Chargers Fumbled This Firing

The San Diego Chargers made a typically stupid, and typically common, NFL mistake the other day when they fired the coach, Kevin Gilbride.

In the complex pro football world, the time to change coaches is between seasons.

It is always a mistake to make that move with the season underway. It is always a confession that the people in charge have much to learn about football. It is always an attempt to shift the blame for a disappointing season to one man.

If the coach is that bad, why wasn’t he fired before the season ? Hasn’t anybody in ownership or management been paying attention?

The facts here are that Gilbride is a respected coach and that football isn’t like baseball, where mediocre teams change managers all the time without changing anything else except, temporarily, the owner’s disposition.

Football has three times as many starters as a baseball team, three times as many coaches, and six or eight times as many strategic and organizational problems with intricate offenses, defenses, special teams and whatnot.

If, somehow, things improve a little with a new coach, they would have improved anyway. And now you have a new, and worse, problem. You’re stuck with an interim coach you never would have hired in the off-season with the whole country to choose from. What’s smart about that?

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George to Leaf: The new coach of the Chargers, June Jones, is an offensive and organizational expert who is still running in bad luck. In his last job, at Atlanta, they handed him a big-armed problem quarterback who has always been difficult to handle, Jeff George.

And at San Diego, they’ve given him a rookie quarterback, Ryan Leaf, the very source of Gilbride’s troubles.

Jones has landed one of the most coveted 30 jobs in football, but only in the worst of circumstances. The situation denies him the chance to choose his own assistant coaches, denies him the training camp needed to develop his own system and program, denies him even the possibility for meaningful trades. The trading deadline has come and gone.

All that is almost as unfair to Jones as the midseason firing was unfair to Gilbride. Assuming the Chargers fail to improve, most fans and most in the media will judge Jones not on his competence and not on the blunders of his superiors but on his won-lost record.

If the Chargers didn’t like Gilbride, they could have hired Jones many months ago. Or they could have hired Bob Toledo, the superb UCLA coach. That Toledo still is in college football shows the poverty of intellect on so many pro clubs. The Chargers had a lot of options. They simply chose the dumbest one.

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Bubby was there: The rookie who has caused all this fuss in San Diego, Leaf, is an immature quarterback who shouldn’t even be playing regularly now.

In effect, the Chargers saddled Gilbride with a rookie passer and fired him when the kid couldn’t produce.

Clearly, if they intended to draft a high-priced quarterback, they should have gone after a journeyman quarterback, too, and worked the youngster in gradually and intelligently.

Many good journeymen have been on the market in recent months--Bubby Brister, Randall Cunningham, Mark Rypien, Jeff Hostetler. And, among others, Doug Flutie.

The great irony here is that Charger General Manager Bobby Beathard is one of the NFL’s top-ranked executives and has been for years. But even in the salary-cap era, the club could have afforded some journeyman and thus avoided the conceivable ruin of Leaf’s confidence or self-esteem and possibly his future.

Instead, the Chargers, like most NFL losers, are blaming the coach. That is arrogance.