COLTS
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LB Forrest Rhyne has been promoted from the practice squad to the active roster. (Mike Chappell)
DAMEON PIERCE
As a Texans running back, Dameon Pierce is determined to revive the team’s running game.
Pierce told Aaron Wilson of Click2Houston.com that the better the run game, the more passing opportunities we have down the field. Getting the running game going is very instrumental for us. It takes us away from being one-dimensional and makes us more balanced. It takes us away from being one-dimensional and helps us to be more balanced.
It has been a lot of work we have done to put on some eye candy and misdirection to get us running early,” Pierce explained. Our offense will be different this week. They’re more of a four-down team rather than a five-down team, which has been causing us problems. We have to keep them at bay. They’re great athletes. If we slow them down, we should have a good chance of running the ball.”
The Texans’ OC Pep Hamilton and HC Lovie Smith also spoke about the running game and Pierce.
On any given play, it is crucial to have the opportunity to run and throw the football, so that they won’t have to defend just one. We’ve faced teams in the last three or four weeks that have covered up all of our offensive linemen and attempted to create one-on-one blocks up front. It’s important to feature some of the guys closer to the line of scrimmage who can run routes downfield when that happens.”
“I want us to know why we haven’t been able to run football, and I’ll say that more than the decline of Dameon Pierce,” Smith said. It is because of what we were doing up front that Dameon had such success early on. We should talk about what we are doing up front at the moment. He’s gotten many yards after contact. It’s hard to maintain a level throughout the NFL season. We have time to make it right.
The Texans
Despite his injuries during his rookie season, Texans LB Miles Smith believes Christian Harris is an elite athlete and three-down linebacker.
He is making more and more plays that we expect him to make as we move forward, Smith told Click2Houston.com’s Aaron Wilson. His athleticism allows him to occasionally make plays that other linebackers are unlikely to be able to make. Right now, he is experiencing some rookie pains, but that’s to be expected. As we continue, we expect him to make more and more plays, and really show what he is capable of. He’ll start making more and more of these plays as he continues to practice and play.”
“Obviously, he’s in a yellow jersey right now, which is never a good thing,” Smith said. We’ll see how things go this weekend if he’s able to go, but I hope so. “Avoiding contact a little bit. He missed that valuable game time last week.” He’s progressing day by day, we’ll see. At this point, he’s a three-down linebacker in our scheme. When we talk about three-down linebackers, our Will and Mike linebackers, they don’t go off the field unless something goes wrong. Early on, we wanted to slowly, gradually get him involved. He played more of our Sam linebacker, which comes out for 11-personnel. As a result, he is on every single play. We’re designing things based on his skill set. He is fully integrated with our defense. We look forward to his future.”