Chargers predicted to have league’s best defense in 2019
By Travis Wakeman
The Los Angeles Chargers have been working on building one of the NFL’s most vaunted defensive units.
Tom Telesco has taken a clear approach in building the Chargers, focusing on finding impact players on the defensive side of the ball. This has led to the team finding Joey Bosa and Derwin James and if Jerry Tillery and Nasir Adderley can live up to early expectations, look out.
NFL.com’s Adam Schein recently made nine bold predictions for the upcoming season and one of those was that the Chargers would have the league’s best defense.
Whether or not that is really all that “bold” is debatable, but there are several great defensive units in the league. Chicago’s defense carried the Bears to one of their best seasons in quite some time last season and both the Dallas Cowboys and Baltimore Ravens have defenses ready to limit the number of points their opponents put on the scoreboard.
But the Chargers have almost no weakness on the defensive side of the ball and the team has Gus Bradley, one of the league’s most respected and innovative defensive coordinators, at the controls.
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Bosa missed half of last season and the team didn’t have the right guy in the defensive backfield with James. With a fully healthy Bosa and Adderley in the secondary, it’s easy to see why Schein makes this prediction.
As the saying has always gone, defense wins championships. The New England Patriots have Tom Brady and last year had a solid rookie running back in Sony Michel, but the defense of the Patriots was the key to the team winning yet another Super Bowl.
If the Chargers can put it all together with the unit they have built and avoid major injuries, we could be looking at a defense on the level of the 2013 Seattle Seahawks, 2002 Tampa Bay Buccaneers or the 2000 Ravens.
How’s that for a bold predicition?