The Houston Chronicle's football writers and columnists make their predictions for the Texans' Week 17 game against the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Brooks Kubena, a Houston native, joined the Chronicle in 2021 to cover the Texans and the NFL after reporting on LSU football for The Advocate | Times-Picayune in Baton Rouge for three years. Kubena received APSE National Top 10 honors six times for his reporting, including his investigative work into LSU's mishandling of Title IX cases and a secret settlement involving Les Miles and a former student.
Kubena also contributed to the AP Top 25 poll and held a Heisman Trophy vote. A graduate of the University of Texas and Clear Lake High School, he's too young to remember the Oilers but old enough to remember a parking lot was once AstroWorld.Jonathan M. Alexander is a staff writer for the Houston Chronicle covering the Houston Texans and NFL. He is a Charlotte native and graduated from N.C. Central University, an HBCU in Durham, N.C. in 2013. He's covered a variety of beats in his career from K-12 schools, public safety, town government, recruiting, Duke basketball, UNC basketball and football at the Raleigh New & Observer, and most recently spent two years covering the Carolina Panthers for the Charlotte Observer.He broke one of the biggest stories on the Panthers beat in November 2021, when he revealed that the Panthers were planning to meet with quarterback Cam Newton with the intentions to sign him one year after releasing him. In his free time, Jonathan enjoys coaching youth basketball, trying new restaurants and hanging with friends. He has one sister, Tyler, who has lived in Houston for six years. His parents, Stanley and Becky, who are his biggest influences, are both retired social workers.Jerome grew up in downtown Acres Homes, Texas. He is a proud graduate of Mabel B. Wesley Elementary and was a basketball team captain at Waltrip High School, where he helped the Mighty Rams to a near-.500 record. A math genius and engineering major in college, he's still working on this writing thing. He says that the three years he spent as an F.M. Black Panther probably played a more significant a role in the man he would become than the time he spent in college.Sports editor Reid Laymance is in his second tour of duty with the Houston Chronicle. A graduate of Westbury High School and The University of Texas at Austin, Laymance started his career at The Dallas Morning News in 1983 before moving to the National Sports Daily. Reid came to the Houston Chronicle in 1991 and helped oversee the paper's coverage of the Rockets' back-to-back championships. He left the Houston Chronicle to be sports editor at the San Jose Mercury News then moved to the Boston Globe as a senior assistant sports editor, where he coordinated coverage for the Red Sox's World Series wins in 2004 and 2007, as well as a seemingly endless series of Patriots Super Bowl victories. From Boston, Laymance went to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as sports editor and another World Series win before returning to his Houston roots.