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Justin Herbert and the Chargers offense were playoff-worthy this season. The defense and special teams were not.
Finally, the Chargers were able to stay mostly healthy. They finished in the bottom five in the league in games lost due to injury, according to Man Games Lost. And this is not an accident. Sure, some luck was involved. But Staley made player health a priority as soon as he arrived, and he instituted policies and mechanisms that kept the Chargers healthier than they have been in recent seasons.
“There’s always a luck factor, but he’s definitely made an emphasis of it,” Ekeler told me in the week leading up to the season finale. “That’s him listening to the team. Look, we’ve had a lot of injuries that have affected our past seasons, for as long as I’ve been here. So, I think he’s kind of caught up to the times as far as taking modern medicine and modern practices, all the activation stuff we do. Literally for 30 minutes before every practice, we do rollouts and we do band work and we do all this stuff that I think has played a huge part to our success on the field because we’re healthy, we’re stretched, everything is good to go. The game keeps getting faster. The people keep getting bigger, people keep getting stronger, so we need to actually update our old methods of training and protecting ourselves.
“In any staff that I’ve been involved in, I’ve never had as much activation, stretching, band work. I’ve never had as much as what we’re required to do right now. I’ve been playing football a long time, and this is the most I’ve ever rolled out, stretched and got ready to practice.”
Not a total loss of faith I think. But disappointed in his first season and the belief he failed to perform to his billing, along with questionable in-game decisions that hurt the team. But I think even the most brutal critics of Staley still have hope he can grow into being the coach he was touted to be.
I think the problem is that we overachieved at the beginning during what was supposed to be our toughest stretch, and that gave us false hope. Maybe the reality is that we were much closer to the 5-7 team that finished the season than the 4-1 team at the beginning because of our roster.
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