Jack Easterby attributes the Texans firing him to fan criticism

Jack Easterby's NFL career evaporated even more quickly than it suddenly materialized. Now, nearly three years after the V.P. of football operations was abruptly fired by Texans owner Cal McNair, Easterby has offered an explanation for how and why things fell apart.

Appearing on the Ross Tucker Football Podcast, Easterby suggested that he was done in by rampant fan criticism.

“There also were a lot of people that, quite frankly, we had to transition out of there,” Easterby told Tucker, via Matt Young of the Houston Chronicle. “So, that was probably one of the other things that I would say that was really hard for people to understand on the outside. Fans love football, man. So if they’re like, hey this is in between me and where I want to be, there’s going to be criticism and justifiably so. That comes with it, right? That’s just part of it.”

It's also perhaps just part of why McNair made what at the time was a surprising decision to part ways with Easterby.

He glossed over the fact that his ouster happened in 2022, the second year of G.M. Nick Caserio's tenure with the team. If things were bad enough from a fan standpoint to get McNair to dump Easterby, they weren't bad enough for McNair to also sever ties with Caserio — the G.M. who was reportedly hand-picked by Easterby, in defiance of the formal Korn Ferry search process.

Blaming the move on fan reaction adroitly glosses over reality. The Texans, while Easterby was still employed there, pulled off one of the all-time coups, dumping quarterback Deshaun Watson onto the Browns for three first-round picks, and then some. With the Watson trade-and-sign becoming the single worst transaction in NFL history, the Texans deserve plenty of credit for engineering it.

Consider the circumstances. Watson didn't play at all in 2021. He had more than 20 civil lawsuits pending, each of which arose from allegations of misbehavior during massage-therapy sessions. And yet the Texans managed to get four teams to submit acceptable trade terms, allowing the Browns, Panthers, Saints, and Falcons to compete for Watson's contract.

Easterby was there when it happened. And yet, only months later after the Texans pulled it off, Easterby was gone. Was it really a product of fan discontent, or was there something else going on that caused McNair to break free from what seemed like the strange and inexplicable hold that Easterby had over him?

The perception, if not the reality, was that Easterby climbed far faster than he should have. That he landed in a key football position without the objective skills or abilities that many other candidates possessed. If anything, fans and some in the media saw through the façade at a time when McNair did not.

Something got McNair to view Easterby differently than McNair had. While Easterby's reputation, earned or otherwise, among the fan base didn't help, it's not as if McNair faced losing his role as owner over it. As Jed York once said, you don't dismiss owners.

The other thing that undermines Easterby's effort to blame his firing on fan opinion is the simple reality that the Texans went from being hopefully dysfunctional with Easterby in a position of significant influence to highly competitive without him. If his firing was simply an effort to give disgruntled fans a pound of flesh, it had the incidental (and perhaps, in his mind, coincidental) benefit of pivoting the team toward becoming the perennial contender it now is.

The fact that none of the other 31 teams has been linked to the potential hiring of Easterby underscores that it was something more than "the fans didn't like me." Easterby, whose arrival sparked among other things questions about the accuracy of his resume, has been unwanted by any other NFL team.

Easterby is currently back in North Carolina. So is his former boss in New England, Bill Belichick. And despite some stray speculation and rumors that Belichick could be bringing Easterby to Chapel Hill, it hasn't happened.

That possibly says it all. Unless, of course, Easterby's sudden emergence during the NFL's slow time is a trial balloon in advance of Belichick giving him a job.

Regardless, like Belichick, it seems that Easterby's time in the NFL has ended. If that's because of any fan base, it would be a rare example of fan opinion overruling the whims of the people who own the teams.