NFL 100: At No. 35, J.J. Watt dreamed big, worked hard and exceeded expectations

Welcome to the NFL 100, The Athletic’s endeavor to identify the 100 best players in football history. You can order the book version here. Every day until the season begins, we’ll unveil new members of the list, with the No. 1 player to be crowned on Wednesday, Sept. 8.

After another Texans season without a playoff berth 10 years ago, the team’s coaches turned their attention to the NFL Draft and quickly identified a difference of opinion between themselves and the scouting staff. It pertained to a Wisconsin defensive lineman named J.J. Watt.

According to then-head coach Gary Kubiak, Texans scouts viewed Watt as a late-first round prospect, maybe even an early second-rounder. But Kubiak’s staff thought Watt needed to move up the board. Way up the board.

Watt was a menacing pass rusher and run stuffer, but his 14 pass breakups in two seasons at Wisconsin signaled to Texans defensive coordinator Wade Phillips that Watt had an unstoppable motor and special feel for the game.

The Texans drafted Watt at No. 11, to a chorus of boos from fans at a watch party back in Houston, but the team only felt better about the pick the next day.

As Texans brass assembled inside their war room to prepare for the next rounds of the draft, Watt, who had just arrived in Houston, stopped in to greet everyone. When the Watt family exited the room a few minutes later, the defensive end’s father lagged behind to thank the group “for seeing in my son what I’ve seen in him his whole life.”

“I’ll never forget that,” Kubiak said in a recent telephone interview. “When his dad left, I was like, holy shit, we got a good one here.”

What Watt’s father realized, and what Kubiak would come to understand, is that Watt’s penchant for overachieving wouldn’t stop in the NFL. It’s part of why Watt ranks 35th among The Athletic’s NFL 100, 11 years into a career that has included five All-Pro seasons, three Defensive Player of the Year awards and equally impressive charitable accomplishments.

Watt’s motto — Dream Big, Work Hard — has been his brand since before he was a brand. Once a scholarship tight end at Central Michigan, Watt walked on at Wisconsin and worked as a maintenance man at the school’s Camp Randall Stadium before ever playing a down as a Badger. He daydreamed about future football success during his lunch breaks, and his supervisors for that gig still laugh recalling Watt slapping a paint brush out of a slacking co-worker’s hand.

“He’s got great ability, but a lot of his greatness came from his work ethic,” said Phillips, who’s worked with plenty of legends. “That’s how most of the great ones I had were.”

The gift for batting down passes that attracted Phillips to Watt ultimately changed the way Kubiak coached. As an offensive mind, Kubiak used to not like when defenders would disrupt practices with such plays, but Watt’s first NFL position coach, Bill Kollar, told Kubiak that if he didn’t let Watt get his hands on balls, then Watt wouldn’t do it in a game. Kubiak listened, and it’s a good thing he did, because late in Watt’s rookie year, he got his mitts on the football in what was then the biggest game in franchise history.

Near the end of the first half of the Texans’ first playoff game, a wild card matchup against the Cincinnati Bengals, Watt snagged a pass out of the air for a pick-six that gave Houston a halftime lead and helped secure the win. The play remains one of the most iconic in the Texans’ mostly lackluster history, and it represented a turning point in Watt’s journey to becoming the most dominant defensive player in the NFL.

“He came into that offseason very confident and never looked back,” former Texans edge rusher Connor Barwin said.

Over the next four seasons, Watt made four All-Pro teams and won his three Defensive Player of the Year awards. He ranked first in sacks, QB hits and tackles for loss, all by a wide margin. He also broke up 41 passes, 20 more than the next-closest defensive lineman.

“He just frustrated offensive linemen,” Barwin said. “They had no idea where he was going to go ever because he was so unpredictable. That’s what made J.J. such a challenge. Both Aaron Donald and J.J., you prepare for them the same way. They’re both game-wreckers on every single snap.”

Former All-Pro Texans receiver Andre Johnson was still elite when Watt arrived in Houston, but the defensive end quickly became the new face of the franchise, thanks as much to his skill as his willingness to engage with fans. He spent a Christmas visiting a children’s hospital without a media cadre, posed for a pregnancy announcement for a couple he never met and used a Ring Pop to propose to a six-year-old girl who went viral for crying that she’d never get to marry the Texans superstar.

When Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston in August 2017, Watt used his platform to raise more than $41.6 million in recovery aid, the biggest crowdsourced fundraiser in history. Details of where the money went two years after the storm remain pinned to the top of Watt’s Twitter account.

“I’d put him in the Hall of Fame as a person for all the things he’s done in Houston,” said Phillips, who’s spent much of his life in the city. “He’s made it his home. He’s an honorary Texan, as far as I’m concerned.”

As Watt emerged as the NFL’s most feared defender, the Texans graduated from an unaccomplished expansion franchise to a team that more consistently competed for a spot in the postseason. After the team’s first nine seasons all ended in Week 17, three of Watt’s first five years in Houston included a playoff berth — two under Kubiak, and one under coach Bill O’Brien.

“You have to have star players,” Phillips said. “You can be a good coach, but you have to have star players that can make a difference, and he’s certainly a difference-maker.”

But even Watt could only make so much of an impact. In 10 years in Houston, he never made it past the divisional round. The Texans spent much of Watt’s prime employing a rotating cast of subpar quarterbacks, and Watt suffered back, leg and pectoral injuries that limited him to eight or fewer games in three of the past five seasons. That made Watt playing in all 16 games last season bittersweet. He was healthy, and the Texans had one of the league’s best quarterbacks in Deshaun Watson, but poor roster construction under O’Brien made them one of the NFL’s worst teams.

During one of many post-loss rants in the Texans’ 4-12 season, Watt said he felt the worst for disappointed fans.

“That sucks as a player, to know we’re not giving them what they deserve,” he said.

THIS is why we love @JJWatt

📹: Houston Texans pic.twitter.com/lXQzowheFq

— Joe Gleason (@joeagleason) December 27, 2020

Watt will have a new sector of fans rooting for him now, as he asked the Texans for his release this offseason and signed with the Arizona Cardinals. On his way out of town, Watt sent signed No. 99 Texans jerseys to many people, from reporters and radio personalities to former coaches, including Kubiak.

As the Vikings’ offensive coordinator last season, Kubiak, now retired, had the unenviable task of game-planning for Watt, and he believes his former star defensive end still has “plenty of good football left in him.”

The past decade has taught Kubiak the lesson the defensive end’s father had already learned when he spoke up in the Texans’ war room many years ago: It’s best never to underestimate what J.J. Watt can do.

(Illustration by John Bradford / The Athletic; photo by Scott Halleran / Getty Images)