Offense On Philip Rivers Shoulders and It Shouldn’t Be

If Philip Rivers struggles, this whole San Diego Chargers team struggles. If Philip is off, this whole team is off. If teams can get Philip out of rhythm, the San Diego Chargers are going to lose the game. It happens every single time. This team and this offense depends on Philip to perform.

The San Diego Chargers defense is not good enough to win a game for this team. They have their moments, but if Philip is off, we can’t put up enough points on the scoreboard. The Chargers offense was only able to score 7 points against the New England Patriots on Sunday. The other 7 points came from the defense.

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On offense, the whole game plan is on Philip’s shoulders. If he can’t hit 70% of his receivers, we likely are going to lose that ball game. We have only won twice this season when Philip has completed less that 70% of his passes. Both of those games were against the Oakland Raiders. In both of those games, the team ran the ball over 30 times in the game. We actually trusted someone else rather than Philip Rivers. We actually trusted the running game.

In all of the Chargers losses this season, the team has abandoned the run game. The team’s most amount of rush attempts in a loss this season was 24 in the first game of the year. All the other losses this season had the whole team running the ball less than 20 times total.

When the team has run the ball 30+ times in a game this season, we have a record of 5-0. Seems pretty fascinating that we don’t like to run it with that type of success. When we run the ball less than than 30 times in a game, the record slips to 3-5. If we run the ball less than 20 times in a game, the record drops even further to 1-4.

We abandon the run too early in football games. Against the Patriots, the team was holding the lead at the half and even was holding on into the 4th quarter, but the run game was on the back burner.  Why do we give up on that part of the game?