At first, his screams were met with silence. Stunned silence, really.

This rookie was standing there, two weeks into his NFL career, moments after a humiliating loss at home, and he was calling out … the entire team?

“Where my leaders at?!?” C.J. Stroud shouted, grabbing the attention of everyone inside the home locker room at NRG Stadium. “I need some leaders! Right now! Where they at? Speak up!”

The Texans were 0-2. They’d just been routed at home by the Colts. They hadn’t won more than four games in three years. “We got waxed that day,” remembers tight end Brevin Jordan, “and we all had the same question, like, ‘Are we gonna have one those seasons again?’”

Stroud was livid, not merely at the loss but at the fact that he was the only one willing to step up and say something about it.

This was last September, six weeks before Stroud would throw for more passing yards in a game than any rookie ever, four months before he’d become the youngest quarterback in NFL history to win a playoff game. This was before belief in Houston really started to build, before the rest of the league started to realize this team wasn’t just coming — it was coming fast.

Few inside the building saw a turnaround happening this quickly or this dramatically. But the margins are painfully small in the NFL, and sometimes seasons come down to little moments, like when a rookie punctures the silence of a somber locker room and changes how his teammates see him — and themselves.

“Some people needed to be called out. The captains needed to be called out,” says defensive end Will Anderson Jr., like Stroud a rookie captain at the time.

Jimmie Ward, a veteran safety who’d come over from San Francisco that spring, sat at his stall that afternoon and watched from across the room. He was injured and didn’t play in the loss; in his mind, it didn’t feel right to rip into his new teammates, not with him in street clothes and them in shoulder pads.

When Stroud was finished, Ward walked up to him.

“You’re a rookie,” he told him, “and that took some balls.”

The Texans were learning the kid who oozed California cool also had what Ward calls “this asshole side to him.” They won their next two games by 44 points.

It’s early August. On a high school field outside of Cleveland, a half hour after a training camp practice has wrapped and two days before the Texans face the Steelers in a preseason game, Nico Collins is wearing out the JUGS machine. Most of his teammates have boarded the bus and headed back to the hotel. A few linger on the sideline. Collins works alone.

The fourth-year wideout is eight feet from the machine, jogging in place, waiting for a football to be fired. Snap. He snares it with one hand. These are coming out hot. Snap. He grabs another, then taps his feet down, like he’s inches from the sideline. He adds to the total in his head. He’s nearing 20 without a drop. Snap.

What looks ridiculously difficult — what is ridiculously difficult — Collins wants to turn into second nature.

“Man,” he says a few moments later, shaking his head, “C.J. was on us today.”

It was a sloppy practice. The offense looked awful. Stroud missed throws and threw picks. Receivers broke off some routes early, others too late. The defense dominated, then gloated. At one point, after he was intercepted along the sideline, Stroud slammed his towel to the ground in disgust. Then he called his unit together.

“Slow it down!” Collins remembers Stroud screaming in the huddle. “How many times have we run this play? How many times?

“Now lock in.”

That’s the side to the young quarterback teammates hadn’t seen until his eruption after the early-season loss to the Colts last year. Stroud’s soft-spoken, laid-back persona belies an edge he’s always played with — and now leads with. He doesn’t unleash it often, preferring to pick his spots. But when he does, teammates feel the fire. Quarterbacks don’t get far in this league being polite.

“Oh, he’ll snap at us,” Collins says. “Way more than you think.”

“At practice you see glimpses of it,” new Texans receiver Stefon Diggs says of C.J. Stroud. “But come game time, he’s the real deal.” (Justin Casterline / Getty Images)

Stroud made it a point last summer to work quietly and earn the locker room’s respect. He was a rookie. He knew his place. Then the Texans stumbled to 0-2, and what irritated Stroud most during that loss to the Colts was how quiet the huddles were. When the team gathered before kickoff, he was the only one who said anything. When they did so again after halftime, same thing. So after coach DeMeco Ryans finished in the locker room, Stroud unloaded on them.

He knew he couldn’t be the only voice.

