FanHouse FrankOkam

In "Rough Draft," lawyer-turned-writer-turned-football-player Clay Travis recounts his experience training for the 2008 NFL draft alongside some future pros. The following is Part 8 of 10 (read chapter 7 here) installments that FanHouse will roll out every weekday leading up to the 2009 NFL Draft on April 25.

It's a little more than two weeks until the NFL Combine and Kurt Hester remains furious with our forty starts.

"Y'all are starting like a bunch of p*****s," he says, "They're f**king horrible."

So horrible, in fact, that for our morning workout Hester has been forced to dig into his massive collection of workout supplies, stored in large plastic blue bins. Desperation has driven Hester to pull out Velcro belts that he can fasten to our waists. In Hester's terminology these are called pop belts.

"They don't even make these anymore," says Hester as he distributes the pop belts to us. "I had to break them out of the bottom of the bins because y'all just weren't listening to me about getting good first steps."

In "Rough Draft," lawyer-turned-writer-turned-football-player Clay Travis recounts his experience training for the 2008 NFL draft alongside some future pros. The following is Part 7 of 10 installments (read Part 6 here) that FanHouse will roll out every weekday leading up to the 2009 NFL Draft on April 25.

Our forty times are not improving. And Kurt Hester is coming undone over our continued failure. With less than a month to go until the combine, Hester sets up six taped lines on the field at a distance of ten yards. "I want y'all to try and run ten yards in six steps," he says. The idea behind the tape strips is to make us take longer strides so that we can get out of our starts faster. I do my best to make my strides match the six pieces of tape, but they're too far apart for me to cover in only six steps.

In "Rough Draft," lawyer-turned-writer-turned-football-player Clay Travis recounts his experience training for the 2008 NFL draft alongside some future pros. The following is Part 6 of 10 installments (read Part 5 here) that FanHouse will roll out every weekday leading up to the 2009 NFL Draft on April 25.

None of those stresses of the guys I'm training with compares to Army's Caleb Campbell (right), a 6'2" 229 pound safety from Perryton, Texas. His future plans are extraordinarily simple: either he's drafted by an NFL team or he's likely shipped to Iraq as a 2nd Lieutenant. Campbell doesn't announce this to the rest of the guys he's training with. Instead he confides it to me one afternoon as I review his NFL Combine questionnaire. One minute we're talking about Wolf from the new American Gladiators television show, and the next moment Campbell unburdens himself. "I need this Bookman," Campbell says, "or else my ass is headed to Iraq."

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In "Rough Draft," lawyer-turned-writer-turned-football-player Clay Travis recounts his experience training for the 2008 NFL draft alongside some future pros. The following is Part 4 of 10 installments (read Part 3 here) that FanHouse will roll out every weekday leading up to the 2009 NFL Draft on April 25.

As the days dwindle for Michael Oher (right) to decide whether to leave school early or return to Ole Miss, we end another workout and gather in front of the television. The Program, the 1993 college football movie starring Omar Epps, Halle Berry, and Craig Sheffer, as quarterback Joe Cane, is on the television.

For the first time I feel old since most of these guys were in first or second grade in 1993, when the movie came out. In fact, the majority of the guys haven't ever seen the movie before. As we watch, in one scene the starting quarterback, Joe Cane, complains because his father has never come to see him play a football game. Sitting in a large red chair to the left of the television, Big Mike Oher reacts. "Never come to see him play a football game?" asks Oher, scoffing. "I've only seen my own dad about four times."

In "Rough Draft," lawyer-turned-writer-turned-football-player Clay Travis recounts his experience training for the 2008 NFL draft alongside some future pros. The following is Part 2 of 10 installments (read Part 1 here) that FanHouse will roll out every weekday leading up to the 2009 NFL Draft on April 25.

The night before the first day of combine training, I can't sleep. It's Sunday January 6, and all of the college players are being picked up at the airport and brought to their apartments. By now I know a couple of their names, Frank Okam (far right) defensive tackle from Texas, Caleb Campbell safety from Army, and a few other vague designations, a tight end from Cal, a linebacker from Illinois. Late at night, unable to sleep, I climb out of bed and go downstairs to the computer where I spend over an hour scanning through player rosters and player bios.

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Because the NFL season never ends, we present our 2009 Offseason Roadmaps for front offices to navigate through the summer.

