It's Time For The Chargers To Move On From Brandon Staley And Tom Telesco, Here's Why
One word can summarize your Los Angeles Chargers as a franchise, but especially over the last decade: underwhelming.
It's easy to point to individual issues every season. Injuries, poor coaching, running into the dynastic New England Patriots in the playoffs, playing in a division with Patrick Mahomes, and (unfortunately) more.
Amidst the excuses and their occasional validity, it always seems as though every team encounters their fair share of similar troubles but, in spite of them, manage to find success at least sometimes.
The Chargers, on the contrary, don't. There never seems to be any cushion. One injury crumbles the roster – there's no depth behind the star level guys. One poor defensive performance and the team is out of the playoff race. One interception and suddenly the team is on the couch after the regular season ends. Why is the margin for error so low?
Tom Telesco
The answer is very simple, and it starts with Tom Telesco, and his blatant mismanagement of the franchise since the dawn of his tenure in 2013.
Handed a franchise with Hall of Fame talents Phillip Rivers, Antonio Gates, and Eric Weddle on a silver platter, Telesco turned a 7-9 team into a resounding 9-7 team. The Bolts finished 3rd in the AFC West in the 2013 campaign, beating up on playoff-winless Cincinnati Bengals QB Andy Dalton, and playoff-winless Head Coach Marvin Lewis in the Wild Card round, before unsurprisingly falling in the Divisional round to the Denver Broncos.
After a promising finish to the season in spite of a poor regular season highlighted by losses to the 2-14 Texans (at home) and 4-12 Raiders, the expectation would be that the roster would improve entering the following season. That did not happen.
We'll skip over the 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017 seasons, because nothing good happened. The team never went better than 9-7 and missed the playoffs every year.
The 2018 season was one for the books, as the Bolts went 12-4, finishing second in the AFC West and sporting one of the league's top defenses. After a road playoff victory against rookie QB Lamar Jackson in one of his first career starts, the Chargers' supposedly elite defense ceded 41 points to Tom Brady and the Patriots, ending their season.
We'll skip 2019 and 2020 because Telesco didn't add anything significant to the roster, and instead chose to enter a rebuild despite having a top defense in the NFL.
The Justin Herbert era has arguably been the most frustrating, as despite him being a top-tier QB from the moment he entered the NFL in 2020, the Chargers (and specifically Tom Telesco) have failed to put an adequate roster around him.
The Chargers defense has been one of the worst in the league each of the past 4 seasons, with Herbert having an astounding 18-4 record when his defense holds teams under 27 points.
For context, the average NFL offense in 2023 (Rams, ranked 16th of 32) is averaging 22.1 points per game ahead of Week 8. That means that in 33 of Herbert's 55 career starts, the Chargers have let up at least 5 more points than the league average. That's inexplicable.
After a 34-31 Week 18 loss to the division-rival Las Vegas Raiders, who averaged just 22 points per game across the season, the Bolts found themselves out of the playoffs despite an excellent campaign from QB Justin Herbert.
In the offseason, to fix the struggling defense, Telesco signed Patriots CB JC Jackson. Jackson, 26, was let walk by the Patriots despite being an All-Pro. With LA, Jackson got benched ahead of Week 8 in the 2022 season and has since been dealt back to the Patriots. How bad did the fit analysis done by Chargers management have to be to have your star free agency signing get benched?
Evidently, Brandon Staley's defensive system didn't have a place for Jackson. Despite that, the Chargers tossed a massive contract in his direction, and their defense got worse in 2022.
The Chargers used their first-round pick in 2022 on offensive guard Zion Johnson despite the defense being horrendous the previous season, and in 2023, despite a poor 2022 defensive performance and already having two star wide receivers, the Chargers drafted TCU WR Quentin Johnston with their first round pick, and he's yet to be a contributing piece.
This is where the real common trend is noticeable.
The Chargers, and Telesco specifically, have attempted to build an offense through the draft, and a defense through free agency. The critical issue here, however, is that no game-breaking defensive players are ever available in free agency.
