ANALYSIS : Steeler Game Post-Mortem Revived Team : NFL: Dan Henning had a late-night meeting with his coaches. It seems to have brought a new day for the Chargers.

Behind closed locker-room doors Sunday after the Chargers had dumped the Broncos, 19-7, Coach Dan Henning offered a few remarks to his team.

In keeping with tradition, he then asked everyone to drop to a knee for a postgame prayer, but he was interrupted.

“We’ve been giving these out all season,” quarterback Billy Joe Tolliver announced, while holding a game ball in the air. “It’s about time we gave one to you.”

Tolliver then tossed the football to Henning, and by all accounts, Tolliver completed the pass.

Do you believe in miracles...yes!

The team that was 1-4, and coached by Dan Henning, is now 5-5, and soon to be featured on NBC “NFL Live,” and HBO’s “Inside the NFL.”

No indication yet if it will also be shown on “Unsolved Mysteries,” but what happened?

It goes back to Pittsburgh, it seems, and all that could go wrong in a 34-16 debacle. As defensive coordinator Ron Lynn has said, “We bottomed out.”

The down and out Chargers boarded their charter flight for home that evening in Pittsburgh, and as Henning said Tuesday, “I had four and a half hours on that plane to take stock of what we were doing.”

Upon arrival in San Diego, for the first time in Henning’s tenure as head coach of the Chargers, he called a Sunday night meeting with his coaching staff at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium.

“We had just lost and we were really down,” special teams coordinator Larry Pasquale said. “We were all wondering if we were doing the right thing and using players in the right manner, and he gave everybody an opportunity to speak their piece.

“It was a very needed gathering and very astute of Dan to do it at that time,” he said. “It was very constructive. I’ve been in meetings like that, and when you come out you felt worse than when you went in. When we came out, we felt, OK, let’s go to work.”

On that long plane ride home, Henning had watched his team lose again on videotape. Then he pulled out a sheet of paper and began writing down the critical mistakes that had led to his team’s 1-4 start.

“It was, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ ” Henning said. “Defensively we used the same kind of thoughts last year and did well. But we had a new guy here and there, and so maybe he misses a coverage and then it’s easy to understand.

“All these things started to fit in place for me. It was no lack of effort. It was guys who hadn’t been in there enough, like Junior Seau, Henry Rolling, Donald Frank and Les Miller. And there were adjustments on offense; it was just a bunch of little things.”

The public, however, was clamoring for a change in starting quarterbacks, if not in head coaches. They wanted action, and Henning was talking status quo.

“I did not question what I believed in, but I was concerned about why it was not transferring into sounder play?” Henning said. “I had my ideas what was wrong, but I wanted to hear it from them.

“I’m supposed to have 12 coaches up there that get paid a lot of money to be experts, and I wanted them to talk and bring out what they thought.”

They talked that night in San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium amongst themselves. They went around the table. They reviewed their problems, and they realized they were not so bad. They took another look at their athletes, and they agreed they weren’t so bad.

“To their credit, I think everybody in there voiced some things,” Henning said, “and accepted some things that might not have been in the best interests of them and their group.”

The next day the defensive coaches reviewed the work of the Chargers’ offense on videotape, while the offensive staff examined the defense. Then the assistant coaches gathered with Henning and players for a “let-it-all-hang-out” meeting.

“You open it up; there’s some negatives about doing it that way, but I thought it was necessary to make sure everybody understood what had to be done,” Henning said, “and if they had any ideas to air them right there. Let’s get them out.

“Once it’s all laid out there, the problems, the solutions, and the actions then to implement the solutions, then you just gotta get a commitment,” he said. “If we do this, we got a chance to get better. If we don’t, then we’re going to continue the way we are.”

At that all-important meeting, Henning impressed upon his players that they were going to remain his players. No wholesale changes. No need.

“He said he was sticking with us,” linebacker Gary Plummer said, “and we realized he was sticking his neck out for us.”

The players were attentive that Monday following the loss in Pittsburgh. They were 1-4, and in their morning newspapers they noticed that even the defense had come under criticism.

“That’s nothing I had heard here before,” safety Martin Bayless said. “Nobody’s ever pointed a finger in Ron Lynn’s face. I guess nobody is too big to be criticized, and Dan did what he had to do at that point.”

Henning had expressed concern about the team’s defense after a 17-7 loss to Houston, but no one was listening. After the disaster in Pittsburgh, he said defensive players and defensive coaches needed to be concerned.

“I took it personally,” linebacker Leslie O’Neal said. “I was really surprised he had said that, but then since then we’ve come on and made plays.”

Consider the plays:

--In the first five games, the Chargers’ defense ranked 16th in the league, while surrendering an average of 322 yards, 20 first downs and 21 points a game.

--In the last five games, the defense has ranked second only to Miami, while giving up an average of 199 yards, 13 first downs and 11.6 points a game.

“In studying films of the first five games, we knew we could not win football games this year if our defense was on the field for a long time,” Henning said. “Now the popular thought is that the offense has to do well for the defense not to be on the field a long time, but that’s bull.

“A defense determines its own time on the field. We reiterated that at the time of our meeting: What we have to do on defense, is we have to make the opposition’s offense get off the field, and get off the field fast.”

While the defense has clamped down on the opposition, Tolliver has not thrown an interception since the team’s final offensive play against Pittsburgh. He has been sacked only six times in the past five games, and the Chargers’ special teams have emerged as one of the leaders in the NFL.

“I’ll be honest with you, I just didn’t think we could play as well as we have played in these four wins,” Henning said. “But we’re doing it, and it’s good enough to keep winning”

And when it’s all over, and Super Bowl historians look back for the magic moment that ignited it all, they can begin in Pittsburgh.

“For the last five weeks, it’s been fine, but let’s see what happens in the next five,” Henning said. “It isn’t just a right turn into oblivion and it isn’t just a right turn into ecstasy.”

. . . Unless you believe in miracles.