Former Jaguars' Receiver Chris Conley Signs A One-Year Deal With Houston Texans

Former Jacksonville Jaguars wide receiver Chris Conley will be heading to a league rival. The seven-year vet has signed a one-year deal with the Houston Texans. Aaron Wilson of the Houston Chronicle first reported the deal and Conley confirmed his departure on his social media channels.

Conley was originally drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs in 2015 and spent his first four years in the league with that club. As a free agent, he signed with the Jacksonville Jaguars ahead of the 2019 season. At that time, the draw to Jacksonville for Conley was the ability to reunite with his former Chiefs quarterback Nick Foles, who had just been signed to the Jags. Foles was infamously injured in the first quarter of his first game and then benched in favor of rookie Gardner Minshew II later in the season. Foles was then signed to the Chicago Bears.

Conley, a former Georgia Bulldog, started 14 of 16 games in 2019, finishing with 47 receptions for 775 yards and five touchdowns. However, in 2020, Conley began to struggle, benched in favor of younger players and hauling in 40 receptions but only for 471 yards and two touchdowns. With his free agent deal expired this offseason, the Jags elected not to renew his contract. He was one of 15 free agents let to hit the market.

“[I’m] really just focusing in on each moment and each play,” Conley said back in October of the adversity.

“Sometimes your role on a team changes and your opportunities are different. Sometimes they go down and that means that each opportunity is more important and that’s the role I’m playing in right now and when those opportunities come, you have to make them.”

Conley’s biggest impact in Jacksonville though came off the field. He was elected a captain ahead of the 2020 season. And as social justice protest broke out across the country—and subsequently the NFL—it was Conley who spoke on behalf of the team during a march to City Hall. He called on the city to remove statues honoring the Confederate Army. Mayer Lenny Curry headed the request and began the removal of such statues within days.

"We cannot allow comfortability with revisionist history to disarm our minds and weaken our convictions. A confederate monument sits a couple of blocks from here, praising the south’s dark past," Conley said at the time.

"Our revisionist history would tell us that it’s there to honor men fighting for states’ rights. But true history would tell us that, in the Cornerstone Address, Alexander Stevens said that our states are built on the fact that the negro is inferior, and slavery and subordination is its normal and natural state. That’s true history.”

With his time in Jacksonville now at a close, Conley took to social media to say goodbye and express his thanks to the city he and his family have called home the past two years.

“Thank you to the City of Jacksonville for welcoming us the last two years,” he wrote.

“Thank you to the Jags for taking a chance on me after Achilles surgery. I’m grateful for the lessons and the experiences. Excited for what’s next. See you Duvall.”