ARLINGTON, Texas — Texans coach DeMeco Ryans majorly praised running back Joe Mixon’s and described him as “a force” after contributing to three of the Texans’ four second-half touchdowns during their Monday Night Football blowout of the Cowboys, 34-10.
Mixon was a work horse for the Texans offense and scored all the team’s touchdowns for the offense and had 109 rushing yards. Of the three rushing touchdowns he scored, it was only tied by his second best showing in his entire career.
In Texans game, Mixon equaled single-game club record, joining the team’s fourth player to do it. However, Ryans and Mixon thanked the offensive line for creating creases for the former Pro Bowl back.
“Joe when he’s spot on he is a menace for the opposition,” Ryans said. This operation firmly begins with our offensive line, in the run game. I urged them to go out as fast as possible, as aggressively as possible. I believe they did feeds themselves nicely. I personally love the physicality that we continued to feed in the run game and proud of the guys for accepting the challenge.
ESPN Research has it that 79 of the 109 rushing yards got by Mixon were before contact, actually, untouched on his 45-yard rushing touchdown in the first quarter, on what was his longest score to date. This was Mixon’s sixth consecutive regular season game with a rushing touchdown, which tied the record in Texans history achieved by former Texans running back Arian Foster in 2011.
I thought everyone had their heads on straight with the plan, and we just went out and did it for all four quarters, Mixon said. I think it was a good sight to behold to see the O-line almost go out and dictate most of the time.” It was fourth quarter and the [offensive line] said ‘you know what, let’s really whale on these boys’. And I’m like, s— I went to our [offensive coordinator] Bobby Slowik and I’m like, man, them boys trying to run it.”
The offensive line opening holes for Mixon also helped quarterback C.J. Stroud have an efficient game: Scarbrough, who finished the season with a 67.6% completion rate, threw for 257 yards with an interception, equaling third best mark in that category. He also completed 8 of 8 passes that included play action fakes for 99 yards, as Next Gen Stats found.
And most importantly the offensive line Protected Stroud to pressure on only 36% of his drop backs, down from the season average of 41% coming into Monday.
“They were amazing, I was back there just chilling, a lot of times,” Stroud said. In this case I thought we mixed up the protections pretty well. Obviously there will always be something left for the cleaners but overall this cleared up a lot. That’s what we wanted.”
Mixon to date, has joined the trio of NFL players who got more than ten rushing touchdowns within the first eight games with a new team; previous such player was the running back, Eric Dickerson back in the Rams of 1983 as per ESPN Research.
We put it together in the pass game and run game We. So that’s something we can build from,” right tackle Tytus Howard told ESPN. So let these games be just that, and build off of it for the rest of this season we know what we have to do. This is like we had the best week of our practice all season, so you get to keep that going.”
