PITTSBURGH -- You don't have to hang around Houston Texans coach Bill O'Brien long to know he has a fiery, emotional personality. That comes through after losses, but never more clearly than it did after the Texans' 30-23 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers on Monday.

O'Brien was heated. The tone and volume of his voice showed it. It was an appropriate response to a game that should have upset him, one in which players and coaches alike made mistakes.

"We had a terrible second quarter," O'Brien said. "We couldn't come back from it. Just too many turnovers. We had a hard time overcoming all of those things. But at the end of the day, we were one onside kick away from tying it. So we are trying to take some positive out of it, but we have to coach it better. We have to play a lot better."

He was asked if he'd ever seen anything like that final two-minute span, during which the Steelers scored three touchdowns in just more than a minute and a half. He said he wasn't sure. He was asked whether it was hard to stop the Steelers from scoring once they started, and that's when O'Brien bristled a little bit more.

"It was 30-23. It wasn't 50 to nothing," O'Brien said. "My point is we can't do that."

O'Brien went through a list of all his team did wrong: the 12-men-on-the-field penalty, the bobbled kickoff, the turnovers, the big plays.

"These questions are like we lost 50 to nothing," he continued. "We lost by a touchdown with all that stuff that we did. We have to improve it. We have to coach better, and we have to play better."

Next came a question about turnovers, and, again, O'Brien mentioned his frustration while also noting how close the Texans were to tying the game.

Finding positives is not always a bad thing, but focusing too much on those positives after another loss in what should have been a winnable game can be. I wanted to know if O'Brien actually was looking at the closeness of the game as a positive, or if his concern about all that went wrong (and we'll get into all of that in another post) outweighed that.

"I think it's a negative! We lost," he said, more visibly upset than he had been earlier. "It's a negative. It's terrible to lose. It's not good to lose."

And then the explanation for the search for the positives.

"My point is to these players in the locker room, is that with all those things that we did wrong, if we can fix those things that we're doing wrong, especially turning the ball over twice inside the 5-yard line, if we could fix those things, maybe we would have a shot, a better shot to win," O'Brien said.

"So no, it's awful to lose. It's not good to come close. There are no moral victories. But we have to fix these things."