It’s always fun when a tumbling boulder from the chaotic avalanche that is college football bounces into the well-manicured lane of the NFL. The characters that dominate college football’s frenetic Saturdays don’t always translate so well to the NFL’s choreographed Sundays.
Jim Harbaugh has won at the professional level, leading the 49ers to the Super Bowl after the 2012 season. But the man is college football through and through, from his khakis to his weird one-liners, and right now he’s looking a whole lot more fit for Saturdays than Sundays.
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Harbaugh’s Chargers are 0-2 after losses to the Cardinals and Raiders — the Cardinals! the Raiders! — and although we’re just two weeks into the season, matters are already bordering on dire. Why? Well, let’s start with the most obvious sign: their schedule.
From here into November, the Chargers face the Bills (away), Seahawks (away), Broncos, Chiefs (away) and Rams (away, sort of), with a blessed bye week after Kansas City. Damn! You couldn’t script a more difficult five-game sequence if you tried!
The odds are stacked against teams that start 0-2 making the playoffs — roughly 10 percent since 1990, per research from NBC Sports — but teams that start 0-7? Yeah, you don’t need to consult ChatGPT for that one. There’s a very real chance the Chargers are winless into November.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Harbaugh’s Chargers were supposed to be angling for a division championship and a run at a Super Bowl. With Justin Herbert at quarterback and Mike McDaniel as offensive guru, the Chargers were, in theory, headed for Bills-Chiefs territory, sustaining elite performance and silencing the last of the doubters.
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The doubters are now at jet-engine volume. The hyped-to-the-moon offense hasn’t even gotten off the launching pad, ranking below league averages in both ground and air attacks. The only teams with two games played averaging fewer than the Chargers’ 14 points per game? Miami, Pittsburgh and Atlanta. That’s a stink that won’t come out.
Sunday’s game against Las Vegas — predicted to be among the NFL’s worst teams; there’s a reason they had the No. 1 pick — was a perfect example. The Chargers mostly couldn’t move the ball, and when they did, they turned it over.
“That’s not up to our standard,” Herbert said afterward, and while that’s a nice lie to tell yourself in the locker room, the truth is that your standard is on the scoreboard, not the feeling you have in your hearts. And right now, the Chargers’ standard is garbage.
“It wasn’t good enough (Sunday),” Harbaugh said. “There’s no time for us to be patient with how we were playing. It’s not good enough, so we have to be better.”
Jim Harbaugh-coached teams had never started a season 0-2 until this year’s Chargers.
(Luke Hales via Getty Images)
Sure, that’s the right thing to say. But can they be better? The league has been waiting for Herbert, 0-3 in the playoffs, to level up for half a decade now. McDaniel was drawn to this job rather than another head coaching one because of Herbert’s possibilities.
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But McDaniel’s highly complex offensive schemes rely, first and foremost, on the quarterback getting rid of the ball quickly. Herbert is more of a deliberate pocket passer; in 2025, per NFL NextGen Stats, his release time was 2.9 seconds, 32nd among NFL quarterbacks. McDaniel said in the preseason that he hoped to get that release time down to 2.4 seconds; after two games, Herbert’s release time stands at … 2.8.
It wasn’t supposed to go this way.
“How smart is Mike McDaniel and Justin Herbert? I can’t tell you because I’m not smart enough to know how smart those two are,” Harbaugh joked during a preseason interview. “But the more they’re together … Justin understanding Mike, and Mike (understanding) Justin, it bodes really well for the Los Angeles Chargers.”
Or not. Harbaugh is now in unfamiliar territory; he’s never started a season, college or pro, at 0-2. His team is a turnover-laden mess, sitting at -4 already this season, including three interceptions from Herbert. Harbaugh’s usual motivational speeches aren’t working, but Harbaugh is attempting to salvage the season one sound bite at a time.
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“I’m not deterred,” he said Sunday afternoon. “No one in that locker room is deterred.”
For the moment.
History offers Harbaugh and the Chargers one tiny bit of hope: only one team has ever started the season 0-4 and reached the playoffs. Back in 1992, that team rallied to win 11 of their final 12 games, claim their division and even win a playoff game. That team? The San Diego Chargers.
Or, if you’re particularly sadistic, think of it this way. “Chargering” is the term this franchise inspired for moments when you implode spectacularly on the national stage — like, say, blowing a 27-point playoff lead. But hey, you can’t go Chargering off the side of a mountain if you never even climb that mountain in the first place, right?
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: Sports.yahoo.com