“Look, C.J.’s a great dude, all the guys like him, but there’s just enough prick to him, you know what I mean? He’s got some dog in him,” says Texans defensive coordinator Matt Burke. “We’ve all been on teams where the quarterback is separate from the rest of the group — he sorta does his own thing, and when he gets on guys, no one really listens, right? But when you’ve got a guy who’s got some s— about him, the team responds.”

Wideout Stefon Diggs, the team’s marquee offseason acquisition, felt it during Sunday’s season opener in Indianapolis. “At practice you see glimpses of it,” Diggs said after catching two touchdowns. “He’ll sprinkle a little emotion on you, he’ll get on you a little bit. But come game time, he’s the real deal.”

That intensity, Diggs said, is essential. Everyone on the offense knows what the expectation is, full stop. Stroud demands it.

“He makes it easy to be a receiver,” Diggs added.

Diggs’ arrival this spring via trade with the Bills, plus the additions of running back Joe Mixon and defensive end Danielle Hunter, made it clear: the Texans are going for it. Last season’s 10-7 regular season and surprise run to the divisional round of the playoffs was enough to scrap the slog of a long rebuild.

The window had opened. They weren’t going to wait. With Stroud still on his rookie contract, Houston wants to take its shot in the crowded AFC.

The QB opened training camp in late July welcoming the hype, mindful that the spotlight shines most on the teams that matter. “Pressure is a privilege,” Stroud likes to say, and it’s something he learned from his time at Ohio State. The Buckeyes would get every team’s best shot every single week. He knows Houston isn’t sneaking up on anyone in 2024.

And with that comes the burden of expectation, something that’s buried teams before them, teams that thought they were ready to contend only to find out the hard way they weren’t even close. “We have that big red target on our back,” Stroud says. “That’s something we didn’t have last year.”

Last season, Houston didn’t have a single regular-season game scheduled for a national television window; this year the Texans are slated for five, including a marquee Christmas Day matchup with the Ravens, the team that bounced them from the playoffs in January. Season tickets sold out by July, a first for the franchise in five years. Entering Week 1, only five teams had better Super Bowl odds. Stroud currently has the fourth-shortest odds for MVP.

So much has changed for this city, this franchise and this quarterback in 12 short months.

“It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be harder,” Stroud says. “That’s how you should want it.”

It started Sunday in Indianapolis. The Colts were desperate to steal this one — they haven’t won a Week 1 game since 2013 and haven’t won an AFC South title since 2014. At the moment, Houston remains Indy’s biggest roadblock.

In the first quarter, the Colts’ Anthony Richardson made the throw of the game, maybe the year.

With two minutes left in the fourth, Stroud made the throw that won it.

A false start turned a third-and-6 into a third-and-11. Leading by two, the Texans needed a conversion to prevent Richardson from getting another chance. After the snap, Collins peeled toward the sideline, blanketed by Colts’ corner Jaylon Jones.

If there was a window, Stroud might’ve been the only person inside Lucas Oil Stadium to see it. The coverage was superb.

Stroud fired. Jones got a finger on it. Collins kept his concentration — the byproduct of all those reps on the JUGS machine — and somehow snagged it. Then he got a foot down. Then a knee. The ridiculously difficult had become second nature.

One Mixon run later, it was over. After the 29-27 win, Stroud was asked about the completion to Collins. How in the world did he fit it in there?

He smiled. Then he repeated an old quote Peyton Manning used to say all the time.

“There’s no defense for the perfect throw.”

Nico Collins’ third-down sideline catch all but sealed the Texans’ victory over the Colts. (Christine Tannous / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)

Nine months ago, after their divisional playoff game in Baltimore, Stroud stood before a lectern on the bottom floor of M&T Bank Stadium, wearing a sweatsuit, beanie and Asics running shoes. It was his first lesson about how punishing postseason football can be. A tie game at the half had ballooned into a 34-10 Ravens’ triumph.

One minute, the game’s tight. The next, you’re getting steamrolled out of the stadium.

“It’s tough getting embarrassed like that,” Stroud said.

His face told the story. He was drained.

