What the Chargers Could Have Been? : NFL: The Packers have gone from 4-12 to 8-6 because they have been able to win most of the close ones this season.
The Chargers, a bad team in 1988 at 6-10, are worse this year in large measure because their past eight losses have been by a total of 32 points. Five of their losses have been by four points or fewer.
The Green Bay Packers, a worse team than the Chargers in 1988 (4-12), are better this year because seven of their eight victories have been by a total of 13 points. They are 8-6 and fighting for a playoff berth. Four victories have been by one point.
“People are starting to talk about us as America’s Team again,” says Bob Harlan, the Packer president. “That kind of talk hasn’t been heard around here since the ‘60s. There have been ‘The Pack Is Back’ bumper stickers on cars here for the last 15 years. Now they finally mean something.”
These are the kind of words Charger owner Alex Spanos was hoping to hear and read about when he hired Dan Henning as his coach last February. Eight victories against six losses was the kind of year Steve Ortmayer, the Chargers director of football operations, expected when when he traded for Bear quarterback Jim McMahon last August. Ortmayer is in the last year of his contract. He needed more than he got from McMahon and the rest of the offense. Both Ortmayer’s and McMahon’s days with the Chargers may be numbered.
Where did the Chargers, who are now 4-10, go wrong? Why weren’t they the Packers of 1989?
The answers and theories are many. Certain people say the Packers were merely lucky.
For instance:
On Sept. 17, trailing New Orleans, the Packers faced fourth and 17 with less than two minutes to play. Wide receiver Jeff Query caught a pass from Don Majkowski that was judged to have been caught out of bounds. But referee Ben Dreith overruled the call. The Packers went on to score and win, 35-34.
Two weeks later, the Packers were losing to the lowly Falcons when they allowed rookie Deion Sanders to return a kickoff 96 yards. But a holding penalty nullified the return, and Green Bay rallied to win by two points.
One month after that, Detroit lost two touchdowns to holding penalties against the Packers. After the second, Lion kicker Eddie Murray missed his first field goal of the year, a 34-yarder, when it hit the upright. Green Bay won, 23-20, in overtime.
One week after that, Green Bay scored against the Bears with 34 seconds remaining. But line judge Jim Quirk ruled the touchdown invalid because Majkowski crossed the line of scrimmage before he threw the touchdown pass. Replay official Bill Parkinson overruled Quirk and the Packers won, 14-13. The NFL later said Quirk and Parkinson were both wrong. Go figure.
This gets better.
Against San Francisco Nov. 19, the score was 14-14 with 12 minutes to play when the defending Super Bowl champion 49ers scored on a 94-yard interception return by Chet Brooks. But officials caught San Francisco defensive lineman Danny Stubbs in the neutral zone before the snap. Green Bay won, 21-17.
Finally, two weeks ago, Tampa Bay led the Packers with less than a minute to play when a Majkowski pass on fourth-and-16 fell incomplete. This time officials ruled Bucs’ lineman Shawn Lee put his hand into the face of guard Rich Moran. The drive remained alive, the Packers stopped the clock with one second left, and Chris Jacke’s 47-yard field goal beat the Buccaneers, 17-16. Moran agreed with the call but later admitted he couldn’t believe, with everything that goes on in the interior line on every play, that an official actually saw and called the penalty.
“I don’t think this team has been lucky,” Packer Coach Lindy Infante said. “I really don’t. I think hard work has gotten us where we are.”
Coaches are supposed to say things like that. Harlan says the answer is more complex. He insists that much of the Packers’ belief in themselves goes back to last year when they won their last two games to finish with four victories.
“We were 2-12, and we weren’t going anywhere,” Harlan says. “But we knocked Minnesota out of the home-field advantage and then went down to Phoenix as underdogs and won there. There was a feeling that, ‘Hey, we’ve improved.’ ”
Meanwhile back at the Chargers . . . their close losses this year haven’t really been because of bad luck. Nor did the fact that they won four of their last six games in 1988 appear to have any positive carry-over effect into 1989.
Rather, the Chargers’ losses in close games have been mostly because of their own ineptitude.
On Oct. 8 in Denver, they led the Broncos, 10-9, with less than four minutes remaining when rookie Burt Grossman jumped offside on third-and-three to prolong the drive that ended on a game-winning 17-yard touchdown run by Bobby Humphrey.
Denver quarterback John Elway lured Grossman offside with a “hard” count that Ron Lynn, the Charger defensive coordinator, later said he had warned his players about all week before the game. The Chargers got the ball back with 57 seconds left, but a McMahon pass was intercepted.
The following week, the Chargers lost, 17-16, at home to Seattle. The Chargers committed two penalties and allowed a sack on their last possession. Earlier in the fourth quarter, they let the Seahawks block a 51-yard Chris Bahr field goal attempt one play after McMahon was sacked for a nine-yard loss.
