Sometimes a team can be a victim of circumstance and sometimes a team can be a beneficiary of circumstance. We tend to dwell on the former and look for reasons to avoid pointing out the latter, but in the case of the San Diego Chargers, that might be the best explanation as to why they were able to win 13 games last season.
You can have a good debate about whether the AFC West or the NFC West was the worst division in football, but what’s not debatable is how San Diego benefitted from having Denver, Oakland and Kansas City as the opposition for 6 games. If you look at their roster and the rest of their numbers, their 13-3 record looks more like fiction than reality.
Don’t get me wrong, the Chargers are a talented team led by a great quarterback in Phillip Rivers. And Rivers had a great receiving corps led by Vincent Jackson, but with Jackson holding out for more money and suspended for the first four games anyways, how much does the offence suffer with a premier player taken out?
Malcolm Floyd and Legedu Naanee will be the starting receivers and the Chargers picked up Patrick Crayton via trade from the Cowboys to try and bolster their depth, but do they have a game-changer out of those three guys? At least they know they have a future Hall of Famer at the tight end spot in Antonio Gates.
Where the Chargers look more like a mirage than anything is with the running game. It’s hard to imagine that a 13-3 team could have the second-worst running game in all of football, but that’s what happened last year. The Chargers will look to rookie Ryan Mathews, their first-round pick from Fresno State, to fill the void left by LaDainian Tomlinson. Can he handle that kind of pressure and expectation?
Defensively, the Chargers were in the middle of the pack in all major categories, which again leads people to believe that their record may have over-inflated how good this team really is. Their defensive line is still pretty solid with Jacque Cesaire and Luis Castillo at the defensive end spots and their linebackers are also solid with Shawne Merriman and Shaun Phillips as the top guys on the outside. The duo of Quentin Jammer and Antoine Cason are a good 1-2 punch at the cornerback spot and Eric Weddle is one of the better safeties in the NFL.
Two players to look out for in camp are Darren Sproles and Shawne Merriman. Sproles lost his starting job at running back to the rookie after a terrible 2009 campaign. Was he just a one-year wonder or can he offer up enough to give San Diego a threatening 1-2 combination? Merriman was once a defensive player of the year, but after only playing one game in 2008 because of injury, Merriman looked like a normal player in 2009. Did the 2008 injury ruin him for the rest of his career or can he rebound in 2010?
2010 Prediction: 10-6