How many years were the Arizona Cardinals picked to finally have their breakout year? It seems like they were the dark horse pick to have a playoff run every offseason. But since they went to the Super Bowl last year, they can't be that sneaky hot team any more.

Maybe the Texans take over that spot. Their franchise has never had a winning season, and the last two 8-8 seasons have only resulted in higher expectations. Houston's offense ranks about the same as the Cardinal offense, their special teams is better and their defense worse. The Texans are trying to fix that bad defense by replacing a number of coaches on that side of the ball.

In their first drive last week, the Vikings offense scored against the Texans defense in 4 plays. It was a typical start to a Texans game. They have by far worst red zone defense in the league, allowing touchdowns 17 of 25 times for a 81 percent red zone rate. The 213 points the Texans have allowed is 4th most in the AFC.

Football Outsiders currently has the Texans defense ranked 30th (compared to 12th for the offense and 4th for special teams). They ranked the Texans pass defense at 21 and the rush defense last in the league. I believe that most of the pass defense improvement in recent weeks is that teams know the Texans rush defense is garbage, and also they have faced a parade of horrible QBs (Orlowsky, Fitzpatrick, Frerotte).

Hey, but there has been some improvement right? Maybe this young defense is figuring it out? Perhaps if you live in blind optimism land, but this week, a thin defense limited in playmakers has become thinner.

Yohei Hori is a system engineer who lives in Tokyo. He is also a huge Houston Texans fan who writes a Japanese language blog focusing on the team. As he explained to me, he knows English, but the translation plug-in for his blog that translates from the Japanese leads to really messed up, humorous results.

The translated name for his blog is "Da Bull Pen - TEXANS cheering blog: Houston Texans and the NFL that, and I love it."

Admittedly, I must confess I enjoy reading the silly Japanese to English translations of all things Texans and NFL. Check his blog out and find your favorite odd, yet somehow accurate account. It's like bizarre poetry.

Discussing the Texans' defensive line after the first week loss to the Steelers:

Mario [Williams] is wonderful. Is, Marvel Smith, not more Willie Colon on the side of the line-up I'd have to be. Richard Smith's campaign to question. Amobi [Okoye] Where is it? Travis Johnson? The two will run unstoppable inside. Inactive [Frank] Okam of the game was to keep up hope.

I discovered Yohei posting as "texamaniac" at the I'm a Texans Club website (the above graphic spells "Houston Texans" in Japanese). He agreed to answer a few questions about what it is like to follow the NFL in Japan, and how he became a fan of the Texans.

Q: How popular is the NFL in Japan?

A: American football is a very minor sport in Japan. It is a pity, but most Japanese don't even understand the rules.

One of the reasons why I started blogging is that I couldn't find enough in depth information about my favorite team, the Houston Texans. Since they are such a new team, if information wasn't on their website or in the Houston Chronicle, it likely didn't exist.

Well, with minor apologies to Buzz Bissinger, thank goodness for sports blogs. I want to point out in particular the fabu work that Solis has done at the BattleRedBlog about the 2008 Texans draft class. Check out these posts in particular:

"Super Steve Slaton" - Explains why this running back may be the perfect one cut and go back for the Texans zone blocking scheme.

"Steve Slaton: An Insider's Perspective" - A must read interview for Texans fans from with West Virginia's Director of New Media, John Antonik.

I'm not much fond of immediate draft grades. Assessments of players the day after the draft are often comical (and/or painful check out 5:10 and 8:55) in retrospect. The biggest problem is there is no one that can know more than just a brief snap shot of each player and how each player fits into 32 teams. And at the time they are doing their draft grades, they are probably a little tired and writing to deadline.

I'm not going to pretend I can grade out players before they take a snap in the NFL. But what I do know is that so many of the so called draft 'experts' are wildly off base in assessing the draft from what you know right now. So I am going to grade their Houston Texans draft grades, though I am sure you would find inaccuracies and superficiality in just about every team's grades:

The Draft Expert Losers:

Jason Cole, Yahoo Sports: "[Frank] Okam, a former defensive tackle, is likely to shift to guard, a clever move by teams that realize that non-athletic DTs can make for cheap, athletic G's."

Huh? Okam was drafted as a defensive tackle, to be a space eating guy next to Okoye that the Texans did not have. Nobody from the Texans is talking about him as a guard and are happy to get a DT who is large but can still move well.

I give Cole a grade of D. He is spared an F because he gave the same grade to the Texans that I did.