“I’ve been going hard since I was like 12 years old,” he said. “AAU tournaments. Baseball. Football. 7-on-7. High school. It’s been a blessing. It’s been a ball. I’m 22 years old, and this is my first time ever having freedom away from school, away from college.”

The climb was so quick, so consuming, that he’d never taken a minute to breathe. That cramped apartment 40 miles east of Los Angeles that Stroud lived in with his mom and siblings, where he cried after getting his first Division 1 offer, still feels like yesterday. Then came Ohio State. The draft. The S2 drama. Training camp. The season. And now, at just 22 years old, he was already one of the young faces of the league, the quarterback some were starting to think might be good enough to do what Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson so far haven’t. That is, beat Patrick Mahomes in the playoffs.

But first, before the rest of his career could start, Stroud needed to get away. So he did. He played in the Pro Bowl. He swung by media row at the Super Bowl and broke down his own film. He hopped on podcasts. He taught football to high schoolers in China as part of an Asian tour with Cowboys edge rusher Micah Parsons, threw out the first pitch before a baseball game in Japan, then trained with — well, sort of trained with — sumo wrestlers.

GO DEEPER

Troy Aikman ‘never lost at anything.’ He’s just now starting to enjoy it.

By the spring, Stroud couldn’t help himself: he was lighting up the text thread again, the same one he used to send teammates film clips last season. Pretty soon, the Texans’ skill position players, including Diggs, were meeting up for throwing sessions. In Los Angeles. In Miami. Finally, in Houston.

“Come on, you know who planned those,” says receiver Tank Dell. “Of course 7 did.”

Burke, the Texans’ DC, felt Stroud’s urgency and inquisitiveness after all of one practice last year. After Stroud threw his first pick, he hunted down Burke after the workout and asked him to explain how he’d disguised the coverage. The QB didn’t wanna get beat on that play again. Burke was floored. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’” he says. “You love that. That piece of it, that desire to learn that stuff, that’s so important.”

Scoop City Newsletter

Free, daily NFL updates direct to your inbox.

Free, daily NFL updates direct to your inbox.

Sign Up

Hunter, the veteran defensive end who arrived via free agency this spring, has spent nine seasons chasing quarterbacks in this league. What struck him during training camp was Stroud’s unflappability in the pocket. He’d tick through his reads without hurrying, without letting panic — a weakness game-wreckers like Hunter prey on — set in.

“He just doesn’t fold under pressure, when guys are coming,” Hunter says. “If it’s not there, he doesn’t try to do Superman stuff. You know how big that is for a guy his age?”

Thing is: Stroud can do Superman stuff. He won Offensive Rookie of the Year doing Superman stuff. Richardson’s stunning 60-yard bomb on Sunday overshadowed a 55-yard second-quarter beauty from Stroud to Collins that, per Next Gen Stats, was the most improbable completion of Stroud’s young career. Two Colts defenders were within a yard of Collins when the ball arrived.

CJ STROUD DEEP TO NICO COLLINS FOR 55 YARDS.

📺: #HOUvsIND on CBS/Paramount+
📱: https://t.co/waVpO909ge pic.twitter.com/pIG9hzf0CD

— NFL (@NFL) September 8, 2024

Stroud found the window. Somehow. When it comes to deep balls, few QBs in the league are better.

“It just seems so natural, so easy for him,” Collins says of his quarterback.

“It may seem easy, but it’s not,” Stroud says.

And it won’t be anytime soon. Stroud knows the innocence of his rookie season is gone. Now he needs to win. The Texans’ first primetime game of 2024 arrives Sunday night against the Bears, and with it, another test to see if they’re ready to meet the moment. The quarterback, too.

Stroud seems to relish it, always returning to that word of his: pressure. He refuses to see it as a negative. His story tells us he never has.

“We love that pressure, and we want that pressure,” he says. “There’s no real reward if there’s no pressure.”

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photo: Tim Warner / Getty Images)

At the end of the 2023 WNBA season, after the Las Vegas Aces had captured their second consecutive title and A’ja Wilson earned Finals MVP, Wilson had a message.

