DeAndre Hopkins Apparently Shades Texans After Losing NFL Season Opener to Chiefs
One word can say a lot more than it seems
The NFL’s curtain-raiser between the Chiefs and Texans gave us our first look at the Houston offense without DeAndre Hopkins, and the results were ... not great.
Will Fuller had a big game with eight catches for 112 yards but Randall Cobb and Brandin Cooks, brought in to soften the blow of Hopkins’s departure, had just four grabs for 43 yards between them. Needless to say, that wasn’t enough offensive output to get past the Chiefs. Kansas City won 34–20.
Less than an hour after the final whistle, Hopkins sent a one-word tweet that got a lot of people talking.
Was Hopkins rejoicing in the fact that he no longer plays for a perpetual underachiever? No, of course not, he said. He was just really pumped to be on Jimmy Fallon’s late-night show.
Now, I might be more inclined to believe him if he didn’t have a history of throwing shade at the Texans. In July, after Patrick Mahomes signed his massive contract extension, Hopkins congratulated the Chiefs quarterback with a tweet.
The numbers 24 and 0 are quite obviously a reference to the Texans' blowing a 24–0 lead to Mahomes’s Chiefs in the divisional round last season.
Hopkins clearly doesn’t miss playing in Houston. While he had a great partnership with quarterback Deshaun Watson, he didn’t get along with coach Bill O’Brien. O’Brien’s decision to ship Hopkins to Arizona in a deal that was roundly mocked surely didn’t improve Hopkins’s opinion of his former boss. So yeah, there was a probably a bit of schadenfreude in watching the Houston offense sputter without him.
Hopkins better be careful what he wishes for, though. He’s going from a team that made the playoffs in four of the last five years to one that sniffed the postseason just twice in the previous decade. We’ll see whether the Hopkins-less Texans or the new-look Cardinals are the better team this year.
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