Brandon Staley has done as much over the last few years to forward the new light box/multiple coverage defensive paradigm as any coach in the league. He has made some interesting decisions based on analytics in his two seasons as the Los Angeles Chargers’ head coach. As a scheme guy, and as a coach who can build a winning defense, Staley has nothing left to prove.
But as a head coach, Staley has a lot to learn.
Moving from coordinator to head coach is a weird and often unexpected journey. That ability to see and react to everything at the proverbial 30,000-foot level — to be the CEO — is not something everybody finds easy or possible to attain. Which is why some utterly brilliant coordinators have flamed out as head coaches, and some perfectly ordinary schematic minds have been great in the top job.
It’s not for everybody. Not to say that it will never be for Staley, but after Saturday’s 31-30 wild-card loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars, in which Staley’s Chargers blew a 27-0 second-quarter lead and seemed to have no answer for a Jags team that was very busy throwing up all over itself in the first half, there have to be serious questions regarding Staley’s understanding of his current job.
In his press conference following the third-largest postseason collapse in the history of professional football, Staley had a lot to say about how his offense and defense underperformed as the game went on. He had things to say about his team’s penalty tendencies in the second half, and he had a veiled shot or two for referee Shawn Smith’s officiating crew — valid to a point, as Smith and his team had a terrible game overall.
What you did not see was Staley taking a leadership role and putting the responsibility upon himself.
“We just didn’t play clean enough football in the second half in all three phases,” Staley concluded. “We didn’t score the ball or possess it well enough on defense. We had far too many penalties in the second half that really hurt us and didn’t play well enough in the red (zone) area, didn’t perform well there in the two minute at the end of the game. Just didn’t play a good second half of football as a team.
“Defensively, penalties just really hurt our team. We had a second-and-18 that [was] going to be a third-and-19. We have a PI (pass interference). We had an offsides when it would have been a sack. We have a penalty that allows them to go for two. An unsportsmanlike penalty, it goes for two. So I thought penalties hurt us in the second half on defense. On offense, we just didn’t sustain drives in the second half, and didn’t run the football effectively enough, and then didn’t do well enough on third down in the second half. We had some killer third-and-shorts that we didn’t make today. And then, obviously, we missed a kick down the stretch that really hurt us.”
Coaching decisions, adapting to in-game changes, and situational awareness were not mentioned. They should have been, and Staley should have put that onus on himself.
Failing to adjust to on-field realities.
Staley said after the game that the Jaguars didn’t do anything differently in the second half, but that’s not true, and it’s demonstrably not true. Jacksonville ran three no-huddle plays in the first half; they ran 12 in the second half. They had no explosive plays (plays of 20 or more yards) in the first half; they had four in the second half, and three came out of no-huddle situations.
The one explosive play that didn’t come out of no-huddle was Travis Etienne’s game-deciding 25-yard run with 1:27 left in the game. The Jaguars had fourth-and-1 at the Los Angeles 41-yard line, and they had to convert this to have any hope of what became a game-winning field goal two plays later.
Before the play, Jaguars head coach Doug Pederson called a time out, because he didn’t like the way Trevor Lawrence killed the original call to run something else. Pederson and Lawrence talked on the sideline, and the call was to have Etienne run outside. A gutsy call accentuated by the guess that the Chargers would load the middle of the formation again in anticipation of a quarterback sneak.
As Pederson said after the game, “Yeah, sometimes – listen, if they’re outside, you go inside. If they’re inside, you go outside, and Travis is a heck of a back that can do that, and with his speed and ability, made a great play in that moment.:
And so it was. 25 yards later, Jacksonville was in position for the win.
Misunderstanding time, momemtum, and situation.
Speaking of running backs, there was the fact that in the second half of the game, when the Chargers were trying to hold on to an ever-diminishing lead, star running back Austin Ekeler had five carries for 10 yards. Both Lawrence and Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert had 24 passing attempts in the first half’. In the second half, Herbert attempted 19 passes to Lawrence’s 23… so when Staley talked about how his team didn’t run the ball well enough in the second half, there is the specter of opportunity that either rears its head, or it doesn’t.
Ekeler didn’t have many more chances to do what he did to Jacksonville’s defense on this 13-yard touchdown run with 13:40 left in the first quarter.
The Jaguars alternated between four- and five-man base fronts against Los Angeles’ run game, and there were times when the Chargers’ interior offensive line just couldn’t keep up with what the Jags were cooking. Abandoning the run in such instances may have made sense in the abstract, but the effort seemed prohibitive, at best.
Failing to keep one's players in the moment.
Emotionally, this was a tale of two very different teams. The aforementioned Shawn Smith and his officiating crew struggled to keep control of the game, to put it kindly. Bad calls were the order of the day for both the Chargers and Jaguars. But Doug Pederson’s team took those lickings and kept on ticking.
Staley’s team? Not so much. Star pass-rusher Joey Bosa was handed two unsportsmanlike conduct penalties — one late in the third quarter, and one with 5:30 left in the game, after Lawrence hit Christian Kirk for a nine-yard touchdown that brought the Jaguars within four points at 30-26. Pederson said after the game that had the Chargers not been penalized from the Jacksonville two-yard line to the one-yard line, he might not have gone for two in that instance.
