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Analysing the 2024 offense under Greg Roman
by Ryan Watkins | Jan 29, 2025 | Articles, PowderKeg Pod Written | 3 comments
HOUSTON, TX - JANUARY 11: Los Angeles Chargers running back J.K. Dobbins (27) is brought down aby Houston Texans safety Calen Bullock (21) and Houston Texans defensive tackle Folorunso Fatukasi (91) during first half action during the Los Angeles Chargers and Houston Texans AFC Wild Card playoff game at NRG Stadium on January 11, 2025, in Houston, TX. (Photo by Ken Murray/Icon Sportswire)
After the season ended in a second Wild Card loss in three seasons Chargers fans will rightly be pondering where this team goes from here. Both losses were painful moments however unlike the 2022 heartbreak the initial disappointment was replaced by a sense of optimism. Jim Harbaugh turned a team who picked 5th overall into a double digit winning side despite being constrained by salary cap issues and a roster that couldn’t have been further from his style. If it wasn’t for the miracle performed by Adam Peters and Dan Quinn I think people would be more appreciative of that turnaround.
I thought the defense was lights out for the majority of the season and their performance in the playoff game was to the stellar standard we have come to expect from Jesse Minter’s unit. I’m excited for where that side of the ball goes with some further tweaks and additions. The fact that Minter elevated the defense to that level allows the Chargers to invest more on the other side of the ball which was less impressive.
Credit to Nfelo
Greg Roman’s offense didn’t have the same immediate impact as his counterpart play caller but that was somewhat to be expected. Minter’s scheme had component carryover from Staley’s system and he was able to keep things simple because of the unfulfilled roster talent he inherited. Roman did not have the same starting point and whilst there were moments throughout the season where it looked like coming together, his offense ultimately failed in spectacular fashion at the most critical moment.
This article will therefore conduct a full analysis of who the offense were in the regular season, what happened in the playoff game and where they go from here. Strap in, this is not a light read! The Chargers’ 2024 offense
The problems of the Chargers’ offense are complex, as they often are, and the blame was therefore inevitably going to be shared to a much higher degree than anyone is willing to admit. As anyone who studies tape can attest to; reviewing the game to a high degree of detail across a whole season affords you the clarity about who a team really is. For me this was the first time I have fully understood what an offense was trying to be and the crux of it is that Jim Harbaugh and Greg Roman were trying to fit square pegs in round holes because their round holes didn’t add up to any kind of offense that can earn a playoff berth.
Kellen Moore is a very competent offensive coordinator who is looking like getting a head coaching job this hiring cycle. Even Joe Lombardi was a contributing part to an offense that made the playoffs. Neither of those could build a sustainable offense in LA that could win meaningful games even though they were stylistically given the right pegs for the right holes. During their collective time the Chargers assigned around 40% of the salary cap spending on offense despite having a quarterback on a rookie contract that was taking up less than 3.8% of the cap.
Contrast that to the 2024 Chargers where 26% of the salary cap was spent on the offense despite Justin Herbert taking 7.6% on his own. When you consider the only off-season that this version of the Chargers have had, this gives further context. Their free agent spending on offense did not surpass $13.5 million despite signing 10 players. Overall the Chargers spent the 30th most money on offense in 2024. That is after losing $35.7 million of their 2023 salary cap spending on Keenan Allen, Mike Williams and Gerald Everett.
Also whilst the draft class may headlined by two star additions in Joe Alt and Ladd McConkey, Joe Hortiz opted for defense and therefore didn’t add another offensive player until the 6th round. This is a very common draft strategy and not one I am critiquing in the slightest however it meant that the offense was left with starters in two positions and almost no depth elsewhere. That is a good analogy for how the talent for this side of the ball performed over the season especially given the bare bones they were asked to start with.
