Balancing act: Houston Texans - ESPN (blog)

In an ideal world, an NFL team is balanced.

I think coaches and GMs would like to have a team that can rely on its offense and defense equally. (I know they love to say special teams is a third of things. Count the plays. It’s a much smaller piece.)

How balanced are the teams of the AFC South?

Our final team in this exercise is the Houston Texans.

Houston has two of the league’s best offensive weapons in Arian Foster and Andre Johnson. They alone could slant a lot of teams to offense.

But last year’s team saw Foster miss a bit of action and Johnson and starting quarterback Matt Schaub a lot of action due to injuries. And while the offense was still effective, it was very much a defensive football team with a swarming front keyed by J.J. Watt, Connor Barwin, Brian Cushing, Antonio Smith and Brooks Reed.

Though the offense has gotten healthy, I think it remains a defensive football team. And by a decent margin. I’ll say it’s 65 percent defensive.

Independent of my number, I asked Matt Williamson of Scouts Inc. for his.

“This is a tough one because last offseason was obviously all about defense -- and it worked,” he said. “This offseason seemed to be all about not going too far backwards on either side of the ball. But I guess I will go with 55 percent defense.”

What do you think?