All offseason we've heard about the gamble the Los Angeles Chargers were taking along their offensive line.
With Joe Alt and Rashawn Slater back in the fold, they trusted Mike McDaniel to identify and develop the necessary talent to replenish the interior. In theory, any players should be better than what we saw last year out of Zion Johnson, Bradley Bozeman, and Mekhi Becton.
In the Chargers' Week 1 defeat against the Arizona Cardinals, that didn't necessarily prove to be the case. Los Angeles is still undertaking a rotation to sort out their full-time starting left guard, and neither Jake Slaughter nor Cole Strange had a strong enough performance to fully acquit themselves as high-level interior protectors.
It's something that will take time to come together. But no matter how you want to spin it, multiple blown assignments, false start penalties, and holding calls are part of what held Los Angeles back from being able to earn a much-needed Week 1 win.
They still have a matchup against the Las Vegas Raiders to figure things out. But they're rapidly running out of time.
The Chargers need certainty along their offensive line— and they don't have it right now
We won't have official pressure numbers until tomorrow, and at the very least, Herbert wasn't constantly under siege like he was at times last season.
But there were certainly some eyebrow-raising miscues. Pipkins looked completely ineffective against Arizona defensive tackle Dante Stills on the sack that prevented the Chargers from scoring their second touchdown of the game, and there were times where both Slaughter and Strange looked outmatched against the Cardinals' defensive front. Even Joe Alt made some mistakes, especially in terms of his timing with the snap count.
Of course, the main question entering Week 2 will be the Pipkins/Awosika rotation. Is Pipkins still someone they consider a starting-caliber guard after his performance this week, and was Awosika's outing enough to silence any doubt about his ability to hold the job? Does simply conducting a rotation like that interrupt the offensive line's rhythm?
But we can't pretend that the uncertainties stop there. Slaughter just played his first ever NFL game, and we'll need time to see if he's capable of holding down the starting center spot at a high level long-term. Strange doesn't necessarily have a sustained stretch of NFL success under his belt, either.
This two-game stretch against the Cardinals and the Raiders was supposed to provide some breathing room for Los Angeles to answer some of these questions. We know that won't be there when they enter their gauntlet of matchups in Week 3—when they'll need to face a murderer's row of pass rushes in the Denver Broncos, Seattle Seahawks, Houston Texans, and Los Angeles Rams.
Instead, this game only injected more uncertainty to a situation already filled with doubt. That's the path the Chargers decided to take this offseason instead of leveraging their significant cap space, and they'll need to live with the consequences now that the regular season has begun.
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