Tennessee defeated Houston on Sunday 32-27 in a game that neither team will want to remember, but both teams will have a hard time forgetting.
Tennessee played some erratic, verging on ridiculous football and won. Houston swarmed on defense and lost. Ugly play piled on top of ugly play until the final seconds of this one, and both teams likely will not wish to speak of it again.
No sequence better exemplified the back-and-forth chaos of the scrap than a four-play whipsaw turnaround late in the third quarter. With his team trailing 23-17 and looking at an ugly divisional loss, Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud got antsy and forced a pass to Nico Collins over the middle, only to see Tennessee’s Kenneth Murray leap up and snag it in flight.
Momentum Titans, right? Or not. After two handoffs to Tony Pollard that netted negative-1 yards, Tennessee quarterback Will Levis got squirrelly himself, throwing a short pass into triple coverage that Houston’s Jimmie Ward returned to the house for 65 yards and the lead:
Seems bad, right? Was bad! But barely five minutes of game clock later, Levis redeemed himself with a massive 70-yard touchdown pass to Chig Okonkwo that put Tennessee ahead to stay:
Will Levis gives, Will Levis takes away. That about sums up this slapfight effectively enough. Houston had eight sacks on the day — including seven in the first half — and still couldn’t shut down Levis. He finished the day completing 18 of 24 passes for 278 yards. Stroud, meanwhile, went 20-of-33 for 247 yards, with a pair of touchdowns and a pair of interceptions decorating and defacing his line.
Houston seized momentum literally from the first seconds of the game. Dameon Pierce fielded the opening kickoff on his own 1 and returned it 80 yards to the Tennessee 19. On the very first play from scrimmage, Stroud found a wide-open Cade Stover in the end zone for a Texans touchdown 18 seconds into the game.
Five games up on Tennessee in the standings and an eight-point favorite to start the game, Houston ought to have had a fairly easy time dispatching the frenetic, erratic Titans. But Tennessee hung 17 straight points on Houston through the first 20 minutes of the game, jumping out to a fast 17-7 lead.
Thing is, Tennessee had enough mojo to take the lead, but it didn’t have enough to hold the lead. Houston tied the game at 17 with 1:47 left in the first half, but the Titans managed to wrangle a go-ahead field goal as time expired on the half. Another early in the third extended the lead back out to six points … and then the chaos truly began.
After the pick 6 that closed out the third quarter, Tennessee again turned the ball over, this time on a Jha’Quan Jackson muffed punt recovered by Houston’s Kris Boyd at the Tennessee 43. Kai’imi Fairbairn turned that into three more points on a field goal to extend the Texans’ lead to 27-23.
But the Will Levis Experience wasn’t quite done. He caught Okonkwo in stride for that final go-ahead touchdown with 9:35 remaining in the game, his second touchdown throw on the day. (Third, if you count the pick 6.) As the AP noted during the game, teams in the Super Bowl era that took eight or more sacks and committed three or more turnovers were 6-145 coming into the day … and the Titans had done all that and still won.
Levis wasn’t the only one gifting the opposition. With less than five minutes remaining in the game, Stroud hit Collins for a 33-yard touchdown … only to see it nullified by an illegal shift. It was a crucial penalty; later in the drive, Fairbairn’s 28-yard field-goal attempt drifted wide left.
And even then, the madness wasn’t quite done. The Titans three-and-outed in just 16 seconds of game clock, punting away with 1:29 remaining in the game. Yet another brutally timed Houston penalty on the punt stuck the Texans back at their own 8. One sack and one murderous rush that forced Stroud out of the end zone, and Tennessee had a safety and the win.