J.J. Watt and DeAndre Hopkins Continue to Impress, Texans Hang in Wild-Card Race

The roller coaster that is the Houston Texans continued its up-and-down slide around .500 by kicking around the hapless Tennessee Titans to climb back to 6-6, tripling the Texans' win total from the 2013 season.

While it's clear that the Houston roster still has work to do to contend for a championship, the Texans have been blessed by a weak schedule, the continued dominance of defensive end J.J. Watt and the emergence of wideout DeAndre Hopkins while hanging around in the AFC wild-card race. 

It was expected that Watt would have a dominant day as the Titans struggled with injuries on their offensive line. Starting Titans tackles Taylor Lewan and Michael Oher both sat out with injuries, and starting center Brian Schwenke was placed on IR earlier in the week.

Watt did not disappoint, catching what would be his fifth total touchdown of the season while forcing another fumble and providing constant pressure on Titans quarterbacks Zach Mettenberger and Jake Locker.

The inevitable MVP talk starts every time Watt has a game like this. (This season, it's been essentially every other game.) While I have a hard time thinking the national media will seriously consider Watt as an MVP candidate if the Texans don't make the playoffs, he is clearly head-and-shoulders above his defensive linemen peers, which makes him perhaps the rarest player in a league where the battle for position-group supremacy (i.e. power rankings) is ever-present. 

Simply put, the things we see Watt do on a weekly basis are absurd. The Texans have always been watchable, even when they've been bad over the years, because Andre Johnson was capable of doing ridiculous things in his prime.

Watt hasn't just continued on the tradition; he's made it his own. Watching Watt play football is something that, by itself, is worth the price of a ticket—something you can say about fewer than 10 players in the NFL.

And, after Sunday's game, it's time to start wondering if Hopkins is going to make the leap into that caliber of player as well. 

Anyone who watched Hopkins play in 2013 knew that he'd be a better fit outside of the binary "one receiver runs a go route, one doesn't" nature of Gary Kubiak's offense. We got a taste of how Hopkins was progressing in Week 3 against the New York Giants, when he made "The Almost-Catch That Was Not Odell Beckham Jr.'s Catch," but Hopkins has been the boom in the phrase "boom-and-bust Texans offense" for most of the season.

This was the week where Hopkins dragged the Houston passing offense over the finish line all by himself, catching all nine of his targets from quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick for 238 yards and two touchdowns. Yes, Tennessee cornerback Blidi Wreh-Wilson has had a troubling initial foray into a starting role, but he hadn't been allowing video game numbers on a weekly basis. 

Hopkins was the beneficiary of Fitzpatrick's best game as Texans quarterback, both in terms of accuracy and arm strength, but Fitzpatrick was also the beneficiary of Hopkins. Two early third-down catches had to be dug out of the ground by Hopkins, and Hopkins' second touchdown involved him winning a 50-50 back-shoulder ball in the end zone for the score.

It was a remarkable game that wound up eerily similar (statistically) to T.Y. Hilton's breakout game against the Texans earlier in the year on Thursday Night Football. 

Week	Player	Yards	Receptions/Targets	Touchdowns
6	T.Y. Hilton	223	9/9	1
13	DeAndre Hopkins	238	9/9	2

The fact that Hopkins is in the top 15 among all receivers in DVOA and DYAR, per Football Outsiders, BEFORE this game is counted—despite inconsistent quarterback play all season in Houston—is proof that Hopkins has transcended the rest of this offense. It's reminiscent of how a young Andre Johnson used to shine even while saddled with the pop-shot arm of former Texans quarterback David Carr.

Houston probably doesn't have the firepower to do more than hang on the fringes of the wild-card race, at least not this season, but it's incredible to watch Watt and Hopkins (and Johnson, running back Arian Foster and cornerback Johnathan Joseph) try their best to drag the rest of this mediocre roster into contention. 

The Texans' next step involves finding the players they need to go from "watchable" to "winning." But, for now, there are much worse fates than watching Watt and Hopkins excel at their positions. 

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.