The Houston Texans have arguably the best defense in the NFL, and the man in charge of their defensive front knows well the talent he gets to work with every day.
“At the end of the day, I’m the luckiest coach in the NFL,” defensive line coach Rod Wright told me over the phone while the Texans prepare to face the New England Patriots in the AFC Divisional Round. “We’re extremely talented to have two All-Pros on the edge, both in the top eight in sacks, with guys in the middle who are stout and also able to rush. It’s a joy to coach these guys every day. They’re great players, high IQs and even better people.
“… Nobody cares who gets the credit, and when you have that, good things happen.”
Wright, 41, is a former college standout and NFL player who coached at Texas-San Antonio four years ago after a decade that included stints at Sam Houston State and East Carolina. Then, after one year, and after a year at the University of Miami, he shot his shot with a text message to DeMeco Ryans.
Flanked by Will Anderson Jr. (No. 51) and Danielle Hunter (No. 55), Rod Wright (center) coaches on the NFL’s best position groups in Houston. (Courtesy of the Houston Texans.)
Ryans, also 41, was forming his coaching staff after being named the Texans’ new head coach. The two were both All-Americans in 2005 and part of the 2006 draft class. Ryans landed with the Texans in Wright’s hometown, and Wright befriended players on the team during his time at home during the offseason.
Later, Wright spent two weeks in training camp with the 49ers in 2017 as a Bill Walsh coaching fellow, working with Robert Saleh, but he never connected with Ryans, who was a defensive quality control coach on that staff in his first NFL job that year.
Fast forward to 2023, when Ryans got the Texans’ head coaching job and was quickly building a staff, and Wright got his phone number.
“I shot him a half-court-shot text,” said Wright, who had done this before with a number of coaches, accustomed to a courtesy “thanks for reaching out,” or worse, no response at all.
Instead, Ryans responded, which gave Wright optimism that he was at least on his radar.
“But he calls me right after I said thank you,” Wright said, and he said, ‘We’re having some guys in. Do you want to come in tomorrow?’ And I’m like, ‘Heck, yeah, I want to come in tomorrow.’ For him to fly me in the next day was crazy.
“… I thank God every day.”
Wright was hired as assistant defensive line coach and was promoted to defensive line coach after one year. Houston has a defensive-minded head coach in Ryans and a coveted coordinator in Matt Burke, but ask his players and they’ll tell you that he deserves credit for their development.
“You talk about a special group, he’s had his imprint on our room, everything he wanted it to be as a culture,” defensive end Will Anderson Jr., a first-team All-Pro this year and a Pro Bowl for the second time in three seasons, told me over the phone. “He’s the same guy I’ve known since I met him when I was a rookie. We’ve really grown together from Year 1 to Year 3. You can see the growth and all the steps he’s taken to be the best possible D-line coach in the NFL.”
Wright’s coaching journey brought him back home
Wright was a consensus five-star recruit coming out of high school, the top defensive lineman in the nation and No. 6 overall recruit according to Rivals. Hall of Fame return specialist Devin Hester, by comparison, was 27th in the same rankings.
Wright stayed home and chose Texas, losing six games in four years and helping the Longhorns win the 2005 national championship at the Rose Bowl with a key fourth-down stop of USC that set up the game-winning touchdown.
A torn rotator cuff hurt Wright’s draft stock, and he went in the seventh round to Miami, missing two of three seasons with injury and totaling 38 tackles and 1.5 sacks.
“I got the ugly side of the league,” said Wright, who had two sacks with the CFL’s Saskatchewan Roughriders and a half-sack with the Arena League’s Dallas Vigilantes before he was done playing.
Wright returned to Austin, where he spent four seasons under Mack Brown at Texas as a grad assistant and quality control coach.
“He has a unique combination of toughness and loving his players,” Brown told me. “He loves the sport so much and loves people, so it was an easy transition. He was a natural. Grad assistants, basically, they call them go-fers. They go for anything. But their job was to get close to the younger defensive linemen and help them, keep them after practice. He’s very consistent in his personality, loved coaching and never cared where he was. It was never a surprise to me that he continued to grow.”
Brown was Wright’s first coaching mentor, and the lessons he first learned as a player in 2005 still help him now as a coach 20 years later.
“I learned about the way he put a team together, having an extremely talented team but finding a way to create a culture, like the culture I want to build here,” Wright said. “When you have really good players, a lot of times you’re dealing with egos. The biggest thing you want to have is a culture that’s hard-working, selfless. When we won it all in ’05, everybody bought into the process, to the common goal that we had.”
