Seven months ago, on a quiet offseason day in early June, I was sitting on a couch in Brandon Staley’s office at the Chargers facility in Orange County. I was there to interview the head coach about fourth-down decision-making and analytics, but early on in the conversation, Staley’s words drifted to something broader, something more deep-seated — something that might seem intangible but has left real, permanent wounds for anyone associated with this franchise.

“The history of this team when I got here, it was like, someone’s going to get hurt, they’re going to blow a lead, something catastrophic is going to happen,” Staley said then. “There’s this Chargering, and there’s all these external factors that I know in my life, they’re just all excuses. They’re just all excuses. And so, all right, well, how do you change that? Well, you have to do things different. You have to have a different approach.”

Staley has tried his hardest to eradicate the black cloud — “Chargering” — that hangs over this organization. He has tried to take that different approach. In 2021, he hired an additional analytics staffer and leaned into more aggressive math-based decision-making, attempting to establish a killer mindset among his players in his first year on the job. He brought in a new director of sports performance and implemented a more forward-thinking process for recovery and injury maintenance, like a mandatory activation period at the beginning of practices to allow players additional time to roll out their muscles and stretch individually. Staley has been refreshingly candid and open with the media, revealing the type of schematic details few, if any, NFL coaches are willing to share.

And yet, despite Staley’s best efforts to be different, the Chargers 2022 season ended in viciously familiar fashion. Someone got hurt. The Chargers blew a lead. And something catastrophic happened.

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