Ryan Mallett Learns A Hard Lesson About Punctuality

Ryan Mallett has been cut by the Houston Texans after missing the team’s charter flight to South Florida for a game against the Miami Dolphins. He had to catch a commercial flight to join the team and did not play in the game.

The story apparently goes back a bit. Mallett has been in new head coach Bill O’Brien’s doghouse for awhile though the reasons aren’t readily apparent. Mallett was late for a mandatory team meeting on Saturday and blamed the lateness on bad traffic conditions. That didn’t satisfy O’Brien who was so livid at the time that he wanted to cut Mallett immediately. Cooler heads eventually prevailed, not so much to give Mallett another chance but so the team wouldn’t have to travel to Miami with only one quarterback on the roster. Brian Hoyer is now the starter for the Texans. The team has since brought back free agent T.J. Yates. At this point, Yates and Hoyer are the only quarterbacks on the Texans’ active roster. Tom Savage is on injured reserve while Zac Dysert is on the practice squad.

Mallett had a reputation as a ‘knucklehead’ dating back to his days playing as a backup to Tom Brady in New England. Despite this, there was little trouble in New England likely due to the fact that head coach Bill Belichick had made clear that Mallett would be gone after one mistake. That apparently wasn’t the case in Houston though only one other incident is known. That came during training camp when he missed practice and told Texans general manager Rick Smith that he had ‘overslept’. He then went with the ‘I bought an alarm clock and it won’t happen again’ mea culpa which seemed to satisfy the team at the time.

Earlier this season Mallett had a chance to start several games from Houston but may have sealed his fate with a temper tantrum after being replaced by Hoyer in a Week 5 game against Indianapolis. Mallett had gone to the sidelines after a hard hit but several plays later indicated that he felt good enough to return. Instead, O’Brien stayed with Hoyer and that set off Mallett.