(Michael Allio/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Wright’s has overlapped with many noteworthy names along his football journey. During his time at Texas, the backup quarterback was 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan. Oregon head coach Dan Lanning was a young defensive backs coach at Sam Houston State. Nick Saban was the coach during his first year with the Dolphins, a staff that had Georgia head coach Kirby Smart and Commanders head coach Dan Quinn as his defensive line coach.
“He was a detail guy, big vision, big maturity, a young guy you knew had his act together,” Quinn told me of Wright. “They’re playing lights out for him now, and it’s very cool to see because he’s really worked for it. I kept up with him from Sam Houston and UTSA. I’ve been super-impressed by the trajectory he’s on. At a small school, you learn to fix your own problems, so there’s on-the-job training, and he got that early on. To see him keep digging in, I’m just super proud of him.”
At Sam Houston State, the Bearkats made the national semifinals in three of Wright’s four seasons there under head coach K.C. Keeler.
“You could tell he was a little raw but had all the potential in the world,” Keeler, now head coach at Temple, told me, “and he had a presence about him. The way he handled himself, the way he communicated. He interviewed and you knew you had to hire that guy. You walked into any high school in Houston, and everyone knew who Rod Wright was. I’m not surprised of the journey he’s made, because he’s so committed to getting better, just really works at his craft. It’s really important to him and he challenges himself.”
Wright has fond memories of his college coaching days, knowing he learned a lot every step of the way. Not many NFL coaches can boast multiple years as a Bearkat and a Roadrunner on their resume.
“Every single place, I felt like I was a crockpot,” Wright said. “I’m not a cook. My wife is the cook. But those crockpots, you heat them up slowly, and by the time it’s time to eat, everything tastes the way it should. For me, I was slowly cooked.”
“This room needs to be extremely tough, extremely disciplined, Wright added of his college coaching days. “We need to be technicians. We need to play harder than everybody. And if you have the talent, guess what? You still have to be all those things. You get a guy like Will Anderson to be a technician, to be blue-collar at work, this guy is going to be extremely good.”
Helping build a dominant NFL pass rush
In Ryans’ three years in Houston, the Texans have quickly built an elite defense. In his first draft, Houston gave up the 12th overall pick, their second-rounder, the next year’s first and third to move up to No. 3 and take Anderson, who has 30 sacks in three years, including 12 this season. A year later, they brought in veteran Danielle Hunter in free agency, and he’s had 27 sacks in two years, earning second-team All-Pro honors this season.
Most of Wright’s career had been coaching 19-year-olds who weren’t coveted recruits. Now, his daily task is taking the NFL’s best pass-rushers and finding ways to make them better. For him, the two challenges are the same.
“It’s all about being consistent,” he said. “You’re always striving for their best. They’re the best at what they do, so you’re really trying to keep them consistent, playing at a high level. I’ve got to bring it every single day. My energy has to be right. I have to keep them locked in on the small details. Those details can get boring at times, but when you’re striving for being the best, you know those details matter the most.”
Wright said Anderson and Hunter make his job easier in more than just their production on the field. If the 31-year-old Hunter is out there setting the pace in the weight room and at practice, how can anyone younger complain? If the high draft pick is already there when you get to the building, everyone starts showing up earlier, staying later.
“It reaches everybody,” Wright said. “Them being the ages they are, working as hard as they are, really not caring what their name is but caring about the work, it sets the bar for not only my room, but everybody’s room.”
When Anderson was going through the draft process in 2023, his first official visit was to the Texans. He bonded immediately with Wright, liking that he takes his job seriously, with the ability to laugh at his own expense.
Wright will go through pregame hand drills with his linemen, working through moves and countermoves to shed a block and get past a lineman. Before one game last season, Hunter caught his coach in the face with a stray hand. Wright kept going, but his face swelled up with the accidental contact.
“The most important thing with Rod is he’s authentic,” Anderson said. “What you see every day, what you see on TV, what you see out of us is Rod, and that’s what makes our group so special. He’s a former player, so he gets it, and it’s easy for him to relate to us and easy for us to listen to him.
“This is a guy who has a motor, who wants everybody in the room to succeed, who knows what he’s talking about and has the same energy every day. That’s the coach he is.”
Greg Auman is an NFL Reporter for FOX Sports. He previously spent a decade covering the Buccaneers for the Tampa Bay Times and The Athletic. You can follow him on Twitter at @gregauman.
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