Even after losing to the Seattle Seahawks in Week 7, the Los Angeles Chargers still have a winning record. They’ve got an inside track to a 2022 playoff spot. They have a 24-year-old rising star at quarterback and defensive stars like Khalil Mack, Joey Bosa, JC Jackson and Derwin James on the roster.
But it’s getting tougher and tougher to believe they’ve got an chance to contend for a Super Bowl. That’s the exact opposite of where this team — and where fans and pundits alike — expected them to be this fall.
The Chargers had a common sense spending spree this offseason. Gifted the cap space that comes with a franchise quarterback on a rookie contract, LA took the $38 million of excess value attached to Justin Herbert’s wildly inexpensive $7.2 million salary cap hit and invested in shoring up its weaknesses.
Mack arrived via trade. Jackson signed a five-year, $82.5 million contract in free agency. Run-stuffing defensive tackles Austin Johnson and Sebastian Joseph-Day followed. Zion Johnson was drafted in the first round to bolster the team’s offensive line. The flaws that stopped this team one win short of a playoff bid last winter had theoretically been fixed; the rest of the AFC West was put on notice.
Los Angeles was gifted a soft schedule and loaded roster. But instead of crashing through that path of soft resistance the Chargers have stumbled and laid down with the grace of an elephant sauced up on fermented plums. They aren’t a contender. They are roughly as good as the New York Jets, Cleveland Browns, New Orleans Saints or Atlanta Falcons.
Through seven games they’re a threat solely to bad teams. None of the franchises they’ve beaten have more than two wins after Week 7. Two of their three losses have come by at least two touchdowns. Each of those games were against franchises who were supposed to be rebuilding in 2022, the Seahawks and Jacksonville Jaguars.
Herbert’s production has been so impacted by an offensive line that can’t keep his pockets clean that he currently sits between Mac Jones and Jameis Winston in terms of advanced passing stats.
Austin Ekeler and the team’s running attack ranks 24th in offensive DVOA, two spots behind a Bears team whose gameplans remain mostly theoretical. The rush defense that was supposed to be fixed with pricy veteran acquisitions has gone from giving up 4.6 yards per carry to 5.7 yards this fall. The secondary that was supposed to be able to hang with Patrick Mahomes and the monster QBs of the AFC West has been less than the sum of its parts, with Jackson in particular (four touchdowns given up in 22 targets, 149.3 passer rating allowed in coverage) struggling.
Some of this is outside the team’s control. Injuries kept Keenan Allen off the field for stretches to start the season and will keep star left tackle Rashawn Slater sidelined for the rest of the year. Jackson left Sunday’s game in an air cast after suffering a non-contact injury in the second quarter.
But this only exacerbated existing conditions.
This offensive line was bad even with Slater in the lineup, making it difficult for Allen or any of the Chargers’ wideouts to thrive downfield. Herbert didn’t throw deep a ton last year — his 7.6 air yards per target were only 18th-most in the league — but he’s doing so even less now. His average pass only goes 6.3 yards downfield (29th among 33 qualified QBs). His average completion only covers 4.7 yards (27th).
Things changed a bit Sunday, but mostly because the Chargers were trailing by multiple possessions for the majority of the game. Herbert threw 10 passes 15-plus yards downfield. He completed only two of them en route to fewer than six yards per attempt. This happened against a Seattle defense content to drop two-high safety coverage and instead offer small, time-consuming gains vs. high risk throws into double coverage downfield to help dissuade any notion of a comeback.
The defense let the Seahawks’ tailbacks run for 203 yards on only 29 carries. Two weeks earlier, the Browns racked up 200-plus on the ground. Both Seattle and Jacksonville were able to handily control the time of possession battle and prevent any hope of a comeback by grinding this team into dust on the ground.
This is a problem, because 2022’s offseason was supposed to fix things for the foreseeable future. The Chargers will go into 2023 an estimated $3 million over next year’s salary cap — the fourth-worst situation in the league, per Over The Cap. Either that year or the following offseason will be the backdrop for an expensive Herbert contract extension that pays him somewhere around $50 million annually and limits the team’s spending elsewhere.
*This* was GM Tom Telesco’s easiest chance to build a championship roster. It was a model the Kansas City Chiefs had laid out for him when they won a Super Bowl in Patrick Mahomes’ third season as a pro.
Instead, LA looks like most of the Chargers’ successful teams of the past two decades — capable of making a run to a winning record or maybe even the playoffs, but presenting a minimal threat beyond that. If that holds true, the only fixes will be relying on internal growth and hoping this year’s struggles lead to the draft position to select a difference maker next spring.
The Chargers were supposed to be contenders. Instead, they’re inoffensive and, for a team with Justin Herbert at its core, strangely uncompelling. Los Angeles was supposed to be building a juggernaut. Instead, it’s repairs were a series of upgrades that proved purely cosmetic, leaving the franchise’s trajectory unchanged. This team should be better than it is — but with the work on both the offensive and defensive lines remaining disastrous, it’s difficult to see how any of this can change before 2023.
