A lot can change in a year.
About that long ago, C.J. Stroud was considered a consolation prize for the Houston Texans. The second pick in the 2023 NFL Draft, the Ohio State quarterback’s profile paled in comparison to the Carolina Panthers’ first overall selection Bryce Young, who was coming off a Heisman Trophy-winning season at Alabama.
Now? New Panthers owner David Tepper is battling some rage. In November 2023, he loudly yelled “Fuck!” when the team dropped to 1-10 on the season. In January, a few months later, he made headlines (and racked up a fine) for throwing a drink on a fan. Most recently, he marched up to a local restaurateur for suggesting — via the marquee — that he not be involved in this year’s draft process.
He’s very mad. Can you blame him? He’s had to watch his presumptive quarterback of the future toss throws into the dirt while Stroud has ascended as a younger, Ayahuasca-abstaining version of Aaron Rodgers. Stroud made the Pro Bowl, won the NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year award, and dragged a supposedly rebuilding Texans team to a first-round playoff victory.
The soft-spoken, all-world quarterback has played quite well in Texas, and not just on the field. Following another Cowboys meltdown — and their geriatric owner-slash-general manager trolling superstar holdout CeeDee Lamb — Stroud is quickly becoming the most popular athlete in the state.
“Texas sports fans are pretty discerning in a lot of ways, but they’re also total pushovers,” Curtis told The Barbed Wire. “You pay attention to us, you embrace us, you say great things about us, and you are one of ours.”
First he conquered the Texans locker room. “They look up to him,” said head coach DeMeco Ryans, mere weeks into Stroud’s rookie season. Next he garnered the respect of his competition, with his peers around the league voting him the 20th best player in the NFL, ahead of established vets like Bengals QB Joe Burrow and on the same tier as Cowboys QB Dak Prescott. In May, Stroud even gave back to his community by assisting with Houston’s post-storm cleanup, seeking out damage, helping with debris removal, even cutting down fallen tree limbs — all before playing catch with local teens afterwards. Suffice it to say, Texans fans are madly in love with Stroud, and they’re voting with their wallets. Three variants of his jersey are among the top sellers in the NFL Store right now.
Perhaps most impressively, he’s won over Troy Aikman, the modern-day standard for a non-Texan whom Texans adore. A 23-year vet in the broadcasting booth — and many of those years were spent without much praise for other signal callers — the former Cowboys quarterback gushed over Stroud in January, calling him, “poised beyond any rookie that I’ve seen before.”
That endorsement might be worth as much as all the others combined, at least to Texans.
Stroud was born and raised in Southern California and then became a college star in Ohio, which means the 22-year-old phenom has nary a tie to Texas — and owes his extended stay here only to a franchise-altering error by the Panthers. At the risk of Tepper tracking me down and tossing his testicular sculpture at my head, I’ll also mention that the Panthers traded multiple picks and star receiver D.J. Moore for the opportunity to not pick C.J. Stroud.
Call him the next great Texas hero.
Following in the footsteps of Dirk Nowitzki, Tim Duncan, and Aikman, Stroud is quickly becoming the Lone Star State’s favorite adopted son, with an approval rating hovering around 100%. And without an active incumbent holding the Honorary Texan seat, Stroud is the odds-on favorite to sweep all 254 counties.
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Turns out though, being an honorary Texan is not as simple as earning hardware, either individually or for a Texas team. For every beloved import, there’s Kawhi Leonard and James Harden. The key for Stroud — and for any Texas athlete — is for fans to believe that you want to be here.
Take Leonard for example. (Spurs fans are begging you.) Now enemy number one in Texas, the LA Clippers forward’s humble beginnings as a San Antonio Spur couldn’t have started better. The quiet, nerdy-seeming Southern Californian wasn’t flashy — and seemed to embrace living here. But his exit, which featured protracted disagreement between the Spurs and Leonard’s people and a public trade request, represented a betrayal.
Mike Finger, a Spurs columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, just returned from covering the 2024 Paris Olympics, where he was amazed to see four Kawhi Leonard jerseys in four days: “That’s more than I’ve seen in the past seven years in San Antonio,” he told The Barbed Wire, “because they were all immediately burned.”
You simply don’t tell Texans that California is a more desirable place to live. Argentinian Spurs legend Manu Ginobili very publicly relishes living in San Antonio more than a half decade following his retirement. NBA superstar Kevin Durant, who spent less than a year at the University of Texas after growing up in the Washington, D.C. area, is inextricably linked to his alma mater and the state, in body and mind.
