The Chargers should probably be 5-0. The fact that they’re 1-4 is some strange mix of inconceivable, hilarious, disgusting and sad.
In week one there was the implosion in Kansas City, with San Diego somehow giving up a 17-point lead with nine minutes left to Alex Smith. After routing the Jags, in week three the Chargers gifted a win to the woeful Colts, unable to complete a regulation third and three pass to ice the game.
Week four saw the dreadful Saints rally from 13 down on the road with less than five minutes left, aided by three San Diego turnovers in the final 6:50. The Saints, if you haven’t heard, are not known for their playmaking defence.
Sunday’s three-point loss to Oakland was arguably the least remarkable of the Chargers’ collapses, which says everything. Deep into the third quarter, holding onto a five-point lead, San Diego running back Melvin Gordon fumbled in Chargers territory, his second costly fumble in as many weeks. Oakland converted the turnover into points and never relinquished the lead.
The Chargers, though, had the chance to tie the game with two minutes left, with an easy field goal attempt from Oakland’s 18-yard line. Of course, propelled by a self-fulfilling ineptitude, holder Drew Kaser fumbled the snap and San Diego turned the ball over on downs, confirming a season-crushing loss. It was only Kaser’s second most embarrassing moment of the game, though, with top billing going to his 16-yard punt that led directly to Oakland extending its lead to double digits in the fourth quarter.
San Diego have become architects of absurdity. They find new, almost inspiring, innovative methods to blow games that can’t be lost. It’s a legacy that dates back to throwing away a 14-2 2006 season with an ugly, incomprehensible home playoff loss to New England, with a missed field goal at the death. They seemed similarly cursed in erasing all the goodwill of a 13-3 2009 season by giving up 17 unanswered points to Mark Sanchez in another home playoff loss where the Chargers entered as heavy favourites.
Perhaps most memorably, it was a legacy of farcical woe established on Halloween 2011, when Philip Rivers somehow fumbled a snap against Kansas City on a kneel-down attempt to finish the game. All throughout the Rivers era in San Diego, the Chargers have worked hard to answer the following question: when does heartbreak become so repetitive that it can only be comical?
San Diego have shot themselves in the foot time and time again this season, but there have been plenty of other shooters too. Injuries have cruelled this team more than any other. Every year an otherwise competent team goes through hell and suffers so many injuries that they just can’t compete anymore. Last year it was Baltimore, this year it’s been San Diego.
Keenan Allen went down for the season in week one, and Jason Verrett and Danny Woodhead have since joined him. Allen and Verrett might be San Diego’s second and third best players, and Woodhead is pivotal to their offensive dynamism. Add in prized prospect Joey Bosa (who looked awesome against Oakland) missing the first month with a dud hamstring, and Manti Te’o, Branden Oliver and Jeff Cumberland all going down for the year, and the Chargers’ 2016 never really had a chance to get up and running.
In the first half against the Chiefs, you saw the blueprint for the successful San Diego season that myself, Bill Barnwell and a few other now quiet voices predicted. The offence was flames incarnate, with the still excellent Rivers orchestrating a dominant passing game. Allen was a stud, Woodhead and Antonio Gates found gaps, and Gordon was dynamite on the ground. But flames incarnate took just two quarters of a season to burn in hell.
Still, the Chargers shouldn’t be this bad. They’ve played four games that have been up for grabs in the fourth quarter and four times they’ve let the result slip through their fingers.
Mike McCoy is not a good coach. He’s ably carried the torch of late-game incompetence from Norv Turner, shrinking into conservatism when the situation cries out for confidence. Kaser only had a chance to fumble the field goal snap against Oakland because McCoy refused to go for it on fourth and one in the red zone, as an underdog, with his team’s season on the line. It was a chance to make a statement, and McCoy timidly kept his lips sealed.
Tellingly, Oakland’s touchdown to take the lead following Gordon’s fumble came as a result of Jack Del Rio going for it on fourth and three from San Diego’s 21, calling for a fade to Michael Crabtree in the end zone – the same player who famously converted the ballsy two-point conversion to beat New Orleans in week one. It’s decisions like this that explain why the Chargers have a better point differential than Oakland, yet sit at 1-4 to the Raiders’ 4-1.
Three games out of the division lead five weeks in, San Diego’s season is virtually over. They’re better than their record, with DVOA pegging them as the 13th best side in the league entering week five – ahead of New England and Kansas City, but it’s almost certainly not going to matter. They’ve blown costly games in the division and to the lowly Saints and Colts, and their roster is depleted.
It’s another lost year for Rivers, one of the generation’s greatest quarterbacks who will never get his due because of the mediocrity he’s been forced to play with. He’s been as phenomenal as ever this year, dragging his bare bones offence to the eighth ranking in DVOA. But he’s forcing things, knowing that there’s no margin for error given his teammates. The end of the half interception against Oakland is not a ball that a quarterback throws when he’s confident in his defence.
The beat goes on in Southern California. In a year where the Broncos are starting Trevor Siemian and Paxton Lynch, the Chiefs are strangely flat, and the Raiders are struggling to incorporate their new personnel (despite their wins), the AFC West was there for the taking.
If things had gone a little differently, the Chargers could have been the ones to grasp it. But for so many years the Chargers have been left to lament ‘if things had gone a little differently’, to the point now where you have to start to wonder if this was the only way that things ever could have gone.
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