There was one overwhelming takeaway after the LA Chargers were dismantled in the 2024 NFL Playoffs: Justin Herbert needs more help on the interior offensie line. Fast forward eight months later, and that help is nowhere to be found.
The Chargers lost their first game of the season on Sunday to a winless Giants team in a game that looked eerily similar to the playoff defeat from January. The final score was much closer, but the constant duress Herbert was in was all-too-familiar.
Harbaugh was rather straightforward about how the offensive line wasn't good enough on Sunday. Unfortunately, this is something Harbaugh has said before. The similarity of Harbaugh's Sunday comments and his comments back in January highlight the entire problem: not enough has changed.
8 months later-nothing has changed.
— Alex Insdorf (@alexinsdorf99) September 29, 2025
Yes, the Slater injury was out of their control and they didn't have Alt yesterday. But they opted to run back the rest of the OL outside of Becton and have invested zero draft picks on the IOL in two drafts.
It will keep happening. https://t.co/aEf5lFSCwJ
Jim Harbaugh is starting to sound like a broken record regarding the Chargers offensive line
Talk is nice, but it means nothing if there is no follow-up action. Harbaugh can point out the painfully obvious all he wants, it doesn't change the reality of the situation that the Chargers have created themselves.
The Bolts deserved the benefit of the doubt after their first year of the Harbaugh era. The team was trusting that a first-round pick would develop under a new staff and that an experienced veteran wouldn't suddenly become the worst center in the sport.
Unfortunately, neither of those bets paid off and instead of taking their money off the table, the Chargers doubled-down.
Sure, the team signed Mekhi Becton to add to the best tackle duo in the sport. But every Chargers fans knew that this approach was simply creating a house of cards. Intentionally running back (even re-signing Bozeman) a failed duo because the rest of the offensive line is talented was setting the team up to fail.
And while it was impossible to predict that the three best players on the offensive line would all be hurt by Week 4, it wasn't impossible to predict that Bozeman and Johnson would create problems. Even if those three were playing, teams would attack and expose the Johnson-Bozeman tandem.
The Chargers were hoping to lean on the top-line offensive line talent to get away with not adding more interior offensive line help. In this hope, the Chargers seemingly forgot that injuries are common in football, and there should have been a built-in safety measure to at least shoulder some of this burden.
But alas, the Chargers find themselves in an even worse offensive line position than they were in eight months ago, and Harbaugh is parroting the same "we weren't good enough" comments.
How much punishment does Justin Herbert have to take to elicit real change? Time will tell.