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COSTA MESA — Put it like this: Brandon Staley, a smart guy, is a better football coach than he’d be a defense attorney.
He has to be.
Because, four days after the Chargers’ monumental meltdown in the AFC wild-card game, I arrived at the coach’s exit interview with the media on Wednesday presuming he wasn’t guilty of much of anything besides inexperience.
That’s life, right? A leader will make miscalculations because he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. And now that he knows, I presumed, he’ll approach some things differently. Better.
But by the time the contents of the to-go coffee cup Staley held throughout his 40-minute news conference had cooled, reasonable doubts had started to percolate.
Yes, Staley offered the acceptable post-defeat coach speak during his appearance at the Hoag Performance Center: “After a game like that, you’ve got to take full ownership of what happens and I’m the one who’s responsible for it.”
Squint at the transcript, sans context, as you might at the final score of Saturday’s 31-30 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars, and it could appear understandable and not altogether unbearable.
But Staley didn’t so much fall on the sword as have to be nudged toward it by questions from the gallery, going there some 15 minutes after he’d begun his season-closing argument in his own defense.
And if there are specific things he’ll do differently, he didn’t mention them.
“This guy is so disrespectful to the game…he’s been reckless ever since he took the job.”
Rex Ryan crushes Brandon Staley. 👀 pic.twitter.com/bMQOYLjwPC
— Keyshawn, JWill & Max (@KeyJayandMax) January 16, 2023
Staley did say that despite being aware of all the speculation about his future with the team, and the fact that the Chargers let go of offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi, and Shane Day, their passing game coordinator/quarterbacks coach, he never felt his head coaching job was in jeopardy – though he didn’t seem to be making his case from a position of strength.
There’s no smoking gun involved in his case, your honor, just passionate people doing their best in a violently competitive industry. Still, Staley wasn’t about to offer critics any ammunition by directly focusing on any of his particular foibles.
Instead, in the aftermath of one of the most brutal losses in the history of a franchise that has experienced more than its fair share of them, he stubbornly accentuated the positive.
So after he proclaimed, “… I’m the one who’s responsible,” he finished the thought by pointing out: “I’m proud that we were able to get a chance to compete and I thought that that first half (when the Chargers built a 27-0 lead) shows what our team has inside of it.”
Indeed, Staley’s Chargers reached the playoffs for the first time since 2018. They found their footing down the homestretch, winning four in a row before dropping a meaningless regular-season finale to finish 10-7 – one victory better than the previous season, three better than in 2020-21 and five better than in 2019-20. And they showed some gumption to do it after losing several starters to injury early in the season.
Another symbol of progress, Staley said: The awful feeling his players experienced in the hours after the loss. “When you feel like this,” he told them, “you’re a lot closer than you think.”
He noted that the locker room banded together better than after the Raiders shattered their playoff hopes the previous year by beating them 35-32 in overtime to end the regular season.
He knows his team, so there’s no reason to think he’s disingenuous about that. And he surely didn’t mean any disrespect – but dude, c’monnn.
There’s saying you own something, and then there’s holding the deed.
He described the loss in Jacksonville as “a tight game.”
That would be like Doc Rivers bragging about taking two of his Clippers teams to Game 7s in Western Conference semifinal series. Really, though, those teams twice blew 3-1 series leads in collapses that still haunt fans of that other star-crossed franchise with San Diego roots.
When a football team blows a 27-point lead in the playoffs, it doesn’t go down as a tight game.
It’s an epic fail.
For fans of that team, it’s not the kind of loss that smarts or stings, it’s a heavyweight’s punch to the gut, heartbreak to the nth degree. It’s the type of defeat that leaves supporters wondering why they even follow sports – or figuring out how they’re going to replace a smashed TV.
“I’m as frustrated as anybody that’s a Chargers fan over what happened,” Staley said, “because there’s no one who’s investing as much as we are.”
Brandon Staley’s message to #Chargers fans: pic.twitter.com/2pM2dDcZBV
— Nikki Kay (@NikkiKaySN1) January 18, 2023
Clearly, he cares intensely and immensely about his work, which went on, pretty much as usual, after the Chargers became victims of the third-largest comeback in NFL playoff history. There were exit meetings with players and coaches, typical business at the end of any season, whether it ends short of the playoffs, with a Super Bowl title or, yes, after you’ve fallen on your face in the first round.
The coach said those conversations were “bittersweet,” and he noted he was buoyed by the fact that the Chargers had given themselves “a chance to compete for a championship.”
Technically, yes. They made the playoffs. But there’s an incredible four-game chasm between wild-card participant and champion.
To make that leap, Staley knows they’ll have to be better. It’ll be a matter, he said, of being able to “continue to improve and to grow and to hold people to that high standard – and you’ve got to live that mission, they’ve got to see that through you.”
But if you expected Staley’s thinking to evolve in regard to, say, playing key players like star receiver Mike Williams, who suffered a small back fracture, in a Week 18 game with no playoff implications – apparently you should know better.
Staley gave no indication he’ll do anything different, and he laid out his case for why not: He valued the repetitions for players like Joey Bosa, who was just returning from injury. He thought the Chargers would benefit from warming up for the postseason by playing against Denver’s playoff-caliber defense.
But most of all, philosophically, he’s the guy who’s famously known for going for it on fourth down rather than punting.
“You really gotta establish a standard for your team, how you’re going to compete,” Staley said. “The people that I respect, learn from, establishing the program here. You know, Tom Brady never missed a regular season game in 19 years in New England. You know, 19. And when you’re building a team, you want to make sure everybody understands the value in that. “
Yeah, I don’t think a jury of Chargers fans would rule in his favor on that. I don’t fathom a completely impartial jury would.
Staley might have the Chargers trending in the right direction, but whether he does the necessary self-reflection away from the court of public opinion will be what determines whether his talented team can find what he calls “another gear” during his third season at the helm.
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