Houston didn’t come away with that they wanted in week one.

Despite being heavy underdogs to the Ravens, the Texans were confident they could come away with a result in Baltimore, but eventually ended up falling 25-9 in their season opener.

“We hurt ourselves a lot in the game,” said Texans head coach DeMeco Ryans. “You can’t hurt yourself like that against a good team. That’s a good team, they played really good ball, you can’t help a team like that and that’s what we did. We helped a good team and you’re not going to win games in this league like that.”

Despite the loss though, there were positive takeaways. Houston’s defense showed up to the occasion and did very well against a team with some of the most prolific offensive talent in the league.  Houston held Baltimore to just 265 yards of total offense in the matchup, with the Texans gaining more yards, but they struggled defensively to hold the Ravens in the red zone.

“Our defense had a good start, but not good enough,” Ryans said. “The game is about getting stops and we have to get those stops in the redzone. We gave up too many points and have to get better there.”

Offensively, the Texans have a lot of injuries on the line and it affected both the run and pass game. CJ Stroud had trouble getting enough time to find receivers in the game and Dameon Pierce had a hard time finding running room as well, with the Texans only gaining 72 rushing yards.

“We can’t have our quarterback hit as much and we have to be better as a group in protection,” Ryans said. “It’s about how we’re helping, we had some really good snaps and protected well at ties, but we have to be more consistent in our protection and our pickups. We need to continue to improve our running game as well. We can run it more and we can be more effective at it.”

The Texans hope to have an improved performance this week when they go up against the Colts at noon Sunday at NRG Stadium.
Indianapolis comes off a 31-21 loss to Jacksonville, where the Colts moved the ball effectively but couldn’t stop the Jaguars offense. For Houston, it’s an opportunity to get into the win column against a team that is not at the top of the NFL pack and maybe will give a chance to allow the Houston offense to improve. The Texans will have to slow down Anthony Richardson defensively, as he comes off a performance where he threw for 223 yards and rushed for 40 yards in his first NFL game.

It’s also a matchup between the second and fourth picks of the draft, Stroud and Richardson, both will be motivated and ready to go and it should be a fun game.

“The biggest thing is I expect the guys around our quarterback to play better as well” Ryans said. “We want to run the ball more effectively to open up the pass and I’d like to see CJ doing the pre snap stuff quicker. He did a great job for his first game but we just want to continue to see improvement from everyone.”