The Jacksonville Jaguars start the game with the Houston Texans as a small underdog.

They don’t expect us to win, but that’s okay. They’ve been wrong before.

Sometimes as I lay awake at night, waiting for the sleep paralysis demons to come get me, I’ll think about how sudden the change came for the Houston Texans (+1)

. For years, we’ve been slogging through some of the worst football ever to be put on television. The change was supposed to be slow, plodding, and, as with everything we’ve come to expect from the Texans, conservative.

So to see the expectations from the wider football world for the Texans go from “they might get six wins but no way they smell the playoffs” to “yeah, they could get to the playoffs, but…” in the span of, essentially, a few games, is enough to cause whiplash in even the stoutest of necks. Especially for a fanbase that isn’t used to having good things happen to their team.

And nowhere is that change more clear than in these opening odds posts. Consider previously that the Texans being three point underdogs at home would’ve been the closest thing to optimism we could expect in a given season. Now, the bigger the spread, the less likely it is to be against the Texans.

This week is not that week, though. The Texans are again an underdog, but only barely, just one point, this time at home against the Jacksonville Jaguars (-1)

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This game could go a long way toward determining the fate of the AFC South and whether the Texans can complete the worst to first turnaround or if they’ll need one more year to get to the promised land.