Conversely, receivers like Tyreek Hill, A.J. Brown, and Stefon Diggs, and Pro Bowl offensive linemen like Joe Thuney, Orlando Brown Jr., and Terron Armstead, have all become available the past 3 offseasons via trade or free agency.
If the Chargers were to have dealt the first-round pick they used on Zion Johnson (one pick above what Philadelphia traded) to the Titans for A.J. Brown, would the team not fare better? If they used money on Joe Thuney, who has been a staple of Patrick Mahomes' league-leading offensive line for the past couple of seasons, as opposed to JC Jackson, would the offense be better? My guess is indubitably, yes.
The Chargers tried to fit a mold that no other team has done successfully. The Chiefs, 49ers, Bills, Dolphins, and more have all chosen to draft their defenses, and go after offensive pieces in the offseason (aside from at QB). The sheer amount of offensive talent that becomes available in the offseason, contrary to defensive talent, is exactly why this strategy is successful.
Telesco, however, tried to be different.
Now the Bolts are 2-4 with the highest defensive payroll in the NFL this season, and one of the worst units. The defense is older, with limited young talent and massive contracts that short-circuit money that could've been given to players like Tee Higgins this offseason.
Nothing in this era besides the selection of Justin Herbert has been game-breaking for the Chargers, and that's where the onus falls on Telesco. The top teams in the league have found elite talent at years across the field, not just with the QB that they were projected/encouraged to draft No. 6 overall.
The Telesco era can best be summarized by 7 missed playoff appearances in 10 seasons, (87% chance of missing this season, making it 8 in 11 seasons), and an astoundingly bad two playoff wins in that time span – one against a QB who is 0-4 in the postseason, and one who was a rookie. Interpret that as you'd like.
Brandon Staley
Brandon Staley is an easier scapegoat than Telesco, and week-to-week is more responsible for the Chargers' struggles, but he's truly been awful in his time in LA.
"The Chargers defense has been one of the worst in the league each of the past 4 seasons, with Herbert having an astounding 18-4 record when his defense holds teams under 27 points.
For context, the average NFL offense in 2023 (Rams, ranked 16th of 32) is averaging 22.1 points per game ahead of Week 8. That means that in 33 of Herbert's 55 career starts, the Chargers have let up at least 5 more points than the league average. That's inexplicable."
This excerpt from an earlier point in the article tells a bigger story than you'd hope about Staley's time in Los Angeles, and as a former defensive coordinator and current defensive play-caller, those poor numbers fall entirely on him.
While Telesco is to blame for investing only in aging defensive players like Eric Kendricks, Chris Harris Jr., and Khalil Mack, Staley has made a defense that even in spite of their age and injuries having more talent than other units in the league, far worse.
With the highest defensive payroll in the league this season, while Telesco deserves blame for handing out oversized contracts, Staley has still been dealt the proper hand when it comes to making the most of the personnel he has.
Derwin James is still an All-Pro level player, Khalil Mack is amongst the league-leaders in sacks, Joey Bosa remains capable, and young players like Tuli Tuipulotu have become contributors. Despite that, the defense is putrid.
The highlight of Staley's comically bad tenure in Los Angeles was the Chargers' Wild Card loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars this past season. Sporting a 27-0 lead at halftime, Staley's defense let up 31 points in the second-half to an average offense in the regular season, including a game-winning field goal to kicker Riley Patterson.
In one of the largest blown leads in NFL history, Staley failed to adjust to Jacksonville's second-half offensive plan, overseeing his own offense shut down and his defense implode.
In one of the great ironies of the Chargers' awful last few seasons, the fact that Staley managed to retain his job after this all-time bad performance was because Telesco didn't push for his firing. Now, the Bolts sit at 2-4, with a 13% chance of making the playoffs, and, yet again, one of the worst defenses in the NFL.
No success aside from two playoff wins against rookie quarterbacks have happened in the Telesco era, and absolutely no success has been achieved under any circumstance in the Staley era.
Worse, the trajectory is downward. It's time to make structural changes in LA.
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