Houston Texans head coach Bill O'Brien has received plenty of grief with respect to his management of team personnel in the past few weeks. Consider DJ Reader.

O'Brien's decision to trade star wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins to the Arizona Cardinals is the shocker of the 2020 NFL offseason, and the move elicited plenty of backlash from executives and fellow players around the league.

But while O'Brien felt the Texans had reached the point of no return with respect to Hopkins, he said the Texans tried their hardest to retain free-agent defensive tackle DJ Reader.

O'Brien said the Texans wanted to re-sign Reader, but were ultimately outbid by the Cincinnati Bengals (via Josh Alper of Pro Football Talk):

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Defensive tackle D.J. Reader drew a lot of interest once he hit the open market and wound up signing a four-year, $53 million with the Bengals. O’Brien said the team spoke to Reader before he left, but that the Bengals’ offer was too rich for the Texans to match.

“I think we’ve done a great job with that of keeping guys on board,” O’Brien said, via the team’s website. “There are certain guys that we just we just couldn’t do it financially and we would have loved to keep on board. D.J. Reader — We would have loved to keep D.J. Reader. We had good conversations with him and his representatives, but at the end of the day, we couldn’t get that one done. So that’s going to happen every single year.”

Reader had become a critical piece in Houston's interior defense over the course of the last three years, but the Texans felt they could not match Cincinnati's offer.

Time will tell whether recent signee Timmy Jernigan can be an adequate replacement for Reader with the Texans. Jernigan had two sacks in 10 games with the Philadelphia Eagles last season.