Texans Must Be Self-Conscious on Their Evaluation of Ryan Mallett

The Houston Texans have officially made the call to the bullpen: quarterback Ryan Mallett, acquired just before the season started for a conditional draft pick, will be the starter coming out of the bye. Ryan Fitzpatrick's reign of terror is over.

Fitzpatrick finishes his tenure as the Houston signal-caller with a minus-7.1 percent DVOA, per Football Outsiders. Despite his increasingly obvious limitations, Fitzpatrick was managed enough to perform right about at replacement level. 

In trading out Fitzpatrick for Mallett, the Texans are trading out one flawed model for another in the hopes of finding some kind of spark. Mallett, as any scouting report can tell you, can push the ball downfield with his big arm.

The hope is that an offense that primarily relies on the running game can perform a little better with someone more capable of hitting on "shot plays"—play-action balls thrown in the vicinity of Houston wideouts Andre Johnson and DeAndre Hopkins. 

The main problem with Mallett as a quarterback is the lack of accuracy that comes with his arm is astonishing. I don't have tape breakdowns to show you because NFL Preseason Live shuts down after the season starts for some reason, but take a gander at the chart below and see what number stands out to you.

Year	Completion Percentage	Attempts	Yards	TD : INT Ratio
2014	53.8%	26	161	1:0
2013	55.3%	76	447	3:1
2012	49.3%	67	300	3:1
College	57.8%	955	8385	69:24

That's right: Even in college, Mallett couldn't complete 60 percent of his passes. For the sake of comparison, Tim Tebow completed 66.4 percent of his college passes, and Tebow is about as relevant in today's NFL as fullbacks and blocking tight ends. 

That's not to say it's impossible that Mallett comes out and outdoes himself at the NFL level. We just have zero evidence that says he can complete enough passes to keep the chains moving. 

And the real problem Houston faces with this move is not if Mallett washes out, but what happens if he succeeds. A player who was similar statistically to Mallett when he came out a couple years ago was the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' Mike Glennon.

Glennon left his senior season at North Carolina State with a 58.5 percent completion rate and was barely north of 60 percent for his college career. He ended the 2013 season with a minus-7.7 percent DVOA (again, courtesy Football Outsiders)—remarkably similar to Fitzpatrick's numbers this season—and showed a modicum of promise.

Bleacher Report's Cian Fahey, who has an eye for film that I respect, called Glennon a "reliable option moving forward" during the 2013 season.

Week	Opponent	Opponent's Pass Defense DVOA (Rank)
11	@ CLE	5.0% (15)
12	v. CIN	-7.4% (4)
13	v. TEN	12.5% (22)
14	@ JAX	3.9% (13)
15	@ IND	6.0% (17)
16	v. BAL	2.0% (10)
17	v. JAX	3.9% (13)
Average		3.7%

Well, what happens if Mallett does show some Glennon-esque promise? After all, when you look at the remaining schedule, it doesn't seem completely far-fetched that Mallett could post some decent games against his fellow members of the AFC Sun Belt. The Texans play only two games against top-10 DVOA pass defenses, and the Baltimore Ravens qualify there only by the skin of their teeth.

What happened in Tampa Bay was very simple: Despite having the eighth overall pick in a draft that appeared to be populated by three pretty good quarterback prospects, the Bucs rested on their laurels and kept Glennon. (We'll ignore the fact that they benched him for Josh McCown, because trying to approach Lovie Smith's point of view rationally is like staring at a squirrel from a close distance and expecting it not to flee.)

The Bucs fell victim to the idea of narrative improvement. We're now 10 weeks into the NFL season, and despite Smith's protestations that Roy Cummings of The Tampa Tribune notes, I don't think they have a quarterback of the future at this point. 

With Mallett, that risk only doubles because he will immediately become a free agent at the end of the season.

Let's hypothetically say Mallett gets the Texans to eight wins with something like a 58 percent completion percentage and a luck-dependent 8-2 touchdown-to-interception ratio. Mallett quickly becomes the best of a bad lot of options in recent Houston memory, and the pressure to keep him from local media at least approaches "hot sports take" territory. 

And, well, that kind of performance got Josh McCown two years and $10 million from an actual NFL team even at 35 years old. If we start to throw in the arm strength that scouts drool over and the relative youth of Mallett (still just 26), we have the trimmings for an enormous quarterback-mistake contract based on a perceived ability to avoid interceptions. 

This is my only real issue with giving Mallett a shot for the Texans. There's no doubt that the team is spinning its wheels when Fitzpatrick is under center. The problem is that the team gains nothing but potential trouble if Mallett actually does succeed.

It's not hard to draw up a scenario where an embattled Texans front office that desperately wants to be right hands a fluke Mallett season a contract that epitomizes the term "Pyrrhic victory."

The Texans desperately need an upgrade at quarterback. But what they also desperately need is an actual franchise quarterback. Anything that dissuades them from zeroing in on that goal is, at this point, the enemy. 

Rivers McCown is the AFC South lead writer for Bleacher Report and the co-host of the Three-Cone Drill podcast. His work has also appeared on Football Outsiders and ESPN.com. Follow him on Twitter at @riversmccown.