NFL Week 6: Texans Debut Harrison in London, Cowboys Embrace the Players-Only Meeting, and CBS Picks Seahawks-Broncos
Week 6 is a light news day around the league, which makes the few real items easier to read. Houston is getting a receiver on the field. Dallas is getting a meeting on the record. And CBS Sports is selling picks on the two games it thinks matter most.
Start with the Texans. Marvin Harrison Jr. will make his Houston debut Sunday in London against the Jacksonville Jaguars, DeMeco Ryans said Wednesday. Read the timing, not the headline. Ryans naming it midweek, ahead of a transatlantic trip, means this isn't a gametime decision that could flip in warmups. It's a plan. What that plan looks like is the open question. I expect Houston to keep his route menu narrow in a neutral-site debut, a handful of concepts he can run without thinking, more if the score allows it. Where I could be wrong is the why: if he's been held out for something that lingers, London on a partial practice week is a bad place to find out. The upside is still the point. An offense that has been waiting on a difference-maker finally gets to see one, and Ryans gets a real look before the season's middle third.
Now the Cowboys. Brian Schottenheimer says he's fine with Dallas's players-only meeting. More than fine, per ESPN's video clip, he loves it. Mike Tomlin panned it. Same facts, opposite reads, and I'm with Tomlin. A players-only meeting is not evidence of cohesion. It's evidence the head coach's voice needed a second channel, and a head coach publicly celebrating it is telling you something he probably doesn't mean to. The tell here is volume: Dallas generated the meeting, the coach's reaction to it, and a rival's critique of it inside one news cycle, which is an enormous amount of oxygen for something that changes no coverage shell and no protection call. My read is that if the Cowboys' next game goes wrong, that meeting becomes the thing reporters ask about every single week. That's the actual cost, and it's Schottenheimer's to manage.
On to the picks. CBS Sports writers Jordan Dajani and Jared Dubin are on Seahawks at Broncos and Ravens at Browns, billed as the week's top games. Here's my issue with the genre: the headline says the two of them face off, and face-offs happen where the board is unsettled, not where it's obvious. So the information isn't in the pick. It's in the admission that Denver and Cleveland are the two games with the most moving parts, the most travel, the most roster questions each staff would rather not answer out loud. Ravens at Browns carries the extra wrinkle of a divisional game, where familiarity flattens talent gaps and the underdog's coaching staff has seen every tendency on tape. I'd rather have those writers' confidence levels than their conclusions.
What ties the day together is that only one of these stories changes a season. Harrison's debut alters what Houston can call on offense. The Dallas meeting alters what Dallas gets asked in a press conference. The picks alter nothing at all, which is exactly why they run every week. My verdict: I'll be grading Houston's decision in London, not Dallas's huddle or CBS's scorecard. If Harrison is a decoy on Sunday, Ryans wasted a trip's worth of leverage. If he's a target, the AFC South has a problem it didn't have Wednesday morning.