There is one thing that I need to say before we go any further; the consensus group-think opinion that Greg Roman didn’t play to his roster is fundamentally untrue and quite frankly unfair. To demonstrate this I looked at his use of personnel, below is a table that shows the changes Roman has made to his system between his 2022 Ravens team to the 2024 Chargers.
If you asked any coordinator at any level to make changes that significant, they would tell you it’s going to be a challenge to be competitive without significant investment.
He also adapted heavily in season. In the first run of games Roman tried to adapt his style to the Chargers’ roster with lighter personnel and more shotgun looks. However once he saw it wasn’t working to where the team needed it to, he pivoted to a something that more represented the core values of his offense. His heavier personnel under center play-action system started to push this offense to a place it wanted to be.
The results show that once Roman was able to embed his system, it started to come together. Over the first four games of the season he used shotgun at a rate of 73.9% with an EPA/play of -0.091, 22nd in the league and a success rate of 38.5% which ranked at 28th. However once he was able to further align with the play style that Harbaugh and Roman have excelled with that picture changed. Over the last three games of the season the shotgun rate dropped more than 16% all the down to 57.7%, the results speak for themselves with an EPA/play of +0.170 (4th) and 51% success rate (5th).
Additionally Greg Roman is not behind the times in his usage of modern scheme manipulations as I have seen people suggest. This season Roman used motion at 9% higher rate than he did a few seasons ago at the Ravens, well above league average. He also put a lot on his players in terms of variable looks to keep defenses guessing over the course of the season. He used the most formations in the entire league which is especially impressive as he only had one off-season to install all of them. Greg Roman’s 2014 pre-season install playbook was 788 pages long, how much of that do we reckon was able to be realized this season?
Offensive formation variations compared to the tenure length of each team’s system
I think the biggest success of this season has been Roman taking one of Justin Herbert’s weakest parts of his game and turned it into an active strength. Greg Roman has given credit to Herbert for this improvement:
Whilst Herbert is a star pupil that can absorb a lot of coaching, this should not be overlooked. In Week 1 Justin Herbert opened the season with a play-action rate of 13.8%, one of the lowest marks of any quarterback this season, yet he ended the season on 32.6% which was the highest rate in the league. He improved with every single game culminating in an elite performance against the Broncos. Justin Herbert used play action on a career-high 47.2% of his dropbacks against Denver, per NFL Next Gen Stats. He finished 12 of 15 for 155 yards which propelled the offense into scoring 34 points on the number one defense in the league at the time.
The ground game is another area where Roman tried to make in season adjustments. He started the season with his gap scheme leading the way but when teams had the tape, he introduced more zone. This is where the problems started because whilst four of the Chargers’ offensive starting offensive lineman were part of zone run system last season, they were woeful at the reach block technique it requires. Roman and his staff quickly recognized this and went back to his core gap scheme as the primary tool for attack which meant they ended the regular season as 5th in gap run rate.
This all tells me that Roman was adapting as much as he could have done whilst also building towards a future where Jim Harbaugh’s vision for the future can become a reality within a very short rebuilding time frame. This dichotomy of living in both the present and the future was a very thin line to tow. Doing enough to win 11 football games, with an incomplete roster, all whilst pushing towards a complete offensive shift within a span of a single season should be earning Roman credit, not calls for him to lose his job.
The combination of tape, data and context tells us that considering the transition this offense is going through, the unit actually over performed under Greg Roman’s leadership. This statement will likely earn some strong feedback however it is true when you take this all into consideration.
Fair Criticism
There are very fair and justified criticisms to be made of the Chargers’ offensive output this season and I agree with the general consensus that it was far from good enough especially on the ground where Greg Roman was supposed to add the most value as a run game “guru”. Whilst I am putting forward an argument why Roman’s performance in his inaugural year as the Bolts’ offensive coordinator hasn’t been the disaster is has been portrayed as, that does not absolve him from any constructive criticism he has been deserving of.
