Chargers Officially Lost Locker Room During NFL Trade Deadline Disaster

New reporting shows things are not going well in the Chargers' locker room.

Joe Hortiz | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

Deep in the throes of a winless season and a winless NFL trade deadline, those running the Los Angeles Chargers have only managed to make things worse. 

Headed up by general manager Joe Hortiz, a front office more concerned with PR messaging than anything else attempted to explain itself before Week 10 for the botched Daiyan Henley trade. 

All it did was create more questions, instead. 

Hortiz and the Chargers, after all, were reportedly confusing other teams with their reluctance to make trades at the deadline. Chargers coaches insisted they could still win games and didn’t want to lose guys, only for the front office to turn around and trade a young core piece like Henley to a division rival, before the agreement collapsed. 

If the locker room wasn’t lost before, it is now.

Chargers lose locker room after NFL trade deadline

Jim Harbaugh | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

Before the deadline, one could’ve made the argument that the Chargers were still playing hard and, if nothing else, the locker room was probably fineish. 

Not now. 

Chargers players about to be confronted with the trade deadline debacle made their feelings known to reporters this week. 

“Don’t ask hard questions to us; ask hard questions to them,” veteran edge rusher Bud Dupree said, according to The Athletic’s Noah Furtado, unprompted. “Ask the hard questions. Everybody pull they cameras out and go upstairs and ask questions to them. Everybody. Walk upstairs and ask them.”

Those who want to read that as joking or something else might want to look away for the next bit. 

According to Furtado, the public disgruntlement from some players about the Henley trade online was very alive in the locker room, too: “But many teammates expressed disappointment, whether in the locker room or on their socials, that Henley had been dealt in the first place.”

The Chargers had been endlessly focused on messaging amid the chaos this season. And (surprise!) the players in the locker room were just as confused by the team demanding continuity and no changes and this is the core group needed to win…before shipping away a young core piece to a rival at the last second. 

The Chargers aren’t going to stop “trying” to win games. Tanking doesn’t really exist in the NFL, at least from the players’ end, because of contract factors, and losing would just make way for their replacements, etc. Things are so broken on the offense, the roster is so injured and the quality assembled so poor that the losses will keep flowing. 

But the locker room? From afar, at least, it feels like the Chargers managed to finally lose it.

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