LA Chargers: Why Tom Telesco may also be on the hot seat

1. Tom Telesco has hired two pretty bad head coaches

It is rare that a general manager gets to pick a third head coach after the first two ended up falling far short of expectations. The sad reality is, too, that the Chargers have had a talented-enough roster to make more than two playoff appearances since Telesco’s hiring but the coaching has held them back.

Telesco’s first hire was Mike McCoy and we all remember how awful that was. McCoy’s tenure started promising with back-to-back 9-7 seasons, although the signs were there that he was not a great head coach.

The reality reared its head in his final two seasons as McCoy went a combined 9-23 in his last two years. His playcalling and situational decisions were awful. He was hired by Denver to be the offensive coordinator in 2017 and was fired before completing a season. He was then hired by Arizona and again fired before completing a season.

He has not been in the league since.

Lynn is not a great hire as well. Lynn seems to be a fantastic player’s coach and a great motivational guy — things that translate better to collegiate sports than they do in the NFL.

The fact of the matter is that Lynn also doesn’t have the best decision-making and there is a reason why there has been a trend of losing one-score games since he has become the head coach. That is not an unlucky accident.

The hiring was a weird one at the time as well and Telesco seemingly fell in love with Lynn’s personality more than his track record. He was a bonafide positions coach in the NFL. He has three-quarters of a season’s worth of being an offensive coordinator and one-game worth of being an interim head coach.

That was enough to put him in charge of the Chargers. It’s almost as if Telesco did not learn his lesson of hiring someone who was not quite qualified to be a head coach, as he did with McCoy.