How is Mike McDaniel Going to Fit With Jim Harbaugh's Style on Chargers?

The Los Angeles Chargers scored a universally agreed-upon win with the hiring of Mike McDaniel as offensive coordinator.

McDaniel is widely hailed as one of the greatest offensive minds to grace modern football. Working with and/or inspiring Kyle Shanahan, Matt LaFleur and others, plus the obvious results, speak to that.

Also interesting, though, is the apparent national perception of McDaniel the coach.

After all, what’s the smaller guy whose teams are accused of being unable to play in colder conditions doing with a hard-nosed football guy like Jim Harbaugh?

For the Chargers, they hope it’s a collision of styles that helps spur Justin Herbert to further greatness and overall contention in a league where even Sam Darnold can make it to the big one.

But perception isn’t always reality, either.

It’s a sentiment that The Athletic’s Jourdan Rodrigue dove into while analyzing the hire:

“All the while, McDaniel has had a sort of mania to him that actual “football guys” understand. So he didn’t work out as the head coach in Miami. He’d probably say a lot of that was his fault — though not all of it. Any good coach has an ego, after all. He wants to be the best, the smartest, the most successful. He has always understood what he has to prove. He likely knows he has to win in order to do it (and even then, some people will never come around). I’d bet Harbaugh saw those parts of McDaniel immediately. People can recognize their own traits in others.”

Rodrigue touches on many things with McDaniel, including a note about how he “drank himself out of dream jobs” before picking himself back up and climbing all the way up the ladder. How his passion for football is infectious while the media focuses on his stature, attire choice and mannerisms in press conferences.

And the Miami job? It was good while it was good. After helping sculpt modern offenses with Shanahan, he evolved on his own with droves of motion to craft some elite Dolphins attacks before Tua Tagovailoa self-combusted and the Dolphins acted like the Dolphins. Bad teams stay bad, after all.

numbers don't lie pic.twitter.com/JZeA8RiLPP
— Los Angeles Chargers (@chargers) January 26, 2026

Perhaps part of this is why McDaniel was so mindful of the head-coaching cycle this time out. He threw out a no thanks to the Cleveland Browns in a hurry. And while the national media suggested he was a candidate for the Las Vegas Raiders, there was never any notable traction behind the idea. He walked away from the Buffalo Bills, perhaps in part because of the meddling ownership and PR disaster.

McDaniel’s time as a head coach will come again, but he’s going to pick and choose his spot. Until then, his pairing with Harbaugh isn’t some hopeful clash of styles that produces a nice cook-up for the Chargers.

Some of it’s just McDaniel is a fantastic coach who can certainly maximize Herbert. But looking deeper than the national perceptions, it’s just one football guy seeing another football guy and getting to work.

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