Deshaun Watson is reportedly unhappy with Texans for not interviewing Eric Bieniemy
One deleted tweet was all it took for the oddsmakers to rank potential new teams for Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson.
As Pro Football Talk reported, shortly after the news Tuesday of the Texans’ hiring Nick Caserio as general manager, Watson tweeted: “some things never change….”
While Watson later deleted the tweet, he was upset about not having a voice in the hiring of the team’s new general manager, reported Ian Rapoport of the NFL Network.
With Caserio hired, the Texans are turning their attention to who will coach the team. Houston is one of six teams looking for a new coach, and five of them have or plan to interview Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy.
The lone exception: the Texans.
That may seem quizzical because, as the NFL Network’s Albert Breer reported, Watson “advocated” for Bieniemy after talking with Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
NBC Sports’ Peter King joined the “Dale & Keefe Show” on WEEI radio on Thursday and said he believes Watson is not happy that Houston won’t speak with Bieniemy.
“I think Deshaun Watson is probably pretty upset that the Texans won’t even interview Eric Bieniemy,” King said. “Deshaun Watson is very close to Patrick Mahomes and I’m sure Mahomes is saying, ‘You would be killer with Eric Bieniemy.’ And I don’t quite understand it, really.
“As somebody in the league told me about a week ago when I was asking about doing Zoom interviews for his team — this is a team president of a team that has some availability right now — and he goes, ‘It’s almost the worst news, but in some ways, it’s the best news. It’s the worst news because it’s different when you interview somebody on Zoom versus interviewing him in person, but the good part of it is now if we want to interview John Doe, and normally you’d get on the owners plane and you’d fly somewhere and you’d interview a guy, maybe have dinner with them, all that stuff, it might be a five or six hour proposition. But this year, it’s an hour-and-a-half or two hours and you basically do a lot of interviews and you decide at that point who do you want to go forward with and interview a second and maybe even third time.’
“That’s why — how hard is it to invest two hours with Eric Bieniemy? And not just to check a box, either. I mean, who wouldn’t want to interview a guy who has been at the right hand of Andy Reid for eight years in Kansas City and watch that whole thing get built the right way? So it’s not the first thing the Texans have done to make me scratch my head, but it certainly is the current one.”
