Can Houston's First Round Draft Pick Solve Texas' "Beto Problem"?
As a former Texan living in Chicago, I found myself at the center of the drama in Week 18 when an (expected) Bears loss and (unexpected) Texans dub swapped the first two picks of the 2023 NFL Draft. With Justin Fields already on their roster, this change pretty much just handed the Bears a massive bargaining chip, the golden ticket to getting whatever they want from some team with deep quarterback needs. A team like…the Texans, who suddenly need to make some sacrifices if they are picky about which of the two top quarterback prospects they want to snag.
For Houston fans, the exhausting pursuit for a franchise quarterback is one they’re used to. (I use “they” despite becoming a Texans fan by circumstance after moving to Texas in 2018, although I’d been fond of the team even before that, in a sort of “I can fix him” kind of way). They got close in the late 2010s with He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, only to have the rug pulled out from underneath them, setting them back almost a decade.
It’s almost a little too apt that a Texas team has spent most of its lifetime struggling to find a good leader. From where I sat, Deshaun Watson’s excitement-to-dashed-hopes trajectory mimicked my own journey with another major character in Texas at the time: a man named Beto O’Rourke. I moved to Texas for school in 2018 and immediately registered to vote there. In November, I woke up at 5am just to get in line early to cast my vote for O’Rourke in the Texas senate election. My friend’s and I aggrandized “Blexas,” a hypothetical blue Texas that Beto had convinced us was within reach. After his senate loss, Beto’s presidential candidacy excited us further, at least at first.
Over time, Beto started to fade for me. As I learned to see Texas through the eyes of Texans, Beto’s campaign began to feel deeply unserious. The whole “man, I was just born to be in it” persona may have captured America, but it didn’t fool Texans. If there’s one thing Texas knows how to do it’s sniff out an imposter, and that’s what Beto was. Despite being from El Paso, he felt like an outsider. He had taken orders from the rest of America about what they wanted Texas to be and returned to Texas spouting saviorisms in a cowboy hat on the cover of Vanity Fair, acting like a messiah who would deliver Texas into democratic faux progressivism.
Living in Texas I developed a notion of “constituent politics,” a phrase I use to describe my conviction that the smoothest political outcomes derive from localities whose leaders match their constituents. For this reason, I stopped believing that Beto O’Rourke should be a senator of Texas.
Let me be very clear: under these same reasoning principles, Ted Cruz is also a terrible Texan senator. It would be an extreme disservice to the good people of Texas to insinuate that Cruz’ ignorant and self-servicing politics were a better representation of Texan constituents than that of someone who – however cringy – ultimately wanted to create positive change.
Herein lies what I’ll call the “Beto problem.” Progressive Texas found in Beto what NFL Teams have mistakenly coveted time and again: the savior draft pick. Someone fresh and (relatively) young who can “clean the slate” and rocket themselves back to success. Sometimes you get lucky, with a Manning or an Elway. But in a place as deeply rooted in tradition as Texas, these fresh faces usually won’t vibrate at the right frequency and you’re going to wind up with your Johnny Manziels and your JaMarcus Russells – your busts. Any positive change to be made in Texas will need to come from deep within. Texas needs progressive leaders and activists who align with Texas’ values (and trust me, whether or not people want to believe it about the South, there are plenty!) and who aim to build a better Texas, rather than leaders who think they can use Texas to fix a broken America (spoiler alert: they can’t).
Like Texas, the Texans need more than just a good quarterback to save them. If I were Houston, I wouldn’t even be considering trading up for that first pick. I’d be focusing on squeezing every amp out of the resources they already have. I’m talking Apollo 13 here, I want to see a CO2 scrubber offense. I’d be working 12-hour days investing in analytics to dig up some generational knowledge that, as a relatively young team, they’re reasonably lacking. I’d be focusing on doing what Texas does best: constructing a thriving and promising American microcosm, profound in its traditionalist approach to empowerment and success. With the right internal components, any young quarterback – be it Stroud or Young – has the potential to be the major asset the Texans need going forward.
Endnote: If you weren’t lucky enough to be living in Texas during the 2018 senate election / 2020 presidential election and want a taste of exactly how unseriously Texans viewed Beto, I’ll reference one of my favorite tweets from that time period:
