Is Bernard Pollard On The Outs?

One of the nuances of Gary Kubiak's presser that was a bit underreported yesterday was his comments on specific players. Or, to get more to the point, what was said about one player that wasn't about another. It's hard to read between the lines in press conferences sometimes, but this one was pretty glaring: 

On possibly bringing Owen Daniels back:

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I can tell you OD wants to be a part of our team and we want OD

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On possibly bringing Bernard Pollard back:

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He's done a good job for this football team, but we have to go back and what we'll start doing tomorrow morning is go back and evaluating our football season and looking at our players, and we've got to decide which direction we go, but Bernard has always done his job.

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Now of course, I'm sure part of the evaluation process at this point is letting the new defensive coordinator, whomever that may be, decide whether he wants Pollard or not. But the difference between these two is pretty jarring. Neither player was very good in 2010, but both were solid contributors in 2009. Daniels has been banged up much more than Pollard, Daniels has three tight ends nipping at his heels for snaps, and still, the Texans want him back.

Pollard, while not able to cover anyone with a double move, was still a big part of the Texans mediocre rushing defense last year in spite of the games lost by the front seven. He plays a position where the Texans secondary options include "jack" and "diddly," yet the most concrete thing that Kubiak was willing to say about him is that he has done his job? That's not exactly a ringing endorsement. 

Pure speculation, but something about that tells me that the intense and passionate Pollard, who was lionized for helping the defense in 2009 on sheer aggression, may not fit what the organization wants at safety in the long-term. Then again, trying to figure out what this organization wants at safety in the long-term is hard, because we've never seen this brass draft or acquire a safety with the intention that he'd be a long-term fix.