“Whoever you are out there that voted me fourth (for MVP), thank you. Thank you so much,” Wilson said during the team’s championship rally. “I wanna say I appreciate you, ’cause that just means that I got a lot more work to do.”

Although the 2024 Aces have disappointed relative to expectation, Wilson has not. Just as she vowed last October, Wilson returned an improved player in her seventh WNBA season.

Already a two-time MVP and Defensive Player of the Year, Wilson is now the record holder for the most points in a single season. Against the Indiana Fever — and rookie Caitlin Clark, who could challenge these marks in the not-so-distant future — Wilson scored her 941st point in the second quarter, breaking Jewell Loyd’s single-season mark of 939 set in 2023.

941 buckets in 2024 and counting…

Most Points Scored In A WNBA Single Season belongs to A’JA WILSON #WelcometotheW pic.twitter.com/ysR3DWubVz

Advertisement

— WNBA (@WNBA) September 11, 2024

Many single-season WNBA records have been broken over the past two years since the regular season expanded to 40 games. When the league debuted in 1997, the season was 28 games long. The next year, 30, then the year after that, 32, which lasted through 2002. The regular season was 34 games long from 2003-19, during which time Diana Taurasi set the scoring standard that lasted until last season.

Nevertheless, Wilson’s statistics don’t require the extra games to break records. Through 34 games, Wilson had 929 points, more than anyone in league history, comfortably ahead of Taurasi’s 860 in 2006. Wilson was averaging 27.3 points entering Wednesday’s game.

She needs only 83 total points over the final five games to post the highest-scoring average in a WNBA season, passing Taurasi’s mark of 25.3.

In addition to points, Wilson is also leading the league in defensive rebounds, blocks, turnover percentage and win shares. It’s been a tour de force for the runaway MVP favorite.

“I don’t want it to ever get lost on how good (A’ja) is,” Aces coach Becky Hammon said before the Fever game. “She just does it all. She’s in the middle of a run that sometimes I want to shake her and say, do you know how good you are? But then I don’t want to shake her because I don’t want to wake her up. She can just stay in whatever zone she’s in.”

That zone put Wilson in lofty historical company. Through seven seasons of her career, Wilson is also threatening Taurasi’s mark as the league’s all-time leading scorer. She has a better scoring average (20.9 versus 20.7) at this age, and thanks to the WNBA’s expanded schedule, Wilson can get to Taurasi’s total scoring output in fewer seasons.

For now, Wilson and the Aces only have their eyes on a third title. But the all-time great can’t help but set individual records in the process.

Required reading

(Photo: Justin Casterline / NBAE via Getty Images)

By themselves, the pieces of a puzzle reveal very little. But link them together and a clearly defined picture emerges.

Metaphorically speaking, that describes the NFL Draft. After spending months, if not years, gathering information on prospects, teams then connect all the dots — er, data — to create a fuller picture of whom they might be selecting.

Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders should understand that more than any prospect. His father, Deion Sanders, is not only his head coach but also one of the greatest cornerbacks in NFL history. Coach Prime, as he likes to be called, knows the league and its inner workings as well as anyone. He is familiar with the circus that is the draft process and how innocuous incidents can take on a life of their own.

That’s why I’m surprised Shedeur hasn’t handled the spotlight in a more circumspect manner over the past year. It goes beyond him throwing his offensive linemen under the bus after he was sacked five times in Saturday’s loss at Nebraska. It’s also having his work ethic questioned by Miami quarterback Cam Ward, another potential top-5 pick, after the two trained together in South Florida in the offseason. And him making a disparaging comment about a former teammate after the player transferred. And legendary QB Tom Brady joking (?) that he needed to get out of the car showroom and into the film room after he posted pictures in a Rolls-Royce.

“How many times did Raiola get touched?”

Shedeur Sanders putting the blame on his O-Line

Advertisement

pic.twitter.com/5Rnab2BOWS

— Unnecessary Roughness (@UnnecRoughness) September 8, 2024

By themselves, these things might not mean a lot.

But when strung together, they could result in uncomfortable questions about his fitness to potentially be drafted No. 1 — which is one of the reasons he returned for his senior season. As one former longtime general manager told me this week: “If you’re asking the question, teams are definitely going to be asking the question.”

