Chargers May Profit From Loss : Weak Team, West Could Lead Them to Troy Aikman
There is a silver lining for the Chargers in the Troy Aikman Derby. Enveloping the cloud of their 2-7 season is the bigger cloud that has stationed itself over the AFC West.
Aikman is the UCLA quarterback almost certain to become the first pick in next spring’s NFL draft. He is widely regarded as the closest thing to a franchise savior since Stanford quarterback John Elway went to Denver in 1983.
The worse the Chargers do in their last 7 games, the better chance they have of procuring Aikman. To a large extent, the worse the rest of the AFC West does in the final 7 weeks, the better off the Chargers will be in the Aikman Derby.
For example: Let’s say the Chargers wind up tied for the NFL’s worst record with Atlanta at 3-13. The team that gets the first pick will be the team that played the weakest schedule. Thanks to a low-water mark in the AFC West this year, under this scenario, the Chargers get a clean shot at Aikman.
Thank you Kansas City, Denver, Seattle and Davisville.
Charger Coach Al Saunders says these are “tumultuous times” for the AFC West.
“And,” he adds, “I think the Chargers are a microcosm for the way the division has gone.”
Of the 8 teams in the Aikman Derby--Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Detroit, Green Bay, Tampa Bay, Atlanta and the Chargers--7 are 2-7. The Chiefs are 1-7-1. Only Kansas City and Tampa Bay have played weaker schedules to date than the Chargers. The combined record of the Chiefs’ opponents after 9 games is 38-42-1. That corresponding figure for the Buccaneers is 39-42. For the Chargers, it’s 39-41-1.
All of which means the Chargers are in third place in the Aikman Derby. And since the Buccaneers already have a young, millionaire “franchise” quarterback in Vinny Testaverde, a second golden arm is not a high priority for them. That doesn’t mean that if Tampa Bay and the Chargers wind up picking 1-2, the Chargers necessarily get Aikman. Tampa Bay would probably trade the Aikman pick for almost anything it wants.
“I’m more worried about the Raiders this week,” says Steve Ortmayer, the Chargers’ director of football operations when Aikman’s name creeps into conversation. And that’s as it should be.
“But,” Ortmayer adds, “there’s no question the AFC West is in a down year.”
It wasn’t that long ago that the AFC West was the best. In 1983 and 1984, three of its representatives qualified for the 10-team post-season playoffs as either division winner or wild card.
Wild-card berths are an instant barometer of strength within a division. The AFC West has placed at least one team in a wild-card game in each of the past five years except 1985, when the 11-5 Broncos lost out on a tiebreaker to the Jets and the Patriots, both of whom also finished 11-5.
Now the critics are saying the AFC West is the worst division in the NFL. It is hard to dispute. The AFC West’s record outside the division also suggests it is the worst.
That’s because the rest of the league is making liver sausage out of the Chargers, Raiders, Chiefs, Broncos and Seahawks. After 9 weeks, AFC West teams have won 4, lost 16 and tied 1 in games against the other 5 divisions. Two of those victories have come against the lowly Falcons. The Chargers, Raiders and Chiefs are a combined 0-11-1 in games outside the division.
The next-worst division to date is the NFC Central. Despite losing 5 of 5 outside the division last Sunday, the NFC Central is still 10-19 against the league. That’s more than twice as many outside victories than the AFC West. All 4 other NFL divisions have winning records against the league. The AFC East, which swept 5 of 5 in Week 9, leads with a 17-9-1 mark.
The numbers prove what many suspected about the AFC West even before the season began.
“We said we thought at the beginning of the year that 9-7 would win the division,” Saunders says. “Now it looks like maybe 8-8 will win the division.”
Would you believe 7-9?
The reasons for the AFC’s West’s sudden decline are as numerous as missed blocks on an interception return:
- There are new offensive and defensive coordinators scattered around the division like so many VCR salesmen.
- There are injured quarterbacks.
- There are 3 relatively inexperienced head coaches--Saunders, Kansas City’s Frank Gansz and the Raiders’ Mike Shanahan.
- And there has been an unusually high turnover of personnel.
At the drop of a pass, Saunders will tell you there are 33 players on the Chargers’ roster who weren’t with the team 2 years ago.
