The Tennessee Titans were down by four with the

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HOUSTON (AP) — ball on the 3-yard line in the second quarter Monday night against the Houston Texans when coach Mike Vrabel chose to go for it on fourth-and-inches.Tight end Luke Stocker took the handoff and was immediately met by Zach Cunningham and Bernardrick McKinney and stopped for no gain. Lamar Miller ran 97 yards for a touchdown on the next play to make it 21-10 , and the Texans went on to a 34-17 win.“If you look at their goal-line defense and having a lot of good knowledge of what they do on the goal line, that’s one play that had worked,” Vrabel said. “It didn’t work tonight and that’s not the reason that we lost. That’s a bad play.”Vrabel spent a good part of his postgame news conference fielding questions about the play and why he chose to hand the ball to Stocker, an eight-year veteran who had zero carries entering the game. In fact, Stocker said after the game that the last time he remembered carrying the ball was in high school.“I’d like to have that back and have a chance to go lower or dive or reach the ball out or something,” he said. “That’s on me. I’ve got to figure out a way to convert that.”Some wondered why Vrabel didn’t give the ball to 6-foot-3, 247-pound running back Derrick Henry in that situation.“That’s something we’ve repped in practice,” Vrabel said about using Stocker. “Just having watched that play be successful against their goal-line look, we felt good about it.”The fact that Tennessee’s defense allowed the huge run by Miller seconds after the failed fourth-down attempt was just another disappointment for the Titans.“Runs like that can’t happen,” cornerback Logan Ryan said. “They shouldn’t happen, but it did. We’ve got to learn from it.”Marcus Mariota, who missed the second half of last week’s game with a stinger, was 22 of 23 for 303 yards and two touchdowns. He completed his first 19 passes before an incompletion with just more than a minute remaining.Vrabel couldn’t celebrate Mariota’s effectiveness on a night when the Titans allowed the Texans to set a franchise record with 281 yards rushing, led by 162 from Miller.“The stats are the stats,” Vrabel said when asked about Mariota’s completion percentage. “The loss is really what I’m going to try to focus on. We’ve got to stop the run. There’s a lot of things other than guys’ individual stats that we’re trying to concentrate on.”The Titans (5-6) have lost two straight to drop into third place in the AFC South behind first-place Houston (8-3) and Indianapolis (6-5).“We’ve got to stick together and we’ve got to go win,” Vrabel said. “We’re going to get as prepared as we can and we’ve got to go out and play. We just didn’t get it done tonight.”The Titans jumped out to a 10-0 lead before Houston scored 27 straight points to take control. Tennessee finally scored again on a 48-yard reception by Corey Davis late in the third quarter, but a 10-yard TD by Demaryius Thomas made it 34-17 with just more than eight minutes left.“We did a good job of coming out, but we got flat and couldn’t pick it back up,” Tennessee left tackle Taylor Lewan said. “We’ve got the guys to do it , but we’ve just got to figure out a way to stop the bleeding and get it going.” The Houston Texans have won six straight games for the first time since 2012, leaving their terrible start behind them and putting them firmly in control of the AFC South as they head into their week off.Despite the dramatic turnaround, coach Bill O’Brien and the Texans (6-3) know that they haven’t accomplished anything yet.“We’ve done a great job of coming back from where we were,” O’Brien said. “But we’ve got a long way to go.”Houston’s latest win came in dramatic fashion on Sunday in Denver when the Broncos missed a field goal as time expired to allow the Texans to hold on for the 19-17 victory to keep their winning streak intact. Now they have two weeks to prepare before a trip to visit the Redskins on Nov. 18.Four of the team’s wins during this streak have come by a touchdown or less, giving the Texans confidence in their ability to win close games.“Our first two wins were overtime wins,” J.J. Watt said. “When you have to go through those, you learn to never give up hope. You just keep growing one day at a time, one game at a time. It will come.”He agrees with his coach that the Texans can get a lot better and believes this team filled with hard workers will make that happen.“It will continue to come,” Watt said. “We still have a lot of things to work on. You continue to find a way to win while you work on those things. It is a lot better to work on them while you are winning than losing.”The Texans had a shakeup on offense last week when receiver Will Fuller was lost for the season with a torn knee ligament and they traded with Denver for star receiver Demaryius Thomas to take his place. Thomas had three receptions for 61 yards in his Houston debut, but had a false start, lined up in the wrong spot and looked lost on a drive in the fourth quarter, showing he has plenty of work to do to get up to speed before facing Washington.O’Brien said his struggles were understandable considering he only had three days of practice to try and learn what he needed to know before Sunday’s game.“(We’re) just continuing to try to coach him up on what we’re doing offensively,” O’Brien said. “Now, we can kind of take a step back and really go back into what we call the basic information, teach him the formations, teach him the routes, the protections, how the protections fit with the routes that he’s running and things like that and the technique of the route.”While Thomas gets acclimated in Houston, the Texans have been impressed with the development of big rookie tight end Jordan Thomas. The 6-foot-5 , 280-pound Thomas, who was a sixth-round pick in this year’s draft, has recently emerged as a great goal-line target. He’s grabbed three short touchdowns in the past two games, adding another dimension to Houston’s red zone offense, which struggled earlier this season.“He was a wide receiver and then as he got bigger, (former Mississippi State coach) Danny Mullen moved him closer to the ball and he became a tight end,” O’Brien said. “Now, he’s had to learn how to block against some of these defensive ends and outside backers and he’s gotten better and better at that.”The Texans’ big winning streak has coincided with long skids by both the Titans and Jaguars, who both have just three wins. The Jaguars have dropped four straight and the Titans have lost three in a row entering Monday’s game against Dallas.The Texans think the attitude they showed in getting through their early struggles will help them as they try to add to their streak after the bye.“A team with grit, fight, one that can really overcome adversity, play good football in tough situations, take care of the football in critical situations, I think that’s the kind of formula that you want to have going down the stretch, hopefully, playing in the playoffs,” safety Tyrann Mathieu said.

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