At this point, just three weeks into the season, it’s too early to credibly discuss front-runners for the top spot. And though some entered the year projecting 2025 to be a QB-weak draft class, history tells us relative unknowns will be pushed up draft boards by the end of the season, making for a robust discussion about who should go No. 1.

We’re sure to hear names like Texas’ Quinn Ewers, Georgia’s Carson Beck, and Miami’s Ward, all of whom are talented and leading potential playoff squads. USC’s Miller Moss also could join the conversation. None is more physically talented than Sanders, but, to this point, each has handled the spotlight with greater dexterity.

Sanders has to know he is going to be judged differently than others. For one, he is a quarterback, which is the premium position in football. For another, he is a quarterback who happens to be Black in a league that only recently has viewed African Americans as capable of excelling at the position. And thirdly, he is a quarterback who happens to be Black and is the son of Deion Sanders, a man whose confidence, flash and bravado rubs some the wrong way. To think that Shedeur won’t be judged more critically is to be naive.

That said, none of these things will prevent Sanders from being highly drafted. But they could create openings for unnecessary and unwanted drama leading up to the draft, which has a voracious appetite when it comes to inane storylines. See, Cam Newton and “fake smile” for Exhibit 1A.

The Pulse Newsletter

Free, daily sports updates direct to your inbox.

Free, daily sports updates direct to your inbox.

Sign Up

Seeking perspective, I reached out to a couple of former general managers and asked what impact these puzzle pieces could have on Sanders’ consideration as a No. 1 pick. Both were involved in selecting a QB among the first three picks, including one at the very top, and each spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. Their views contrasted.

“All of these things do matter,” one said. “We’ve seen some great quarterbacks over the years who are unbelievably talented but they just can’t pull it off. There are many, many like that. … At this point, if I’m coming back to the league and kicking off a new regime, with what I know, I would never have Shedeur kick things off with me. I’m trying to pinpoint why that is, and I just don’t trust everything I’m seeing right now. He’s got some money from the portal and he’s spending it the way he is. … I just don’t trust his maturity. I don’t trust how he’s going to be able to handle the limelight, which sounds odd because he should be able to handle it more than anyone because he’s been around it all his life. I don’t mean handle the limelight; rather, is he going to be a distraction in that building? Is he going to irritate people? Do his teammates like him, or do they resent him?”

Said the other: “During the draft process, everybody pokes holes. Yes, people are going to be looking at that stuff. But I view it differently. Those types of things are all learned, maturing traits. We forget that kids are going to be kids. What you look for is how quickly they will grow up. Obviously, he has grown up in an athletic environment where he’s used to having the best around him. The work ethic will be the most important thing. The stuff about the comments and things like that, people will worry about that a little bit, but the work ethic is the thing. If you don’t think he’s going to have the work ethic, it’s a big red flag. You look at Jayden Daniels and he had the receivers in at 5:30 in the morning for meetings. You look at Matt Ryan, and he used to take his offensive linemen to dinner once a week. That said, I do think you have to be very careful about letting those things build up.”

Both men called Sanders “extremely talented” and said they expect him to be among the top quarterbacks in the 2025 draft. He could have turned pro after last season and possibly been the first quarterback taken after Caleb Williams, who went first overall to the Chicago Bears. But he came back because he said the timing “didn’t feel right,” the season didn’t “end right,” with Colorado finishing 4-8 after a 3-0 start, and because he wants to be the first quarterback off the draft board.

He has the talent, without question, completing 69 percent of his passes for 3,230 yards and 27 touchdowns, with just three interceptions, last season behind an awful line. Scouts speak highly of his accuracy, arm talent and pocket mobility. The tangibles. But the intangibles are what clubs figure to dissect during the draft process. They will want to know about his makeup and leadership skills. So far this year, frustration is seeping through.

He was sacked 56 times last season and has been dropped six times through two games this year. If his protection doesn’t improve in the coming weeks, how will he respond? The answer could be a major piece to his draft-day puzzle.

(Photo: Matthew Stockman / Getty Images)