Bryan Curtis, an editor-at-large for the Ringer, grew up worshiping DFW legends like Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman, and not just because they won trophies. They quite clearly chose Texas over California or New York. Aikman in particular embraced the glory — and the burden — of representing his city and the state of Texas. “He loved being quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys,” Curtis said. “It wasn’t like, ‘This is just this is the uniform I put on today. I could be playing for the Saints.’”
For his part, Stroud has already said all the right things about his city and his state. He seems to inherently understand that Texans love it when transplants love Texas: After routing the Steelers last October, Stroud called it “a blessing” to be in Houston. “I’m falling in love with this city,” he said.
It may seem small, but that kind of statement is significant for Texans, Curtis said. Stroud didn’t choose to live in Texas, but he appears to love it here. And as soon as he is a free agent, and for the rest of his life after that, he can. If he does — well, and if he keeps winning — he will hit Texas immortality.
“Texas sports fans are pretty discerning in a lot of ways, but they’re also total pushovers,” Curtis told The Barbed Wire. “You pay attention to us, you embrace us, you say great things about us, and you are one of ours.”
Finger said it’s also important that non-Texan Texas athletes embrace the cultural fabric of their cities — to become indistinguishable from its residents (besides having a lot more money and being either monstrously strong or impossibly tall). That is, if they’d like to become a true star.
Tim Duncan, for one, wore enormous cargo shorts and didn’t worry about being seen as cool or marketable.“That is totally San Antonio,” said Finger. “That is San Antonio’s version of being Texan.”
Finger attended the University of Texas at the same time as running back Ricky Williams. The Heisman Trophy winner from San Diego won the hearts and minds of all Texans by embodying two Austin legends. “He was like Earl Campbell and Willie Nelson combined,” Finger said. “He had the pieces of both, and that’s how he became Texan.”
In a city like Houston, that’s a bit harder to define. How can Stroud embody an international metropolis without a specific, slick marketing image, especially considering that he’s on a historically middling team without a strong cultural identity? Without a strict playbook, Stroud has the opportunity to audible at the line — to freestyle at will. The prodigy is already mastering that skill on the field. There’s no looming legacy like the one Aikman faced when he arrived in Dallas in 1989 and had to confront the legend of two-time Super Bowl champion and beloved Texas import Staubach.
As for Houston, Warren Moon is the greatest pro quarterback in the city’s history, and, technically, he played for a team that is now known as the Tennessee Titans. Past Texans quarterbacks include a monumental draft bust, a former star that the city would rather forget, and Matt Schaub.
“You get a lot of credit if you change not only the image of the franchise, but the image of the city,” Curtis said.
Houston has not won a professional championship in football since George Blanda’s heroics won the American Football League title in 1961. The Texans, playing their first game as an expansion team in 2002, have an image that can be summed up by typing “The Rosencopter” into Google. The 2023 season may be the final one in which the NFL forces Houston into the dreaded Shakey’s Pizza Bowl — the throwaway first Saturday slot of Wild Card Weekend that usually features the Texans, if they make the playoffs.
This season, Stroud has the unique chance to set the bar himself; to define what it means to be a Texan.
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The only competition Stroud faces as the next big Texas cultural import is Spurs center Victor Wembanyama, who is doing some campaigning of his own.
After the Spurs won the draft lottery in 2024 and the right to select generational talent Wembanyama, the 7-foot, 4-inch center went to work ingratiating himself to the city and the state.
Before the paint dried on murals of his image on the sides of bars in San Antonio — before his rookie season even began — Wemby got to work. He threw on a black cowboy hat and a curtain-sized white T-shirt and stretched his giraffe legs across the city, in the process lovingly referring to San Antonio as “the most faithful fanbase in the NBA.”
It’s PR, sure, but as we’ve seen before, some star athletes can’t fake the funk.
Stroud has joined the French beanpole in Texas aestheticism.
In mid-August, Stroud attended a Luke Combs concert alongside Texans kicker Kai’imi Fairbairn and team owner Cal McNair. The rising star quarterback didn’t join his boss in shotgunning a can of Miller Lite, but he didn’t have to. Bedecked in a white cowboy hat, his grin was as wide as the sidelines where he regularly finds his BFF, the also ascendant wide receiver Tank Dell. He really, really seemed like he wanted to be there.
Is all of this pandering? Maybe. Would Stroud have gained additional Texas points by chugging the light pilsner? Probably. But as long as he doesn’t publicly pine for the palm trees of his Southern California home, he’ll be a beloved Texan. And not just a Houston Texan.
