SAN DIEGO — Big city, bright lights, podunk results.
The Los Angeles Chargers show zero AFC West titles in six tries, and you wonder how many more NFL favors and lucky breaks it'll take for Roger Goodell and the Spanoses to finally celebrate some sort of big splash.
It was the NFL's guarantee of tenancy in a privately financed stadium that persuaded Dean Spanos and his three siblings to move their family business north.
Perhaps the Hollywood moment comes next year. Three years into their stay at the $5.5 billion Kroenke Dome in Inglewood, the Chargers still seek their first playoff victory as full-fledged Angelenos.
Coinciding with the Kroenke Dome's opening season in 2020 was Justin Herbert falling into the Chargers' hands, all but ensuring the NFL and the Spanoses would start fast in their shared L.A. venture.
Herbert is the franchise's anti-Leaf, a top-10, likable quarterback from the moment the Chargers let him play. And the NFL, a year after Herbert showed up, provided a booster seat to teams like the Chargers that can't win the four-team divisional race, by adding a seventh seed to the playoff field.
The Bolts still fell short of those playoffs.
This year they qualified, only to Charger their way to defeat Saturday night, in a game they led by 27 points in the second quarter.
More than ever, the NFL's economics and pass-friendly climate favors teams with an advanced young QB like Herbert who can match or outperform a veteran starter.
The Seahawks parlayed Russell Wilson's first multi-year contract into two Super Bowl trips and their first Lombardi Trophy. The Chiefs, likewise, celebrated two conference-championship victories and a Super Bowl triumph with Patrick Mahomes.
A year ago in their second season with Joe Burrow, the top pick of the 2020 draft, the Bengals collected their first playoff victory in 31 years and reached the Super Bowl. Though Burrow's knee was mangled early in his rookie year, the Bengals have won four postseason games since he returned.
In the NFC, the Eagles grabbed this year's top playoff seed, just two seasons after drafting Jalen Hurts in the second round. Along the way, two Eagles coaches who are former San Diego Chargers assistants helped to transform Hurts into an MVP candidate.
New zip code, same M.O.
When it has come to hiring a head coach and deciding who has the most football clout within their braintrust, the Spanoses may as well still be in San Diego.
They still don't hire as their head coach anyone who's gone to a Super Bowl as a head coach.
(Hey, we like young risers, too. Everyone needs to start somewhere, right? A factoid to nibble on: the Chargers' past three playoffs losses have come against a head coach who'd taken a team to Super Bowl. First was John Fox, nine years ago in Denver; followed by Bill Belichick five years later in New England; and Doug Pederson on Saturday.)
As with Mike McCoy when he took over as the final San Diego Chargers head coach, L.A.-era hires Anthony Lynn and Brandon Staley were new to full-time head coaching, period. Their salaries, coincidentally or not, were near the NFL's bottom, as was true of several other Spanos hires.
Similarly, relocation to Greater L.A. didn't change the top bosses' belief in maintaining a powerful front office. Whoever got the head coaching job wouldn't be as pushy as, say, Sean McVay, the Rams' hire who had the NFL chops to throw his weight around even as a first-time head coach. As former NFL GM and Chargers exec Randy Mueller has described the Spanos prototype and manual for a head coach, he's "more of an assistant, kind of box him in, stay in your lane type, instead of just letting him run with it."
Might the Spanoses trip the L.A. light fantastic and hire a plug-in Super Bowl-caliber head coach who commands more clout — and a much higher salary — than Staley and previous head coaches?
If they did, they'd break with decades of family tradition. And one that, so far has proved L.A.-proof.
Four things
— The wild-card round was a rough ride for NFL officials.
— Giants rookie head coach Brian Daboll knows how to play with fire. As a play designer Daboll has called for numerous rushes by quarterbacks Josh Allen and Daniel Jones, the latter his current QB. Both had a lot of success doing it and, with football angels looking over them, suffered no serious injury setbacks.
— Herbert won't soon forget his too-high liner, meant for Keenan Allen in Saturday's first half. A four-point misfire, it swapped a likely TD for a field goal. The end zone's obstacles called for a Philip Rivers-type touch throw, one for which Rivers' unorthodox delivery was ideally suited. All told, Herbert's performance, his first in a postseason, was fairly good. The lack of downfield stretch to the offense, due partly to speed limitations — DeAndre Carter was injured during the game — was glaring in the second half. The Telesco-Spanos front office found Austin Ekeler but hasn't had much success in providing him a terrific backup. That flaw hurt the offense at Jacksonville.
— Staley had his team ready to play Saturday night. That counts. A lot. The main reason Staley leaned on many of his starters in the season finale was to prepare them for the playoff game. Six days later, his team was mostly sharp, racing to the 27-0 lead on the road. (Yes, the Chargers may have won if Staley hadn't deployed his top receiver, the often-injured Mike Williams, at Denver.)
