones was painted Black and Gold while the same colors were put over the blue padding around the same end zone.

The rest of their home games alternated between the Alamodome in San Antonio and Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, La.

The Saints collapsed after a 2-2 start, finishing 3-13 and firing Jim Haslett. Their only win during that stretch oddly enough came in their return to the Meadowlands, this time as the road team, against the New York Jets.

While I’m not going to compare Ike to Katrina in terms of its affect on a city, as what Ike did to Houston pales miserably, but in terms of people affected and lives altered, the storms rank side-by-side among the most potent in modern U.S. History. No doubt, comparing the seasons seemed accurate after Week Five.

The team rattled off three consecutive wins, including an improbable win against the Dolphins in which they had to complete two fourth downs, the latter coming with only three seconds remaining, in order to score the season-saving touchdown.

On fourth-and-two on the Dolphins three yard line, Matt Schaub kept it himself on a designed draw to put the Texans ahead and break the resolve of the much-improved Dolphins.

Yet as soon as the three-game winning streak was snapped, the team saw its season come to a crashing halt. In consecutive days, the Texans lost quarterback Matt Schaub and linebacker Zac Diles, the latter for the rest of the season. Diles at the time was leading the team in tackles.

Schaub had torn his medial collateral ligament in his left knee and would miss the next five games.

Diles broke his leg in a freak non-contact drill after apparently accidentally kicking himself while jogging.

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