4 devastating draft mistakes that continue to haunt the Chargers

Drafting unproven projects in Tre' McKitty and JT Woods

Drafting prospects in the third round is not a surefire thing. There are many more misses in the third round than there are in the first and second round and that comes with the territory. Expecting a team to bat 1.000 on third-round picks is expecting a team to fail.

That being said, the Chargers' track record with third-round picks under Telesco has been pretty woeful. Telesco took Keenan Allen in the third round of his first-ever draft as Chargers GM and it has been all downhill since with very few bright spots.

In 2021, the Chargers selected Georgia tight end Tre' McKitty with the third-round compensatory pick the team received for Philip Rivers leaving in free agency. McKitty never quite worked in LA and was outright waived halfway through the 2023 season.

So how did Telesco follow that up? By taking safety JT Woods in the third round of the 2022 NFL Draft. Woods has hardly played any defense in his two year NFL career and looks like he could be waived by the new regime in LA. What made the Woods pick even worse was the fact that the Chargers did not have a second-round pick from the Khalil Mack trade so the team really needed to hit on this pick.

This was a staple of Telesco's tenure as the GM. Instead of taking the best player available or drafting for need, Telesco would take projects in the third round. The logic was that these projects would have higher ceilings if the Chargers could simply develop them properly. They never did, and more often than not these picks blew up in the team's face.