The week after that, the Chargers committed two penalties on their final drive in a 20-13 loss to the Giants. The Chargers’ last three offensive plays resulted in a sack and two incompletions.
It gets worse.
On Oct. 29 in Seattle, the Chargers took the lead, 7-3, with 1:53 remaining on a 14-yard pass from McMahon to Arthur Cox. But Seahawk quarterback Dave Krieg needed just 1:42 to hustle his team 71 yards upfield for the winning score despite being sacked by Leslie O’Neal for a 12-yard loss on the first play of the drive.
On Nov. 26 in the Hoosier Dome, the Chargers limited Colt running back Eric Dickerson to 30 yards on 17 carries and took the lead, 6-3, late in the final period on a 38-yard Bahr field goal. But the Indianapolis offense suddenly came to life and scored with 1:54 remaining on a 25-yard touchdown pass from Jack Trudeau to Bill Brooks. Once again the Chargers failed miserably on their final possession--four plays produced a sack and three interceptions.
More of the same the following week at home where the Chargers lost, 20-17, at home against the lowly Jets. This time Bahr missed a 37-yard field goal with 10 seconds to play that would have sent the game into overtime. “Snakebit and born to lose,” said rookie Charger quarterback Billy Joe Tolliver after that loss.
Then last week, the Chargers blew a 14-0 lead in Washington, D.C., and lost, 26-21, when a Tolliver pass to Wayne Walker on fourth and goal from the Redskin six was too high and too hard. Washington took over on downs and ran out the clock.
All of which shows that the Packers may be lucky, but the Chargers, according to the overwhelming body of evidence, are simply bad. But they’re not bad by much. Just a few points here and there.
“I think we’ve made progress,” Henning says. He also says he and his coaches will analyze and study in the off-season the kinds of mistakes the Chargers have made to cost them all those close games. “Continuity,” he says is the next-most-important part of a football team after player personnel.
In 1988, the Packers floundered. It was Infante’s first year. In 1989, they have won the close games. Has continuity been the reason? Maybe the 1990 Chargers, in Henning’s second year, will provide answers to that question.
There is also this matter of the fifth-place schedule. Four of the six teams that finished last in their division in 1988--thereby benefitting from the easier 1989 fifth-place schedule--are still alive in the playoff race. They are Kansas City (7-6-1), Miami (8-6), Pittsburgh (7-7) and the Packers. Only the Falcons (3-11) and the Cowboys (1-13) have fallen on their faces for the second consecutive year.
“If the difference between fourth and fifth makes a difference, historically, that would be nice,” Henning said wistfully this week. The Chargers finished fourth in the AFC West last year.
If you listen to Chiefs Coach Marty Schottenheimer, you get the idea that any difference makes a difference (didn’t Yogi Berra once say that?). “The margin between winning and losing football in this league is very, very thin,” Schottenheimer says.
The Chargers have already clinched last place in the AFC West and can only hope to benefit from that schedule next year.
Charger Notes
The Chargers officially placed H-back Joe Caravello (knee) on injured reserve Thursday even though they had him listed on injured reserve Monday in their weekly public relations release. . . . Coach Dan Henning said he didn’t think injured cornerback Sam Seale would be able to play Sunday against the Chiefs in Kansas City. Seale has an injured hamstring. Defensive backs Elliot Smith and Michael Brooks, both on the six-man developmental squad most of the year, practiced in the defensive backfield Thursday. Henning said the Chargers have taken Brooks off the developmental squad, and if he clears procedural waivers, he could be activated for the Kansas City game. Veteran Elvis Patterson played in Seale’s place when Seale suffered the injury last week against the Redskins. . . . The Chargers will practice on their artificial turf field today and Friday to prepare for Arrowhead Stadium’s surface, which is also artificial. . . . Backup quarterback Jim McMahon was moved last week by the death by heart attack of Doug Scovil, one of McMahon’s coaches in college at Brigham Young. But McMahon and Scovil didn’t always see eye to eye. In an interview earlier this year (when McMahon was still talking to reporters), he said this about Scovil, who was his first coach as a freshman at BYU: “Doug and I didn’t get along real well that first year. No matter what I did, it was the wrong thing. I never got any seven on seven (passing drills). So I’d be sitting there trying to learn. And every three or four days, he’d say, ‘OK, you get in there for this play. And I hadn’t thrown a ball in an hour. And so I would say, ‘I’m not warm.’ And he would say, ‘How the hell are you going to get ready to play if you’re not warm?’ So the next day I’d be throwing, and he’d say, ‘How are you going to learn if you’re not over here watching?’ I couldn’t please the guy. But I learned a lot from him. That guy’s got a brilliant mind.”