Brutal news out of Houston. Graham Mertz went down in the second quarter of the Texans' preseason opener, and the belief inside the building is that it's a torn ACL. Additional testing is expected to confirm it, but nobody's holding out much hope this is anything less than season-ending.
According to reports on the injury, Mertz went down on a non-contact play while scrambling toward the sideline late in the first half, and head coach DeMeco Ryans didn't sugarcoat it afterward, saying the team is "looking at a knee injury, ACL" and waiting on further evaluation.
The gut-punch here is that this is the same knee. Mertz tore his ACL during his final season at Florida, an injury that ended his college career and was still part of his recovery timeline when the Texans took him in the sixth round of the 2025 draft. Landing back on the injury list with the same joint less than a year later is about as cruel as it gets for a young quarterback trying to carve out a roster spot.
With C.J. Stroud sitting out the opener and Davis Mills as the only other healthy arm on the depth chart, Houston's quarterback room just got thin in a hurry. Don't be surprised if the Texans go looking for outside help just to round out camp bodies for the rest of the preseason, even if it's only a stopgap move.
For Mertz personally, this is a devastating turn in what was supposed to be a fresh start. He'd already fought his way back from one ACL tear to get drafted; now, pending the results of further imaging, he's staring down doing it all over again before he's thrown a real NFL pass that counts.