Joey Bosa’s reaction to Brandon Staley handing him his helmet back is the funniest thing you’ll see this @NFL playoffs…pic.twitter.com/XUwjIrVIjM
— Tito (@JavierPDJavier) January 15, 2023
Bosa’s first penalty came after he snapped at Smith after Jacksonville’s failed two-point conversion, which may have been why the refs missed defensive pass interference on cornerback Asante Samuel Jr. Was Smith being overly sensitive here? Perhaps, but you need to understand that.
Caption This… pic.twitter.com/1LK9zu67nV
— Robert Griffin III (@RGIII) January 15, 2023
Both teams were railroaded by a bad crew. The Jaguars shrugged it off for the most part; the Chargers didn’t.
“I think he was frustrated,” Staley said of Bosa. “I think he felt like there were a bunch of things that kind of accumulated throughout the game and tried to talk through it with the officials. But we can’t lose our composure like that. We need to make sure that we stay on the high side of things, and we can’t hurt the team that way.”
Like a lot of things in that game, Staley’s advice was too little, too late.
Beating one's opponent to the punch.
The Chargers did flip their coverage concepts to a point in the second half; given the results, perhaps they should have made other adjustments.
After using single high coverages in the 1st half. Chargers tried to mix it up in the 2nd half like this snap of Cover 2.
This was a nice job by Lawrence of recognizing the soft coverage post-snap, letting defenders sink & hitting the checkdown for a 1st.pic.twitter.com/vvOGEm5C3a
— Nate Tice (@Nate_Tice) January 15, 2023
One instance in which the Jaguars were able to clock Staley’s defense perfectly? Lawrence’s 39-yard touchdown pass to Zay Jones with 50 seconds left in the third quarter — this was one play before Bosa’s first eruption. As JP Acosta of SB Nation pointed out, Pederson and his staff got Jones wide open based on the Chargers’ defensive tendencies against 3×1 sets.
I am running on very few hours of sleep but I LOVED this TD to Zay Jones when it happened and loved it even more watching it again pic.twitter.com/9LdMbA0V6a
— JP Acosta (@acosta32_jp) January 15, 2023
Basically, the Jaguars ran vertical over looks from all three receivers to the strong side, and Christian Kirk as the inside slot receiver cut his route short to keep Derwin James, the backside safety, underneath. With that, there was nobody to cover Jones, who was about as open as anyone will ever be.
Is Staley the guy, or should the Chargers move on?
There was no way for Staley to throw deodorant on such a collapse, especially when so much of it was a coaching problem.
“Anytime you’re up 27-7 at halftime and you’ve got four takeaways and you end up winning the takeaway margin 4-0, it’s going to be a killer. I’m hurting for everybody in that locker room. It’s a special group of guys. This is the toughest way that you can lose in the playoffs. Certainly, with the way we started the game, that’s the team that I know that we’re capable of being and in the second half, we just didn’t finish the game. We’re going to learn a lot from this and, unfortunately, this is the tough side of things. Our season’s over. But I love everyone in that locker room. This was a step for us and we’re going to grow a lot from it.”
The question is, how will they grow, and is Staley the guy to make that happen? Remember that it was Staley’s decision to play his starters deep into the Chargers’ meaningless Week 18 loss to the Denver Broncos. Staley’s team had the AFC’s five-seed locked up no matter what, so it was a curiosity that a coach who famously doesn’t play his starters in the preseason went for it here. Coaches are paid in part to assess cost-benefit scenarios. Staley had nothing to gain and everything to lose. In the end, top receiver Mike Williams suffered a back injury that put him out of this game, and given Los Angeles’ offensive splits when Williams is on and off the field, that was a major miscalculation. Bosa was also nicked up in that game, and Herbert took a lot of hits he didn’t need to take.
“We were trying to compete in the game, and we only have 48 guys on the team that are active for the game, so we wanted to make sure that they went a good way in this football game and competed at a high level,” Staley said after that game. “Then, when we felt like it was right for them to get out of the game, and that’s what we’re going to do slowly phased them out so we’re getting ready for next week.
“We only get two practice squad elevations for the game, and you have to put a team out there. You can’t decide when you’re having to play a football game who isn’t going to play and who is going to play and how you’re going to subtract this. You’ve got to go out there and play the football game because this isn’t the preseason where you have 90 guys to choose from. You only have 48 players to choose from so you have to go out there, you have to feel the football team. So we did it the best we could. We wanted to play well in the game and then we wanted to be safe for next week and that’s what we did.”
Except for the fact that this is absolutely what did not happen, sure. This was yet another example of Staley in over his skis. And with so many of those examples showing up at the worst possible moments…. well, we’re not saying that the Chargers should end Staley’s tenure after two seasons. But we would understand if it’s the elephant in the room right now.
If Staley is to remain as the Chargers’ head coach, there had better be some serious self-scouting in the offseason… which started last night.