“If you average about 15 new players on the other 4 teams in the division,” he says, “you’re talking about almost 100 players who aren’t in this division anymore.”
With 19 games remaining against the rest of the league, the AFC West is seriously threatening to compile the worst out-of-division record since the NFL went to the 16-game schedule in 1978.
In 1984, the NFC Central went 11-28-1 against the league. What had once been the proud “Black-And-Blue” division turned into the Embarrassed Zebra division. (“What’s black and white and red all over?”)
If the AFC West doesn’t win at least 7 of its remaining 19 games outside the division, it will set a new standard for futility. Worse for its teams, if the oddsmakers handicapped those 19 games today, AFC West teams would be favored in less than half a dozen of them.
“I don’t know what it is,” Ortmayer says. “You’ve got the Raiders, Chargers and Chiefs continuing to struggle from last year. And the 2 teams that were supposed to be pretty good at this point in the season--Denver and Seattle--don’t appear to be.”
Denver, the defending AFC champion, couldn’t have defended a Gatorade cooler Monday night against Indianapolis in a grisly, nationally televised, Halloween spectacle that could have been much worse than the 55-23 final score.
“Nightmare On Elway Street,” read one banner at the Hoosier Dome.
The Chargers’ stultifying 17-14 loss to the Seahawks last Sunday in the Kingdome featured the league’s 27th-ranked offense against the league’s 26th-ranked defense. There were 4 fumbled center snaps, 7 false start or motion penalties and only 340 yards of offense and 10 points by both teams in the first three periods.
“It was your typical Ugly American Conference West game, symbolic of pro football’s worst division,” wrote John Clayton in Tacoma’s News Tribune Monday.
The Chargers, hip deep in a 5-game losing streak, have had little time to ponder the demise of their division.
“I ain’t gonna make any comments about anybody else,” defensive end Lee Williams says. “I don’t concern myself with what everybody else is doing.”
“Our goal is to take one week at a time,” Saunders says. “It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous. To take the whole gulp at once is difficult.”
But Ortmayer rejects the argument that the AFC West’s poor performance is part of a natural cycle.
“I don’t think you can call it cyclical, because it has never happened before,” he says. “The AFC West has never been down since its inception. It’s always been as tough a division as there is in football.”
In the 22 seasons that have ended in a Super Bowl, the AFC West has sent one of its teams to that game 9 times. The AFC West has won 4 Super Bowls. Only the NFC East (5) has won more.
Ortmayer suggests the schedule may have had something to do with the trouble in the AFC West.
“The 1988 schedule was a strange animal,” he says. “All of our teams got scheduled right off the bat against one another. And believe me, when you’re playing in your division and you’re playing in your division right off the bat, that’s paramount. It gets your attention. You’re doing everything you can to win those games including probably getting beat up.”
The Chargers and the Broncos were the only teams in the league forced to play their first 5 games against division opponents. Seattle played 3 of its first 3 inside the division, Kansas City 3 of its first 4. No other NFL team except New Orleans had to play more than 1 of its first 2 games inside its own division.
“I don’t know whether that has affected the way this thing has turned out or not,” Ortmayer says. “But that was the thing that struck me going into the season--that this is going to be something that has never happened before.”
As recently as 1985, AFC West teams were 32-8 against the rest of the league. The year before that they were 25-15. In less than 3 years, those numbers have turned upside down.
The net effect is that the Chargers harbor legitimate hopes of earning the right to select Aikman, an enormously gifted player, at a position where their need is pressing.
The Chargers have never selected first in the draft. It is a dubious distinction--a reward for failure. But the more they lose, the more attention will focus on Aikman. And except for Kansas City, the worse the rest of the division does, the better it is for the Chargers.
SINKING IN THE WEST 1988 NFL division records vs. teams from other divisions:
AFC East 17-9-1
NFC West 15-9-0
AFC Central 15-9-0
NFC East 12-11-0
NFC Central 10-19-0
AFC West 4-16-1
1988 record of AFC West teams outside the division:
Denver 2-2-0
Seattle 2-3-0
Kansas City 0-3-1
Chargers 0-3-0
Raiders 0-5-0