Where do Houston players rank in the rebuild?

Mike Sando of The Athletic dropped his annual “QB Tiers” article. The premise revolves around 50 NFL personnel workers, either coaches, scouts or general managers, ranking all 32 quarterbacks into different groupings. The exercise is designed to provide more insight and clarity than simply trying to rank the league starters 1-32 while highlighting value at a position that offers different ways to win.

With that idea in mind, the thought of hypothetically “tiering” the current Houston Texans’ roster and their respective values to the team is an interesting one. Plenty has been made of trying to determine the one or two most valuable pieces on the roster but little has been said of how the team could be collectively grouped.

For a roster that’s so young and in the middle of a rebuild, it may not be fair to build tiers in comparison to the rest of the league. However, the following players are ranked exclusively within the context of Nick Caserio’s rebuild over the last two years. Each tier will address how players are expected to contribute in 2022 and how likely they are to contribute to the future beyond that in 2023 and 2024.

Contracts and potential trade probability are not taken into account in this exercise. This is a measure of talent and what a player has shown at an NFL level.  Players such as Laremy Tunsil, who Houston may ultimately decide to trade rather than extend, are not discounted for their current contract or the uncertainty regarding any future negotiations. Positional value, and how coaching and the league works around it, is taken into account when determining future value.

With these parameters set, here is how the Texans roster may be ranked.

Tier 1: Anticipated contribution in both 2022 and the future, regardless of circumstances

(AP Photo/Jeff Lewis)

Brandin Cooks
Jonathan Greenard
Laremy Tunsil
Kenyon Green
Derek Stingley Jr.

These five players are as theoretically “bullet proof” in the grand scheme of the Houston Texans rebuild as anyone on the team. All five would likely start or at least see significant rotational minutes if traded to another club and are amongst the most talented current players on Houston’s roster.

These players should be foolproof to coaching fallacy or any competition. Cooks has gone for 1,000 yards on four different teams at this point in his career and Tunsil has been regarded as one of the league’s best left tackles for years. The two of them would…