In Florida this week, Brandon Staley will try to match Mike McCoy and Anthony Lynn by winning a wild-card game on the road.
Where in their playoff debuts McCoy and Lynn led Chargers teams that were six- and three-point underdogs at Cincinnati and Baltimore, respectively, Staley's team has opened as a 2 1/2-point favorite at Jacksonville.
A key ingredient to all three games: the Chargers had the better quarterback. (It's very close this time, as the Jaguars' rising star, Trevor Lawrence, is playing very well.)
Leading McCoy's first San Diego team to a 27-10 victory in 2014, Philip Rivers outplayed Bengals quarterback Andy Dalton, who appeared confused and hyper against John Pagano's defense. Dalton had three turnovers, an unfortunate habit of his. In his four career playoff starts, Dalton was 0-4 with eight turnovers and one touchdown pass.
Rivers returned to the playoffs in five years, directing Lynn's second club.
As impressive as Ravens rookie Lamar Jackson was that season, the playoff game marked just his eighth career start. Gus Bradley's D exploited Jackson's inexperience en route to three takeaways and a 23-17 victory.
Saturday brings Justin Herbert's first playoff start. As with Rivers, he'll face a team that defeated his club during the regular season.
The edge Herbert provides, relative to his counterpart, is not large. In recent months, Lawrence has shown why he went first in the 2021 draft, a year after Herbert went sixth. Leading a 7-2 sprint that won the AFC South title, Lawrence posted a 104.6 passer rating, driven largely by 15 touchdowns against two interceptions. His improved physicality has jumped off the screen, as has sharper recognition of coverages and quick-release arrows to the perimeter downfield.
Lawrence is a slightly more capable rusher than Herbert. In the 7-2 stretch, he averaged 5.5 yards per carry and rushed for two TDs.
At 23, Lawrence should be well prepared Saturday for his 35th career start and playoff debut. Coinciding with his breakout season, he's working under a Super Bowl-winning head coach and former Andy Reid protégé in Doug Pederson, who excels at attacking flaws. Jags quarterbacks coach McCoy assembled a terrific offensive staff 10 years ago in San Diego. The quick game he and assistants installed helped Rivers to get his career back on track.
Not moronic
It's perfectly fair to contend Staley should have removed Herbert and several other key frontline players from Sunday's season finale after just one or two series, given the implications of a serious injury.
After all, the final score had no bearing on the Chargers' playoff seeding. So why not use only the first quarter as a brief tuneup for several players? Or hold them out altogether? We've seen Reid and other Super Bowl-winning coaches take those routes (though not always).
It's important to bear in mind, however, that while the game's outcome was meaningless, the game itself offered value in preparation.
Start with Denver's crowd that exceeded 74,000 fans. Their noise, amid an NFL competition that can't be replicated in practice, enabled Staley's offense to maintain or improve its aptitude in communication and timing, the No. 1 challenge a road team faces. In that his team was playing just its second road game in five weeks and that its previous road test was against the hapless Colts, whose fans saw their offense couldn't compete, it made sense that Staley would want to sharpen his offense's noise-management skills Sunday.
The Jacksonville crowd figures to be similarly loud and opportunistic. Also: the Chargers likely would encounter similar challenges later this month, should they advance to play one or two additional playoff games.
Staley no doubt took into account that Denver's chilly weather (43 degrees at kickoff) may compare with the conditions his team would encounter in Buffalo, Cincinnati or Kansas City. Particularly on offense, it's beneficial preparation to compete in such conditions.
In his postgame comments, of course, Staley didn't mention cold weather. Why give the Jags the sense you're looking past them?
Staley had to weigh both the injury risk and the wear and tear of Sunday's game, against the preparation value of deploying his players as long as he did.
Certainly he considered the season's workloads of every player and both the individual and collective sharpness — or dullness — they'd exhibited lately.
As noted a few weeks ago, most of his players' individual snap counts this season were relatively light, with almost every player ranking well below 10th at his position in snaps. Herbert was the highest-ranked exception, standing second in snaps played. But the 24-year-old Herbert, a 6-foot-6, 245-pounder who is one of only three franchise QBs to be available to his team for every start the past three years, seemed to ward off fatigue. Herbert's primary receivers, Keenan Allen and Mike Williams, were well below 20th in snaps played. The line's leader, center Corey Linsley, whose savvy is crucial to the offense's recognition and communication efforts, also ranked well below 10th, owing to his injury detours.
If you put stock in Staley's postgame comments to reporters, they weren't persuasive. Certainly in his public interviews Staley has annoyed NFL observers, including former longtime NFL GM and Chargers executive Randy Mueller, who last month reiterated his stated view, in The Athletic's NFL podcast, that Stately can come off as entitled.
But, in exploiting an environment whose noise, weather and competitive nuances largely can't be simulated in practice — all paired with the unique demands of an actual NFL game — he made defensible decisions in player usage. This wasn't a foolish machismo.
Three Things
— Look for Williams to play against the Jaguars, despite exiting Sunday's game deep into the second quarter with back spasms. "Williams should not be hampered in the playoffs, according to our panel of doctors," said former longtime Chargers team physician Dr. David Chao of Sports Injury Central.
— The "San Diego" Lions ended a breakout season with an entertaining victory. With smartly bold and atypical play calls and game-management decisions Sunday night, physical Detroit (9-8) denied the Packers a playoff berth. Head coach Dan Campbell employs four San Diegans on his staff. Their respective units each had a big season. The offense finished fifth in points and net yards per pass, eighth in touchdown passes and third in rushing TDs. The special teams of Dave Fipp (La Jolla) led the NFL rankings of Pro Football Focus.
— Jamal Agnew(University of San Diego, Point Loma) did his part to set up "Bolts-Jags" by returning a kick 54 yards Saturday night. Jacksonville, down 10-0, turned the short field into a TD and went on to beat the Titans, earning the playoff berth.
