COSTA MESA, Calif. — Entering this season, the Los Angeles Chargers were anticipating sizable improvement from their run game.

They had moved on from offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi, replacing him with Kellen Moore, who had overseen a top-10 rushing offense during his four-year run as the Dallas Cowboys’ play caller. Moore was bringing a fresh ground-attack philosophy to Los Angeles — what he described in June as a “physical, north-and-south run game” that was rooted in “getting downhill.”

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The early returns were electric. The Chargers rushed for 233 yards on 40 carries in Week 1 against the Miami Dolphins. By rushing success rate, it was the team’s best single-game performance in Brandon Staley’s three seasons as head coach, according to TruMedia — better than all 35 games with Lombardi as the offensive play caller.

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Since the opener, though, the Chargers’ run game has cratered. The Chargers are last in the league in rushing success over the last 11 weeks, according to TruMedia.

(Success rate is based on expected points added and deems a play successful based on situational factors. For instance, a 1-yard run on third-and-1 would be a successful play, as the offense gained a first down. A 1-yard run on first-and-10, meanwhile, would not be successful.)

Over those 11 weeks, less than a quarter of the Chargers runs have been successful. No other team is below 29 percent in that span. When isolated to just first down, the Chargers have a rushing success rate of 16.2 percent since Week 2, which is last in the league. Even including that Week 1 game, the Chargers have an overall rushing success rate of 30.5 percent for the season. That’s well below the league average of 37.6 percent and stands as one of the five worst single-season rushing success rates in the NFL since 2018, ranking 188th out of 192.

“Obviously it’s not necessarily the numbers or the stats that you want, that you outlooked as you projected this thing out,” Moore said this week. “But we’re continuing to navigate that and trying to find ways to run the football more efficiently — because we need to.”

Why has the preseason excitement not materialized into production for that phase of the team?

It’s a challenging question to answer. So many variables affect every play in football, and that is especially the case in the run game.

Staley has repeatedly said this season that it takes “all 11” to be consistent and efficient in the run game, and that is not just coach speak. On one play, the five offensive linemen can block a play perfectly, but the tight end misses a block. On another, the tight ends and offensive linemen are in sync, but a wide receiver misses a block. On another, all the blocking can align, but the running back misses his track. And then when the tight ends, wide receivers and running backs all do their jobs, an offensive lineman can lose at the point of attack, and that play gets blown up in the backfield.

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All these things have happened to the Chargers at some point this season. The only consistency in the run game has been inconsistency.

Still, there are certainly identifiable issues, weaknesses and explanations.

The Chargers’ tight end blocking has been bad. They went into 2023 with the same group of tight ends as last season — Gerald Everett, Donald Parham Jr., Tre’ McKitty and Stone Smartt. The Chargers struggled to block consistently at tight end in the run game in 2022. They did not add anything to that group in the offseason. Lo and behold, it remains a glaring weakness. McKitty was drafted to be a run-blocking tight end in 2021. The Chargers waived him in October for what Staley said was “performance.” McKitty did not even make it through the third season of his rookie deal. The Chargers called up Nick Vannett from the practice squad to replace McKitty. He was a slight upgrade but still had rough moments as a run blocker. Vannett missed the Chargers’ Week 12 loss to the Baltimore Ravens with a concussion.

Moore and Staley were building this downhill rushing attack at least in part behind their All-Pro center Corey Linsley. After just three games, Linsley was placed on the non-football illness list with a heart-related medical issue. Linsley has been in meetings and with the team, including traveling on road trips. But he has not played since the Chargers’ win over the Minnesota Vikings in Week 3. There has been an understandable drop-off from Linsley to backup Will Clapp. Linsley has always been a player who elevates the linemen around him, both in pass protection and in the run game. Staley called him “one of the top engines at center in the middle.” And engine is an apt word to use. Engines are what make any piece of machinery go, and that is what Linsley was to this running game, allowing the Chargers to attack the second level of opposing defenses.

Running back Austin Ekeler sustained a high ankle sprain in Week 1 that kept him out of four games. He returned in Week 6, but those types of injuries do not just magically heal. Ekeler has never been an elite between-the-tackles runner. At the same time, he has not had the same burst since the injury.

Left tackle Rashawn Slater has dealt with ankle and knee injuries this season. Slater and left guard Zion Johnson were supposed to form a dominant run-blocking duo on that side of the line. That tandem has not fully meshed, at least in part because Slater has been noticeably battling through some injury problems.

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Receivers are also part of run blocking, and the Chargers lost two of their top three players in that position group with both Mike Williams and Joshua Palmer on injured reserve. Palmer, in particular, did a lot of the dirty work for the Chargers at receiver.

“We’ve had to make a lot of adjustments based on some of the personnel attrition,” Staley said.

The identity the Chargers wanted to establish, too, has not coalesced. The blocking has been poor, and while some of that falls on execution, some also falls on how Moore and Staley are constructing this run game schematically.

“How we run the ball, it just hasn’t happened yet, in terms of saying, ‘Hey, that’s what we do best,’” Staley said.

The Chargers have tried to get creative. They have incorporated run-pass options. They have utilized the Wildcat formation. They have gotten receiver Derius Davis involved with jet sweeps. They have lined up rookie offensive lineman Jordan McFadden in the backfield.

Nothing has really provided a spark.

Moore will assuredly continue to try out schematic wrinkles. That creative willingness is one thing he has shown as a play caller and designer this season.

“If you got to navigate some other paths, we got to be open to that,” Moore said.

But there is not much hope that this running game will experience a dramatic turnaround at this stage of the season.

“If we had a perfect solution,” Moore said, “we’d obviously be able to express it in a different way.”

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(Top photo of Kellen Moore: Ashley Landis / Associated Press)

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