This was an interesting preseason watch. We got a little sampling of the first-team Texans offense for the first series minus Nico Collins and David Montgomery, but mostly the first team, including C.J. Stroud at the helm.
Las Vegas went with their backup defense and gave us a little taste of some of their starting offense with Fernando Mendoza getting the start without Ashton Jeanty, but with his starting trio of WRs. That was nice of Klint Kubiak to allow Fernando Mendoza to get a start against the Houston defense, or their backup defensive group…except their backup defense is probably top 15 in the NFL if they were the actual starters. They got after Fernando Mendoza so he got a bit of a real-world look at what good, aggressive defenses can do. We’ll talk about how he did in the players section.
Houston dominated this early look at the teams on both sides of the ball. The Texans’ “kinda-sorta” first-team offense was crisp and scored a TD on their opening drive, while they flustered Fernando Mendoza with their backup defense. The Texans were cruising along and then all of a sudden the Raiders woke up with the third and fourth-string players, and Aidan O’Connell (15-24 for 166 yards, 0 TD/0 INT, 1-12-1) played well enough to lead the “try-hard” Raiders to a come-from-behind win. The Raiders won the scoreboard, but there was no doubt who the better team was here… It was Houston. But you have to give credit to the Raiders—they are much improved and have a lot of nice young talent being well-coached by Klint Kubiak.
Onto the player notes, where I’ll go in the order of the things that captured my attention the most, good or bad.
Player Notes...
– So the first note is an absolute no-brainer to be the lead-off player note, and it’s a discussion the likes of which I never thought I would be having. But this is the beauty of the NFL. This is the beauty of scouting football for a living. This is the reason why a football analyst should be grinding all of these game tapes all the time. Because the image that we have of a player from whatever college tape we think we saw—or in this case, what we also saw from their first run in the NFL last season—players can change so much in an off-season if they put in the work. Especially if they are radical about it. There was someone in this game who has totally transformed himself physically, and it’s going to lead to newfound success on the NFL field, and that player’s name is Woody Marks (4-37-1, 1-6-0/1)…the supposed backup running back for the Houston Texans.
Woody Marks looks like a whole new running back this year. He looks like he’s put on about 10-plus pounds of muscle. He’s lean, he’s muscular, he’s quick…and he may be the most talented RB the Texans currently have. As I was watching this and trying to pick my jaw up off the ground, I was thinking how fantastic he looks physically and how this cannot be good for David Montgomery. Not that David Montgomery isn’t going to be the lead RB, but there’s going to be way more of a split between the two than anybody would have thought, and with the added pressure, that Woody Marks may just overtake Montgomery by sheer force/talent into the season. If you possess David Montgomery, you gotta go get Woody Marks.
– Woody Marks looked good, but Raiders rookie Mike Washington (9-56-0, 2-18-0/3) looks amazing…again. The way Woody Marks looked made me seriously question David Montgomery’s touch count projections for the upcoming season. And the way that Mike Washington is looking, I’m starting to wonder how much of a split is going to take place there in the Vegas backfield. Remember what Klint Kubiak did with Zach Charbonnet and Kenneth Walker last season? Everyone howling about not using Kenneth Walker more during the season before Zach Charbonnet got hurt? Why wouldn’t he do a big split again to preserve Ashton Jeanty? Too much talent hitting the NFL and thus fantasy football. It’s creating several conundrums on RB touch counts that are going to be impossible to figure out before the season. Whatever it’s going to mean for fantasy football purposes, I don’t know that there’s been a better-looking rookie at any position than the glimpses we’ve seen of Mike Washington so far in 2026.
– It was nice to see C.J. Stroud (4-6 for 27 yards, 0 TD/0 INT, 0-0-0) play more under control and more competently and more confidently than when we last saw him melting down in the playoffs. Stroud played for a series and led a scoring drive with a very nice game-management type of drive from the QB. I don’t see any signs of the “old, electric” C.J. Stroud, but in this one brief appearance, at least we didn’t see the version of C.J. Stroud with the yips. Granted, he was facing the second-team defense for the Raiders, which is not the greatest backdrop to be judging him by… but he should be able to handle that type of defense and he did, so mission accomplished.
– The other major reason the Texans are a Super Bowl threat is that defense. They played the backup/second-team defense in this game, and their backups are probably better than the Raiders’ actual starters on defense. Houston has depth and talent all over the place on defense. If there’s going to be a shutdown defense that’s immune to the schedule, my bet is it’s going to be on the Texans. The Rams with Aaron Donald might hit that level as well.
– Fernando Mendoza (8-15 for 86 yards, 0 TD/1 INT, 1-1-0) got the start against that tough Texans second-team defense and it didn’t go that great for him—barely over 50% completion percentage and threw a pick-six. He was under assault most of the time that he was in the game. But I give him a ton of credit; this was a “welcome to the NFL” moment and he took his beating like a man and he never flinched or got down on himself. He has supreme confidence in his abilities without being arrogant about it. He’s no doubt the best QB talent and leader from this draft.
– I have two minor notes to finish…
1: Raiders rookie WR Malik Benson (1-18-0/5) has been getting a lot of camp buzz, but I’ve never been much of a fan of his work per se. In this game, he had a nice catch on his first target and then kinda melted down on his last four targets where he didn’t catch any of them for any number of reasons, but mostly because the Texans’ secondary is a higher level and physical, and Malik Benson shrunk within that.
2: I got my first real glimpse of Texans rookie tight end Marlin Klein (3-31-0, 3-31-0/3) and I gotta say…I wasn’t very impressed. Now, it’s early, but when I say he looked awkward and unathletic, that can happen to rookie TEs in their first NFL action. I thought another Michigan tight end looked awkward starting out his NFL rookie season when I watched Colston Loveland at first and got a negative impression; we need to give the tight ends a couple of weeks to get their feet wet in the NFL before we make too much of a radical judgment on how awkward or not they look running the route in a debut game.
However, that does not apply to Eagles tight end Eli Stowers, who has a whole different problem and a whole different valuation for fantasy that we have to make a reaction to—and I don’t want to give him time because his issue of playing passive is something I don’t want to invest in or wait around to see if it changes because it was so pronounced. By contrast, Marlin Klein just looked a little awkward and out of place moving around on the field, like I’ve seen rookie tight ends do for over a decade. I like it better when they hit the ground running and look smooth right out of the gate, but looking a little awkward out of the gate is not a death sentence for future production and competency.
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