Bob McNair Quotations

We want people that fit in our locker room. As I said, it's all about teamwork.

The team comes first. We want to keep all of our players. We want to take care of all of our players, but the team comes first.

At nose tackle, you don't have to run that much.

Experience shows that those people who were selected to be a head coach in the NFL met with more success if they had had head-coaching experience.

I didn't think I was going to die. I knew some did. I knew there were some rumors.

I knew I wasn't going to play professional basketball.

I thought I was in a better position to get a team than anyone else in Houston.

I'm not a real estate developer. I'm a golfer. I'm a sportsman.

I'm not going anywhere. My dad lived to be 102. And we've got Super Bowls to win.

I'm not ill. I'm healthy. I'm not going anywhere. We've got Super Bowls to win.

If a local market is supporting the team strongly, you're not going to have a lot of support for a team leaving that market.

Sometimes, in order to be successful, a business must reset.

The franchise tag is worth something to the team, and you can't be afraid to use it.

Unfortunately, when we had a No. 1 draft pick, there wasn't an Andrew Luck out there. A lot of that's pure luck.

We don't like to acknowledge that we're getting older. None of us do.

When you're under stress, your immune system doesn't work as well.

A quarterback that goes out and performs for you and is a franchise quarterback is more valuable than a player playing another position, but there's a lot more risk there. It's a more difficult position to play, and there are lot more failures.

As a matter of policy from the beginning with our team, there have been three things we've said we won't draft a player: if they've been involved in domestic violence, drug abuse, or if they show lack of respect for authority.

Every athlete, I think, would like to play forever. They never want to acknowledge that they've lost a step or they can't quite do what they did before.

I worked for twenty-some years with no capital, so I never had any liquidity. Managing my loans alone wouldn't do it, and working hard twenty-four hours a day seven days a week alone wouldn't do it. You have to be properly capitalized.

If a team needs new facilities, and they've been unsuccessful for a long period of time, and the local community is not being responsive, then I think it's a possibility that team might get a vote to relocate.

If you look around, there are very few really super quarterbacks. There are just very few. If you're lucky enough to have one, lucky enough that one of these Andrew Lucks is available when you have the top pick, then that's just a matter of luck. You can't attribute that to anything else.

If you're going to have a satisfactory standard of living, you're going to have to be competitive in this world. And you can't be competitive if you don't have a good education.

Look at Baltimore back in 2000. They had an outstanding defense. They could run the ball, and they had a quarterback that didn't turn it over that much. I think that is a plan that can bring you great success.

Now, would we like to have that super quarterback? Absolutely. And if we have the opportunity to get that person or develop that person, that's what we'll do.

Our players are role models; there's no question about it. Whether they want to be or not. They are. So they're in the spotlight. So if they do something that's wrong, that's in the spotlight, too.

Some people said, 'Why didn't you sign Peyton Manning?' Well, we just couldn't do it. We would have had to let go of two or three of our outstanding players to create enough room in the salary cap to do something with him.

The radiation was worse by far. I had bandages all over my head. I looked like a mummy. On the side of my head and neck and down to my collarbone, I had second-degree burns. My skin blistered and peeled before it grew back. That was the worst part of it.

We can take action with a player without the league taking any action. But all that we can do is, we can deactivate him. But we're limited under the collective bargaining agreement to four games.

We concluded that one thing we can do is to just go through the locker room and make sure that if anybody is using anything, it's a product from one of the approved manufacturers.

We protected Andre Johnson, given him long-term contracts. Brian Cushing's got a long-term contract. Arian Foster. So certain key players, core players, we've tried not to tie them up for a long period of time.

We're going to look at any and all options. Whether it's keeping the pick or trading or whatever.

Case (Keenum) is going to be the quarterback. We’re going to give him a chance to see how he can perform. I think the jury is still out. He’s got a lot of ability. He’s shown some flashes of brilliance and then he’s shown some rookie mistakes. We’ve got to see if we can improve, eliminate those mistakes, minimize those mistakes and continue some of the outstanding play that (we’ve) seen and see whether we think that he can be a starting quarterback in the NFL. At this point, we really don’t know.

I was impressed, but I wasn't surprised, because we already knew Vince was a great athlete. He showed a super arm. He was really accurate. He put the ball on the numbers. He was accurate throwing on the run, and he didn't have to break stride. It was a great performance.

I look forward to getting Gary down here.

I don't want to be in this position again. This is an exciting time, but this isn't the spot you want to be in for obvious reasons.

He is not here to interview for a coaching job. He is not here to evaluate the coach, he is not here to evaluate the general manager.

He's almost dismantled the Eagles. Why would you wish that upon us?

He's here as a resource to assist me as we go forward and to assist the other people in our organization to help us be a better team.

I thought we should be competing for a playoff spot and we weren't even close to that.

It is a complicated process because of the playoffs.

I think that we've underachieved this season. I think that everyone expected us to do more.

Our problems did start there. I certainly remember it and I'd like to think that everybody remembers that to be motivated. We should be.

It creates a problem with the playing field....So that's what concerns me, it's the safety for the players.

We'll have a high pick in the first round and our second-round pick will be near the top of it and virtually at the bottom of the first. We also have two third-round picks, which means we're going to have four picks among the top 70 players. I think those four picks can have a significant impact.

We'll get together this week and get all that wrapped up.

We thought that $100,000 or $200,000 wasn't enough. We thought this was more appropriate.

We will wait until the end of the year before we make any determinations for next year. None of us are happy with the performance of our team this year. We're all disappointed. It's very frustrating.

With Gary being born and raised in Houston, what better way to get this team to the championship level then to be led by a Houston Texan.

There have been a number of teams that have had swings of eight games from one season to the next and some nine games. The Colts had a 10-game swing (from 1998 to 1999). The most recent was San Diego went from 4-12 to 12-4 in 2004. Significant swings can occur like that.

After a disappointing 2-14 campaign this season we had to make a change.

Some people think this is a ploy. It's not. We think he's just as dominant a player on defense as Reggie is on offense. The thing we've been missing has been a pass rush.

This is a performance business and, so, today I met with Dom and reviewed the situation and told him that I thought that it was in the best interest of the Texans to go ahead and make this change.

I hope this is the last time we have the No. 1 pick. At the same time, it is of great value to us. ... We're going to have four picks in the first 70 players. That means we're going to get some good players.

I know we're not going to win a lot of games this year. But this one Sunday might be one we'll win, so I expect to win it.

I'm totally committed to producing a winning team and I'm going to do everything within my power to see that we do that. I think that we're very close to being a good team, but we have work to do.

If you want to get a good seat at a Texas A&M game or a University of Texas game, it depends on how much money you give the school.

Hopefully we'll have him down here by the middle of the week and he will then be assembling a staff.

Gary is the kind of person that can elevate the play of our players.

I certainly wasn't proud of that. And the players weren't proud of it. None us were. That's not the kind of team ... that's not the kind of effort that we want to have. That's just totally unacceptable and we're not going to have that.

He can be another Reggie White. That's what our people think.