The Los Angeles Chargers, at 0-5, now officially need to face the reality of this season. Not only is a playoff berth a far-off dream currently, but they are, in terms of production and actual on-field product, among the worst teams in the NFL.
This isn't simply an average offense where the expectations were more optimistic. This is a team that, currently, is on par with the Tennessee Titans and Miami Dolphins. Given the expectations this team had entering the season, it's safe to say that things couldn't have gone any worse.
Of course, the matchup with the Denver Broncos was always going to be an uphill battle. Entering the game, the Chargers were down both starting tackles, their first, second, and third-string left guards, and two of their top three receivers on the offensive side of the ball alone. Both Charlie Kolar and David Njoku have missed time, as have Denzel Perryman, Donte Jackson, Dalvin Tomlinson, and Derwin James Jr. Even if this team was clicking from the start of the season, it's quite possible that this bevy of injuries would've derailed any momentum they gained in the first place.
But this team, over the course of the rest of this campaign, needs to take an honest look in the mirror. Did Joe Hortiz build this roster for success? Did Mike McDaniel and Jim Harbaugh do their jobs as the leaders of this offense and this roster as a whole?
The injuries may deserve a share of the blame for the way things went this week and last week. But now that we've seen the way this roster has played across five weeks, there's very little reason to believe it would've looked any differently if the Chargers had finally had a stroke of injury luck.
Injuries seem to follow the Chargers everywhere—but that's not an excuse for the way this season has gone
Although Greg Roman received his fair share of ire last season, it was actually relatively easy to write off Justin Herbert and the offense's struggles as a direct result of its injuries. After all, Los Angeles lost both Joe Alt and Rashawn Slater for the season, and the offensive line simply wasn't the same after that. Any hope the Chargers have of reaching their ceiling, in any iteration of this roster, involves those two pieces performing at full strength.
It's possible to pin the Broncos loss, therefore, on the sheer number of absences Los Angeles faced. The defense actually did a solid job keeping the game close well into the second half, limiting the viability of Denver's passing offense and managing to keep Nix guessing for much of the night. In the end, the complete lack of receiving threats or experienced protection is what did the Chargers in.
But this organization needs to seriously re-evaluate this roster and its coaching, and the impact of injuries can't be considered as any sort of excuse for the way this season has gone.
Even in Week 1 and 2 against the Arizona Cardinals and Las Vegas Raiders, when the team was mostly intact outside of Tyler Biadasz and Trey Pipkins III, this roster looked poorly coached. The offensive scheme was clearly poorly implemented, with mistakes, miscues, and ball security concerns running rampant among the Chargers' playmakers. The special teams has been abysmal since Week 1, and even the defense struggled heavily to find its footing against the pass-leaning Jacoby Brissett and Kirk Cousins.
At the end of the day, even with an ideal version of this current roster, Hortiz trusted a second-round pick in Jake Slaugher, a career backup in Kayode Awosika, and a former draft bust in Cole Strange to take over the guard spots. He failed to add cornerback depth this offseason after letting Benjamin St-Juste walk in free agency, and he clearly felt comfortable entering the season with Ladd McConkey, Tre' Harris, and Quentin Johnston as the primary pass-catching weapons in McDaniel's scheme.
It's not as though there's not a world where this could've worked, and it's important not to lean too heavily on the benefit of hindsight here. But there was obviously some major downside with this roster if injuries (which every team faces over the course of the season) were to kick in. The depth was too cheap, and too unreliable, to sustain even the limited absences Los Angeles saw over the first couple weeks of the season.
The Chargers are 0-5, not because of their injuries, but because this team has deeper, systematic issues that need to be addressed. Using the injuries, as absurd in number as they are, to write off a loss of any sort this season is to let this regime off too easily.
The answer here from Harbaugh and company can't simply be to claim marginal improvement on a week-to-week basis and hope for improved health after the bye. There needs to be an entire re-evaluation of the way this team conducts itself, and only then can they start to think about preparing to return to contention in 2027.
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