Watt swatted away passes, Arian Foster ran away from tacklers, and the Houston Texans did just enough to knock Cincinnati out of the playoffs for the second straight year.
Matt Schaub made his first postseason start a successful one when Foster’s 1-yard touchdown in the third quarter helped the Texans to a 19-13 AFC wild-card win over the Bengals on Saturday.
"The whole stadium knew we had to line up and run the ball and boy, he was at his best there at the end," Texans coach Gary Kubiak said of Foster. "He’s become a fine, fine player, and it just seems like the bigger it gets, the better Arian gets."
Now comes the big test. The Texans (13-4) move on to the second round on Jan. 13, when they visit the Patriots, who beat them, 42-14, in Week 14. This time, the Texans are 9?-point underdogs.
"It’s one step," Watt said of the win. "We know what it means, and we have bigger goals than that."
Shayne Graham kicked four field goals for the Texans, while Foster finished with 140 yards and became the first NFL player to rush for at least 100 yards in each of his first three playoff games.
Watt finished with a sack and swatted away two of Andy Dalton’s pass attempts, once wagging his finger at the Bengals quarterback after the play.
"I think it was a full defensive effort, everybody was flying around and we were getting off the field on third downs," Watt said.
The Texans’ defense smothered Dalton and the Bengals early. Their second drive ended when Connor Barwin tackled BenJarvus Green-Ellis for a 6-yard loss and Watt followed with a sack of Dalton.
Houston’s offense had the ball for almost 39 minutes as it ate up the clock with a season-high 32 carries from Foster.
"We controlled the line of scrimmage, and any time we do that it’s going to be hard to beat us," Foster said.
The Texans had trouble finishing drives and managed three field goals in the first half against the Bengals (10-7). Houston struck first after the break, with Foster scoring the game’s only offensive touchdown to make it 16-7.
Schaub, who missed last year’s playoffs with a foot injury, had an interception returned for a touchdown by Leon Hall before halftime.
"It was never easy," Schaub said. "Cincinnati is a great team. I made a turnover and gave them points. We just had to rally around each other and we did that."
Johnathan Joseph, an ex-Bengal, had an interception for the Texans, who kept Cincinnati without a playoff win since the 1990 season, the league’s longest current streak.
Houston had struggled on third downs lately. This time, the Texans didn’t let the Bengals convert a third down on nine tries.
The Texans rebounded from a terrible month in which they lost three of four games and the No. 1 seed in the AFC playoffs. The win came in front of a record crowd of 71,738, including former Oilers great Earl Campbell.
"We like to run the ball and play good defense," Foster said. "It only takes one week to turn things around in the NFL and we did that."
The Bengals couldn’t do anything offensively before the break, and were outgained, 250-53, in the first half. Dalton was 4 of 10 for 3 yards in the first half.
Schaub shook off his first-half miscue to finish 29 of 38 for 262 yards, and Dalton finished 14 of 30 for 127 yards.
The Bengals had a chance for a touchdown late in the fourth quarter, but Dalton’s pass sailed just out of reach of a diving A.J. Green in the end zone.
"The offense didn’t play as well as it could have," Dalton said. "You can always look back and say, ‘What if?’?"
Dalton’s 45-yard pass to Green got Cincinnati moving in the third quarter and set up Josh Brown’s 34-yard field goal. When Dalton tried to go to Green again, Joseph intercepted and got the Texans in scoring range again as the quarter ended.
In last year’s playoffs, the Texans routed the Bengals, 31-10, with Dalton throwing three interceptions.
The main difference in this one: Schaub was back in charge for Houston. Rookie T.J. Yates filled in for Schaub and got the Texans a win in their first playoff game, but couldn’t take them any further.
On their second possession, Schaub completed an 18-yard pass, Foster had a 17-yard run, and Keshawn Martin went 16 yards on a reverse, setting up Graham’s field goal.
It became a pattern — move the ball down the field, settle for 3 points. The fans started booing.
And then Schaub did the one thing he wanted to avoid — he let Cincinnati’s defense get its hands on the ball. Hall anticipated Schaub’s throw, stepped in front, and returned it untouched, high-stepping the last few yards, for the defense’s fourth touchdown in the last four games.
In that tragedy’s aftermath, I kept coming back to one inescapable thought: Once that cowardly shooter got inside the school, what’s the one thing — aside from him having an immediate, massive stroke right there on the spot — that I could have hoped for? Someone to stop him as quickly as possible, with a minimal loss of life. A trained police officer, preferably. But next best? Any sort of competent, caring adult who had been drilled in the use of firearms, had access to them and was willing to take on the grave responsibility of protecting innocent lives.
I hold in my hands “Early Settlers of Rowley, Massachusetts,” compiled by George Brainard Blodgette and published 1882-1887 by the Essex Institute Historical Collections. It was revised and published in 1933 by Amos Everett Jewett and reprinted in 1981 by New England History Press.
Researchers don’t need to know all that. My copy probably will go to a library eventually, but Maine genealogists will be interested in where they can see the book now, maybe even today.
Rowley is a bit northwest of the town of Gloucester, Mass., from which many people moved to Maine in after the Revolutionary War; the Rowley book is well worth a look, especially because its family sections are so well done. And yes, there is an index in the back of the 472-page volume.
Here are some of the surnames that have their own sections of family history: Bailey, Boynton, Bradstreet, Brocklebank, Browne, Burpee, Carleton, Chaplin-Clark, Dickinson, Dresser, Goodridge, Harris, Hazen, Hobson, Jewett, Johnson, Kilborne, Lambert, Mighill-Perley, Nelson-Payson, Parrat-Jewett, Pearson, Perley, Pickard, Pingry, Platts, Prime, Scott, Searle, Spofford, Stickney, Tenney and Todd.
There are many more names, and the index has more than 50 pages.
Keep in mind that many libraries do not let their genealogy and family history resources circulate. In some cases, the books are very rare, and the volumes really need to stay in the building so that they are accessible to all. Most libraries have photocopiers so that researchers can copy portions they need for their records unless the books are too fragile.
These days, it is too easy to rely solely on the Internet for doing family research. Sometimes it is hard to tell from looking at a webpage whether the information is well done.
Pick up a book such as “Early Settlers of Rowley, Massachusetts,” and you get a sense right off of its being well-done. The book is subtitled “A Genealogical Record of the Families Who Settled in Rowley before 1799 with Several Generations of Their Descendants.”
Here is another reason to go looking at a top-notch facility such as Bangor Public Library, where the genealogy resources in the Bangor Room are accessible by elevator
inside the children’s department through the entrance on the right. The Bangor Room has a table where there are several handouts about genealogy and family history resources.
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