The Houston Texans will travel to the Bay Area later this week for a joint practice with the San Francisco 49ers on Friday, and then a preseason game on Sunday. Joint practices are becoming more and more common lately. It provides teams with a chance to mix up practice a bit, going against new players. It can sometimes lead to problems on the practice field, but generally speaking, players behave themselves.
Texans coach Bill O’Brien met with the Texans media on Monday (video), and he discussed this week’s matchup. He confirmed the team will be working more on getting their own stuff installed in the game, rather than game-planning against the 49ers. Not exactly shocking information.
“We’re going out there to practice against them so we do have to be prepared for some of those things – obviously the tempo of their offense, things like that. But overall, we’re still in an installation-type part of camp. For instance, tomorrow we’ll come out, we’ll install some more situations, they’re off on Wednesday, then Thursday will be a big situational-type practice. We won’t game plan, so-to-speak, for San Francisco. We’ll just basically have a call sheet. Those are the plays that we’ll call in the game and we’ll go from there.”
A year ago, the Texans practiced with Washington down in Richmond, Virginia, and a fight broke out during practice. The 49ers have had some scuffles in practice, but nothing too crazy thus far. O’Brien did say he and Chip Kelly have already had some discussions about the joint practice:
“We don’t ever want that. Chip (Kelly) and I will talk to our teams. We’ve already spoken to each other about that. If you fight, you’re out of practice. We don’t want that. We don’t want that at all.”
The big question for preseason games is what kind of reps the first string offense and defense will get. O’Brien was asked about quarterback reps for this first game. He kept things pretty generic:
“We have a pretty good idea of what we’ll do there. Obviously Brock (Osweiler) will get a decent amount of snaps in the first half. Whether it’s by quarter, or by the amount of snaps or maybe the series, we’ll have to kind of see how the game’s going, try to get him into a rhythm, which will be good. Then, if you feel good about the amount of time he’s played, you take him out and then you go from there with Tom (Savage) and Brandon (Weeden). We haven’t exactly mapped that out but we have a pretty good idea of how we want to approach that.”