DeMeco Ryans insists Texans’ media thrives on negative coverage

For someone who doesn’t care about media coverage, DeMeco Ryans sure has a lot to say about media coverage.

The Houston Texans coach spent a significant portion of his press conference this week explaining how outside noise means nothing to his team.

“It really doesn’t matter,” Ryans said when asked about finding a balance between positive and negative outside noise. “I mean, here, you can see there’s a lot of negative talk about us. We get it. I hear people trying to give it to me all the time. I get it. But it really doesn’t matter. Again, I talk about it — everybody wants to write a hot story, and most of the time, it’s negative stuff that people want to talk about. Nobody wants to talk about the positive stuff that happens.”

He continued: “And, again, if you feed off of that and you’re riding the pendulum of ‘Oh, we’re great because we won. Oh, we suck because we lost.’ That’s our business; I get it. But that’s the nature of it. We keep moving forward. It doesn’t drive anything. It means nothing, literally nothing, to what we’re about. It does nothing to drive our team. We just gotta go out and play good football.”

🤯Texans HC DeMeco Ryans tries to end his press conference with “YOU GUYS GOOD??”

Reporters pushed back on Ryans after he said no one wants to cover the positives with the Texans.

Ryans is flat out wrong. There has been a TON of positives over the years.

This is… pic.twitter.com/SS65qsEpCC

— Will Kunkel (@WillKunkelV) October 27, 2025

Multiple reporters in the room pushed back on the perception that there aren’t any positive stories coming from their pens and laptops. Ryans retreated slightly, saying, “I said that’s what people thrive on is the negative stuff.”

“People thrive on the negative. You guys are good? You guys must be the negative ones with the negative stuff,” he said. “We’re playing football. You talk about outside noise, I’ll say it again: it doesn’t matter. Good, bad, it doesn’t change how we prepare; it doesn’t change our week of preparation. We’re gonna work. We’re gonna work our best to gameplan our best and go play good football.”

Another reporter pointed out that for Ryans’ first couple of seasons in the league, he and his team have gotten nothing but positive coverage from the local and national media. So when he says everyone in the media wants to focus on the negative and not the positive, it’s hard to see how that tracks with reality.

“You guys good?” Ryans asked, clearly ready to move on.

Here’s the thing about saying something doesn’t matter: if it actually doesn’t matter, you don’t spend multiple exchanges with reporters explaining how much it doesn’t matter. You certainly don’t reference “a lot of negative talk” if you’re genuinely unbothered by it. And you definitely don’t get defensive when reporters point out that the negative coverage you’re complaining about hasn’t actually been the dominant narrative.

Ryans kept circling back to the same point. The media focuses on the negative. People thrive on the negative. Nobody wants to talk about the positive. But when the Houston media pushed back and noted they’ve written plenty of positive stories about a team that went from 3-13-1 to back-to-back playoff appearances, Ryans didn’t engage with that. He just asked if they were good and moved on.

The Texans have been one of the feel-good stories in the NFL since Ryans arrived. C.J. Stroud’s rookie season generated wall-to-wall praise. The turnaround from laughingstock to contender was covered overwhelmingly positively. Even when Houston has struggled, the framing has been about a young team learning on the fly, not organizational dysfunction.

So what negative coverage is Ryans talking about? He referenced it vaguely — “a lot of negative talk,” people “trying to give it to me all the time” — but never specified what stories or takes bothered him. Because if he did, someone might point out that those stories are either outliers or fair criticism of a team that’s hit some rough patches dating back to the end of last season.