The Texans will be without Nico Collins for the second straight week, ruling out their Pro Bowl wide receiver with a hamstring injury before traveling to Indianapolis to face the Colts.
What separates this from routine injury-list housekeeping is the practice log. Collins didn't take a single rep this week, per Texans Wire, after the injury surfaced during drills the week before. Hamstrings don't clear on a team's timetable. They clear on the muscle's, and Houston ruled him out early rather than let the question drag toward kickoff, which tells you the training staff already had its answer.
Two games is a real bite out of a season for a team whose passing game is built around its outside receivers. The Colts have a vacancy of their own, having ruled out wide receiver Ashton Dulin for Week 3, but Indianapolis losing a depth piece and Houston losing Collins are not the same problem. Anyone who lines those two absences up side by side is flattening the matchup.
The answer has to come from the receivers behind Collins, again, on the road, against a division opponent that has had two weeks of tape on what Houston looks like without him. That's the hard part. Filling a roster spot is a job. Drawing the coverage Collins draws is a different job, and it's the one that decides whether this trip goes the Texans' way.
Here's my read, and I'll own it: Houston can absorb one more week of this because the run game and defense travel. It cannot absorb a lingering version. If Collins is still sidelined when the Texans return home, the framing around this team shifts from contender to question mark, and no amount of next-man-up talk covers for a hamstring that won't cooperate in September.
