Houston Texans general manager Nick Caserio has been busy as the trade deadline nears.
“Every opportunity, we’ll look at it. If it makes sense, great. If not, [shrugs],” Caserio told reporters on October 26.
“We’re always open. We’ve had conversations. We’ve talked to most of the league here. Teams have started to reach out here a little bit, trying to figure out, all right, where are teams? What are you looking for? Where’s a surplus? Where you have potentiality to have a need? So, we’ll always be open-minded. We’re not going to eliminate anything. We’ll listen. And ultimately, we’ll do what we feel makes the most sense.”
Caserio said that he did not anticipate making any “knee-jerk” decisions based on their loss to the New York Giants, and he downplayed the idea of any major changes coming for the roster before the trade deadline.
Caserio’s comments drew ire locally, received as ducking responsibility.
He repeatedly suggested player performance for the source of the Texans’ issues and did not have an answer for why one of their most long-standing woes, the offensive line, remains a problem.
The deadline is on November 10, just after the conclusion of Week 9. That means the Texans have one game left before they are left to ride out the season with who they have.
They have already been active.
Caserio acquired Kayshon Boutte in a trade with the New England Patriots after the Texans lost Jayden Higgins to a season-ending knee injury. They more recently added Marvin Harrison Jr. via trade with the Arizona Cardinals.
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The Texans have six picks in the 2027 draft, but they do not have selections in the second, fifth, or sixth rounds. Their future picks are clean, but Caserio noted that they did not view any other potential targets as being worthy of the second-rounder they used to land Harrison.
“Just kind of looking at the landscape, just from the information that I have, I’m not sure there are too many players where that, I would say, draft pick is probably going to have gonna be relevant or was going to be relevant. And again, that’s all we can do is go off of information at the present time. Look, as things change, maybe two, three weeks from when we did the trade, maybe. But that’s just the reality of where it goes,” Caserio said.
“Again, I think when we made the decision at the time, it was more of ‘Okay, here’s where we are. Here’s the opportunity. All right, feel comfortable. Full, great if not–. ‘ Again, my suspicion is we probably weren’t going to be trading a second round pick, November 11th for another player. I could be wrong, but I think that was part of the calculus that went into it.”
However, Caserio was clear that he does not expect to clean house in the next few weeks.
“The team is what the team is,” Caserio said. “We’re not going to see significant change, relative to personnel, until the off-season.”
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Like Texans head coach DeMeco Ryans, Caserio noted their greatest hope for improvement will come internally. If not, they will make the necessary changes when the time is right.
That is where Caserio put the onus on himself.
“Just making sure we have the right people in the building. If we don’t, then we gotta find other people,” Caserio said. “There’s different segments of the team building. Offseason, March–call it March, April, May–is probably when the bulk of the team building takes place.
“We’ll always look at that. If there’s something that we could do better, we’ll try to figure out if that makes sense. During the course of the season, it’s a little bit more, sort of, week to week, and the pool of players that’s available potentially could be limited. So, you’re not going to really overhaul your team. You’re just going to try to take the group that you have, and, all right, try to make it work. And if that doesn’t work, then you gotta pivot and do something else.”
Caserio asserted that some of the Texans’ best players have not performed up to expectations, and that they must do so in order to course correct.
If not, some of those same players could be elsewhere this coming offseason.
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