Texans RB Arian Foster Not Likely to Get Too Far Ahead of Himself

Now that the football nation knows Arian Foster comes the obvious question:

What's next?

Foster, the second-year running back for the Houston Texans who rushed for a franchise-record 231 yards in a season-opening victory over Indianapolis this past Sunday, said what he does know is what's not next:

Complacency.

"You've got to keep focused," Foster said this week as the Texans (1-0) prepared to play the Washington Redskins (1-0) in Washington Sunday.

Foster this week was named the AFC Offensive Player of the Week.

"How could you not (give him the award)?" Texans wide receiver David Anderson said of a game in which Foster also ruhsed for three touchdowns and dominated the second half as the Texans pulled away for a significant victory over a team that has owned the AFC South in recent seasons.

"That's a pretty impressive day of work," Anderson said. "I think he deserves it."

Foster said while he appreciated the award -- "Everybody likes recognition for the work they put in," he said -- more important is maintaining the approach that enabled him to win the starting job after developing from an undrafted practice squad player a year ago. That, he said, won't be difficult.

"Not at all because I know where I came from and I know what I did to get here," said Foster, who signed with the Texans as a collegiate free agent from Tennessee. "In no sense of the imagination have I arrived. I had a good game and you can have a bad game and then you guys will be standing here asking, 'What happened?' It comes and goes.

"NFL careers are short-lived. You have a short tenure here, so I'm going to enjoy it, but I'm going to make sure I get the maximum effort out of my body."

That's a mature approach, one Foster said stems from not only humble NFL beginnings, but from knowledge gleaned from conversations with former NFL players. He said it's also from a knowledge that the Texans' offense -- particularly the offensive line -- played a huge role in a dominating performance in which he rushed for 191 second-half yards.

"I was raised with humility, but if you just watch the game film you'll see that I was running through a lot of big holes," he said. "It's easy to point the cameras towards me because I have the pigskin, but it's the guys up front putting in the work, and that's the work we put in before the season started that made this happen."

The Texans spent the offseason confident they would be improved, but somewhat lost in that was that they also spent the off-season focused on getting more physical and developing a running game to package with a high-powered passing offense. In Week 1, that work paid off. Foster said what's next is to continue that improvement. If that happens, the Texans have a very real chance to be more than just the team that beat the defending conference champions on Week 1.

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