With all the injuries this team has suffered, I firmly believe another coach would have gotten at least two more wins, possibly four. Did McCoy make Gordon and Benjamin fumble against the Saints? No, but the team reflects his personality, or lack thereof. All the late game implosions, including the “wins” against the Broncos and Texans, would not happen on another coach’s watch. Thus far, only the Jaguars win came against a team entirely out of the playoff picture. But that doesn’t mean that this team was close to getting over the hump. Not finishing was a problem of the Schottenheimer Chargers. Then it stopped being a problem under Marty until it re-emerged in the worst possible times. That was who Marty, was, by the way. He said all the right things, but wasn’t the guy you saw in the old NFL Films clips. By the time AJ Smith assembled the talent, he had become basically a figurehead. That 14-2 won in spite of him, even though Cam Cameron going soft in the first half of 1/14/07 had as much to do with not putting the Patriots away as anything.
Will McCoy ever get fired? I’ll believe it when it’s official but once again Spanos will wait at least a year too late. Now, the entire city has given up on the Chargers and I don’t blame them. Sunday’s game was against our most hated rivals, who were looking to clinch a playoff berth. But the same think happened on the final weekend of the 2011 season and look what a Charger win got us–another year of Norv. The following year, he beat Oakland on December 30 in another meaningless game.
We knew it could come to this. Not running on the goal line in Denver and against Miami proved this coaching staff never learns from its mistakes, or even admits that they are mistakes to begin with. The only win that impressed me was the Atlanta game. The other wins seemed like losses that they just ran out of time to blow the lead entirely. I know the Jacksonville game was nearly a shutout, but that’s meaningless.
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