Add The California Post on Google At least the Chargers might spare everyone the wait this year.
Usually, it takes a while. A few impressive wins. A stretch of brilliant quarterback play from Justin Herbert. Enough promise to convince otherwise reasonable people that this is finally the season the Chargers stop being the Chargers.
If they lose Sunday to the Raiders at SoFi Stadium, they will have considerably shortened the process.
An 0-2 start, including a home loss to a rebuilding division rival, would get everyone to the familiar destination without all the trouble of building expectations first.
Unless, of course, the Chargers intend to do something about that.
An energized Raiders team comes to Los Angeles with a victory over the Dolphins and an opportunity to send the Chargers deeper into an identity crisis that predates this season.
Are they tough enough? Resilient enough? Capable of taking a punch without spending the rest of the afternoon checking their chin?
Those questions might sound harsh one week into a season.
But the Chargers were embarrassed in the playoffs last season, and some of the same protection problems that left Herbert vulnerable followed them into their opening loss to the Cardinals.
At some point, the benefit of the doubt becomes something a team has to earn back.
The Chargers have received plenty of it. We spend so much time admiring their talent, imagining their ceiling and explaining why things should be different that we sometimes forget to demand proof that they actually are.
Then they make everyone who believed look foolish again.
Jim Harbaugh understands the immediate assignment.
“It’s a feeling of when you get punched,” Harbaugh said. “And how we respond is what I’m thinking about right now.”
With the Chargers, the concern is never simply whether they will absorb one. Every NFL team does. It is whether the next blow will expose the glass jaw people keep suspecting is there.
That perception — soft, fragile, too easily knocked off course — follows them into every season. No matter how promising things look, everyone seems to wait for the other shoe to drop.
The Chargers don’t have to agree with that depiction.
They do have to stop supplying the supporting evidence.
Against Arizona, their offense failed in the situations that separate an impressive collection of players from a dependable football team.
“We didn’t get conversions when we needed to, didn’t move the ball when we needed to, and we turned the ball over too many times,” Herbert said. “We can’t expect to win like that, and we have to be better because of it.”
But it’s reasonable to be concerned that they will carry into this Sunday and beyond.
The Raiders produced five sacks against Miami, showing that Maxx Crosby now has help getting to the quarterback. If the Chargers cannot protect Herbert, their third-down problems against the Cardinals could quickly become a second-week issue and maybe a season-long worry.
And every wasted possession creates another opportunity for Ashton Jeanty to help the Raiders control the game.
“It’s on us and offense to not have penalties, we got to score the points in the red zone, really execute those third downs and move the ball like we needed to,” Herbert said.
The transition to Mike McDaniel’s offense offers a convenient explanation for some early unevenness.
“I think it’s on us to execute. We’ve run those plays since OTAs and since camp, so we know them and we just have to go out there and do what we’re capable of,” Herbert said. “That hasn’t been an issue at all, so we’re going to watch the film and see where we went wrong and learn from it.”
Good. Because the Chargers have forfeited the right to explain away their failures.
What they need now is a response that holds up when something goes wrong.
A protection adjustment after a sack. A scoring drive after a turnover. A defensive stop when Jeanty starts finding room. Show that adversity can be limited to one bad possession instead of becoming the personality of an entire afternoon.
Harbaugh acknowledged there are “lots to get better at, lots to fix.”
The Raiders will test how much repair work actually got done.
Klint Kubiak has film of Arizona succeeding with the run game and short passes. Chargers defensive coordinator Chris O’Leary needs answers, and his players need to execute them.
The Chargers have the better roster. They have Herbert. They have every reason to understand the urgency before the schedule becomes more demanding.
But “should” has done an awful lot of unpaid labor around this franchise.
Beating the Raiders would not erase the playoff embarrassment or establish the Chargers as trustworthy. It would give them a starting point: a punch taken, a correction made, a response delivered.
Lose and the discussion becomes painfully familiar.
Or maybe the Chargers are simply getting an earlier start on being exactly who everyone keeps hoping they aren’t.
