Chargers’ Season is Lost and 3 Overreactions from Embarrassing Loss to Raiders

The Los Angeles Chargers are cooked.

Starting the season at home and losing to the Arizona Cardinals and Las Vegas Raiders pretty much says it all. Jim Harbaugh’s message appears to be tired. Justin Herbert just looks tired.

And hey, maybe the warning signs were there. Joe Hortiz and the front office sat on a boatload of free cap space this offseason, perhaps at the demand of stingy ownership. Both sides of the ball underwent coordinator changes. Every offseason headline about Herbert didn’t have anything to do with football. Even the first-round pick was made in the hopes of replacing a free agent they could have just signed back.

So yeah, it’s tough in Los Angeles right now.

Chargers’ season ends in September

Forget it.

This isn’t the Chargers team that scraped together tough fights against the likes of Kansas City while Herbert fought through injuries behind a bad line in a Greg Roman offense. This is something else entirely.

And the upcoming stretch is disaster:

At Buffalo
aVs Denver
At Kansas City
BYE
At LA Rams
Vs Houston
At Baltimore

We’re not going to say the Chargers start 0-9. This is the NFL. Things happen. But 0-2 is too much of a hole to dig out of by now. Factor in injuries yet to happen, every team in the AFC West looking better and the general state of things and the Chargers sporting only one or two wins by November is a real possibility.

Mike McDaniel is doing too much (and he’s probably one-and-done)

Forget those cutesy ideas about McDaniel taking over as head coach when Harbaugh leaves. If he can’t even get what Greg Roman managed to get from Harbaugh, he might not last as long as Harbaugh in Los Angeles.

Sure, the Chargers needed to better fit what McDaniel needed. Where is the speed his offense needs? Quentin Johnston isn’t bringing it. But his offense shouldn’t be sitting in Week 2 and having elite players like Joe Alt still making critical pre-snap mistakes. If it’s that complex, he needs to rip out the tough stuff and get back to basics.

Justin Herbert deserves the heat

Chargers fans know all the excuses for Herbert over the years. The organization has repeatedly failed him. So have the players around him. We all know he has the upside of a top-five quarterback.

But this isn't the Herbert fans have come to know.

This Herbert looks off. This was the first offseason Herbert actually appeared in the public limelight, with his relationship with a pop star going viral, his showing up at sporting events and even starring in music videos, never mind missing some voluntary offseason work he hadn’t in the past (with a new coordinator, by the way).

That’s not to blame Herbert’s private/public off-field life for on-field performances. But it is going to be hard to argue against this stuff when people make the arguments. Herbert is on a $262.5 million contract. They got him the shiny new coordinator. There’s no way a small footwork change in certain formations and a new playbook is giving him this many problems, right?

Jim Harbaugh is done

This seems to be it, folks.

Jim Harbaugh’s message worked for a few years. But repeated playoff duds and the same dad-joke energy, at least publicly, isn’t working.

There’s no reason for a future Hall of Famer like Khalil Mack to be dropping quotes like this:

Q to Khalil Mack: What was the message from Jim Harbaugh?

"Honestly, I blanked out the whole time. I don't really know. My mind was on the game still, but I feel like it had something to do with picking up the pieces and getting this thing right."

Said he's "pissed" but…
— Kris Rhim (@krisrhim1) September 21, 2026

Maybe that’s a negative reading of what Mack said, but it feels right. And looking back at Harbaugh’s resume, he tends to leave his recent spots quickly once the schtick wears out, and some of those places he leaves on fire, too.

Harsh? Maybe. But maybe there’s an expiration date on this whole thing. If nothing else, it’s at least very obvious Harbaugh didn’t get everything he needed from the front office during the offseason before he mishandled the training camp and preseason workload while breaking in two new coordinators and a host of free agents.

Regardless, this start is an indictment on Harbaugh. And when similar things happened over his first few years, it was easy to still buy into the message before the Chargers bounced back.

But not this time.

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