TEXANS RIP HAPLESS RAIDERS

The Houston Texans learned firsthand on Sunday something that the rest of the NFL already knew—that the Oakland Raiders aren’t a very good football team.  The Texans romped for 329 yards of total offense against the Oakland defense, while their own stop unit held the woeful Raiders’ attack to 165 total yards and eight first downs en route to a 29-6 victory.  Houston evened their 2009 NFL record at 2-2 while the Raiders dropped to 1-3.
 
Houston covered as -8 home favorites, improving their ATS mark to 2-2.  The Raiders, meanwhile, dropped to 2-2 against the spread.  The 35 points scored went UNDER the total of 42’.  Houston evened their NFL totals mark at 2-2, while the Raiders have gone UNDER in three of four games this season.

Texans’ defensive end made the somewhat obvious point that football is a lot of fun when your team is dominating on both sides of the ball:

"Everybody was having fun. When you're having fun you have confidence in what you do. You don't second-guess. You don't pull up when you can go full speed and that's when you make big plays."

The Texans prevailed despite several players suffering from the ‘Swine Flu’ virus including tight end Anthony Hill and safety Eugene Wilson.  Texans’ coach Gary Kubiak addressed the situation:

"Eugene got very sick last night, it continued through this morning, so there was no way he could play. We're monitoring the situation. It's something that's hit us in the past four days and we just have to work through it."

Oakland head coach Tom Cable had only the ‘sickly’ state of his team’s offense to address in his postgame comments.  Even his anatomical analogy made little sense:

"We could not run the football and that really disrupted our offense. We are really killing ourselves -- we're shooting ourselves in the foot all over the place."

Beleaguered Raiders’ quarterback Jamarcus Russell blamed the team’s problems on their inability to stay out of third and long situations:

"We kept ourselves in third-and-long situations. We keep harping on that it's a must that we stay in manageable downs."

Making matters worse for the Raiders is that they play their next three games against very tough opponents starting with arguably the best team in the NFL at the moment, the New York Giants, on the road.  The Raiders are a whopping +16 underdog in that game, with the total set at 41.  They’ll then host the Philadelphia Eagles and New York Jets in the following two weeks.  The Texans will travel to Tempe, Arizona this week for a game against the Arizona Cardinals.  The Texans are a surprisingly short +5’ underdog to the defending NFC champs.  The total in the game is set at 48.  Houston will head to Cincinnati for a game against the Bengals the following week before returning home to face the San Francisco 49ers on 10/25.