Fans Must Go With the Flow

Charger fans have to be the happiest of campers this morning. You’ll hear them at water coolers, in coffee shops and on bar stools. You’ll hear them talking about the good times to come, how beautiful it will be.

You see, they now have seen the absolute ugliest.

The poor fans in places such as Dallas and Philadelphia and, yes, Pittsburgh can only look from the top to the realization that there has to be a down side.

Not Charger fans.

They have seen the sewer, and it stinks.

It does not get any worse than Sunday’s 23-6 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers in One River Stadium in Mission Valley.

One River Stadium? Mission Valley? Pittsburgh?

You tell me whose home game it was. You couldn’t tell it by the crowd noise. Pittsburgh’s fans either outnumbered Charger fans or maybe they simply had so much more to cheer. There were 15 of those handmade signs in the stadium, 13 of them supportive of the supposed visiting team.

Paint the place black and gold.

Paint the Chargers black and blue.

Paint them crazy and discombobulated. Paint them like Picasso would paint them. Paint them so they don’t resemble a football team, at least a professional football team. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t paint them in the same frame with something called an end zone.

End zone?

The Chargers don’t do end zones. They have scored a total of two touchdowns in their first three games. They have scored a total of 29 points. In the good old days, they scored that many in a half . . . not in a month.

Actually, they did score a touchdown Sunday. Stan (Billy Joe) Humphries threw an 11-yard pass to Nate Lewis in the end zone at the end of an impressive first possession. However, Harry Swayne was called for illegal motion. They settled for a field goal.

Actually, they should have scored another on a 17-yard pass from Humphries to Shawn Jefferson. The problem was that Jefferson, in this instance, flunked geography. He did not take advantage of what seemed to be a reasonable opportunity to get his feet down in the end zone. It was merely another incomplete pass.

Incomplete pass? I began to think quarterbacks Humphries and Bob Gagliano were corporations. My play-by-play was filled with Humphries Inc. and Gagliano Inc. They attempted 36 passes and completed 19 of them, 16 to their teammates.

Another sad day for the Chargers’ dropsy-turvy wide receivers, you say. Wrong. The Chargers had only one dropped pass . . . and that was nullified by a holding penalty on Courtney Hall. At least they held onto something on the play.

You know what play was the Chargers’ biggest gainer of the day?

It went like this. With the clock running out on the first half, Gagliano dropped back and lofted one of those Hail Mary prayers. It fell into a pack of groveling hands and popped out. Ronnie Harmon caught it in full stride . . . and then tripped over teammate Rod Bernstine.

The play gained 55 yards, but the half was over.

Laurel and Hardy would have loved it.

Woody Hayes would have loved the play-calling, at least at the beginning. The Chargers’ first eight first down plays were a Marion Butts run, a Bernstine run, a Butts run, a Butts run, a Butts run, a Bernstine run, a Bernstine run and a Bernstine run. The person who calls a sequence of plays like this probably eats white bread, vanilla ice cream and baked potatoes with nothing on them.

That wasn’t the bad part of the game. That came in a seven-minute span in the third period. It was so funny and so inept that Steve Martin should have played all the roles . . . on both teams.

Through almost no fault of their own, the Chargers had the ball for all but one play during this period of time.

They started at their own 47, where Eric Moten was called for a chop block and assessed a 15-yard penalty. They promptly got a first down at their own 49 when Pittsburgh’s Rod Woodson was called for pass interference. Greg Lloyd intercepted a Gagliano pass on the next play, ran the ball 35 yards and then fumbled it back. Now the Chargers were on their own 20.

Given the gift of possession once again, the Chargers ended up on their 10 because of holding penalty on Deems May. Butts lost a yard, but the Chargers got a first down on the next play on another pass interference call on Woodson. Two plays later, they were back on their 12 after a holding penalty against Leo Goeas.

After an inevitable punt, Pittsburgh fumbled the ball back on the first play and now the Chargers had the ball at the Steeler 38. They moved the ball down to the eight and there, not to be upstaged by his bumbling teammates, John Carney missed a 25-yard field goal. He missed it so badly I didn’t even see where it landed.

There was lots of stuff like this on this most pitiful afternoon during this most pitiful of performances.

“I want to apologize to our ownership, to our management and to our fans for a very embarrassing performance,” Coach Bobby Ross said in the aftermath.

Bobby, if it ever gets more embarrassing than that, you won’t have to worry about the plural of the word fan. I’m not even sure it was appropriate Sunday, unless it was applied to Steeler fans.