As the Los Angeles Chargers are one of 12 current NFL franchises never to have hoisted the Lombardi Trophy, it can't be easy on Bolts fans when the Super Bowl rolls around, as it simply serves as a painful reminder that the only title this team has ever won was the 1963 AFL Championship.
And the fact that the Chargers' lone appearance in the Big Game was 31 years ago definitely doesn't help, nor does the fact that it ended in an embarrassing 49-26 loss to the San Francisco 49ers, with the 23-point margin of defeat ranking as the 10th-largest in history.
Recent years have been particularly tough on the Chargers, as one of their biggest rivals, the Kansas City Chiefs, have appeared in five of the last six Super Bowls, winning three of them.
The Chiefs obviously aren't playing this Sunday, as they didn't even make the postseason, but the Bolts do still have a reason to be annoyed at the Super Bowl 60 matchup between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots. And, no, it's not because the Pats ended their season in the Wild Card Round. If anything, a New England win makes Los Angeles look better for losing to the eventual champs.
But what we're focused on here is how Sunday serves as a painful reminder of just how close the Chargers were to being given the opportunity in the 2023 draft to select Jaxon Smith-Njigba, who went off the board one pick before Los Angeles ultimately landed Quentin Johnston.
The Chargers lost out on Jaxon Smith-Njigba by one pick in the 2023 NFL Draft
Heading into the 2023 draft, the general consensus among pundits was that the Chargers were looking to use their first-round pick to find a new target for Justin Herbert, who was coming off a 2022 campaign in which he completed a career-best 68.2 percent of his passes for 4,739 yards and 25 touchdowns.
Most believed that target was Smith-Njigba, who had only appeared in three games for Ohio State in 2022 due to a hamstring injury, but was still seen as the best wide receiver in his class, as he'd tallied 95 catches for 1,606 yards and nine touchdowns when fully healthy in 2021.
What was really interesting about the '23 draft was that after 19 picks, not a single wideout had come off the board, which had to make the Chargers happy, as they were sitting in waiting at No. 21 overall. But, of course, Smith-Njigba was ultimately taken at No. 20 by the Seahawks, thus leaving Los Angeles to take TCU's Quentin Johnston one pick later.
Simply put, Johnston hasn't come anywhere close to living up to his first-round status, recording 144 catches for 1,877 yards and 18 touchdowns over the last three years.
Just in this 2025 season alone, Smith-Njigba tallied 119 regular-season receptions for a league-leading 1,793 yards and 10 touchdowns en route to earning a second straight Pro Bowl selection as well as a First-Team All-Pro nod, adding another 13 catches for 172 yards and two scores in the Seahawks' pair of playoff victories over the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams.
Overall, the former Buckeye has 282 catches for 3,551 yards and 20 touchdowns in his first three seasons.
For those wondering how Johnston fared in the two postseason games he's played thus far, he's made three catches for 20 yards, all of which came against the Patriots last month, as he had zero grabs on five targets in last year's wild-card loss to the Houston Texans.
Now, there's no guarantee the Chargers would have selected Smith-Njigba had the Seahawks gone in a different direction. But the likelihood seems very high, and one has to wonder how different the NFL landscape would look had he ended up in Los Angeles.
Guess we'll just have to throw it in the Chargers' "what if" bin next to Eli Manning's two Super Bowl rings. What, still too soon to bring that up?