Over the course of the season my biggest gripe has been with Roman, and Harbaugh, getting game plans wrong. I have been very vocal whenever this happened along the way but this all came to a disastrous nadir in the playoffs. The Texans’ game was the worst example of this which came at the worst time possible. The bare faced result against the Texans shows us that when push comes to shove, this offense failed on multiple fronts and it simply was not good enough.
Let’s dive into the tape from the Wild Card Weekend loss to understand what happened and try to work out where the fair share of the blame lies.
What happened against the Texans
I want to start by giving Demeco Ryans a fair share of the credit. I certainly underestimated just how fast and brutal his unit were prepared to be. They stayed true to the course for the most part, they played quarters on early downs and man on 3rd down. The match-up was there to be had but they were outclassed by a superior unit and there were key tactical changes that helped lift them even after their offense tried to give the game away in the first half.
The ways that the Texans adjusted their usually rigid system tell us a lot about how teams see the weaknesses of the Chargers offense. Demeco Ryans went for a 5-0 front on third down with 2-man or Robber behind it essentially copying the Raheem Morris’ game plan for the Atlanta Falcons’ smothering of the Chargers weak offensive weapons. This was a challenge to essentially say “You have no viable tight ends, no running back receiving threat and only one receiver who can separate against man coverage, who we will bracket”. Which are all true assumptions and the decision to attack them paid dividends.
To really interrogate this offensive performance I charted every single dropback in order to assign credit and blame per play with the intent of understanding what went wrong at a unit-wide level as well as evaluating individual performances. It was an eye-opening process which I conducted using Greg Roman’s 2014 and 2016 playbooks as a basis for the language and rules. What I found from this exercise can be summarized as follows:
In unsurprising news Ladd McConkey was the only player who contributed more than he squandered with a +29% rate. The fact that the next nearest player was 21% below that mark tells the story of this game. I think we can all agree that the only positive part of the offensive performance was Ladd McConkey’s incredible display. The rookie was absolutely brilliant and deserves all the praise coming his way however I see no one acknowledging that getting him the ball was a big part of Roman’s game plan.
As you can see from the compilation above Romans’ passing architecture for this game was predicated on exposing singular moments often referred to as a ‘Void Attackers’ which was a good plan (on paper) to beat Demeco Ryans’ reliance on Quarters. This theory is based in using one route to drag the man match defender out of the passing window which allows a second route to fill the void leftover. Some examples of this would be Dagger, Sail and Over. Ladd was the focal point of these concepts and he could have had even more success than his already impressive 197 yards should the pass protection have survived any longer than a few seconds. Evaluating Greg Roman’s game plan and execution
Whilst I am defending Roman in some aspect across the span of the season, there are failings in this game that reflected what went wrong in critical moments throughout his first season in LA.
The first decision I evaluated was the most perplexing to me; on the first drive Roman copied the Ravens blueprint by running Trap runs for pretty good results but then completely went away from it. Ryans shed some light on this after the game as shown below but I was disappointed not to see a counter to that adjustment. Having studied his system I believe he most likely saw the Texans’ modification and pivoted to a different section of his game plan but to abandon all central targeted gap exchange runs seemed like an over-correction to me. This has unfortunately been a consistent theme for the season for Roman’s offensive brain trust and it should be a flaw that the staff identify during their self scouting this off-season.
Giving up on the run so early but still expecting play-action to work was a poor decision that compounded the error into a complete stalling of the offense. The play-action was a foundational component of this offense even when the ground game went to pot, establishing the run early in the first half was an integral game plan for the 2024 Chargers as it has been for both Harbaugh and Roman throughout their careers.
I am astonished that no one in the post game press conference pushed the question about why J.K. Dobbins was essentially benched in the second half. Even if he got a few gap reads or pass protections wrong, it was not the time for discipline. This unfortunately highlighted a season-long issue for the bolts. The offensive line ranked as the 24th in run blocking grade and whenever J.K. wasn’t on the field that’s the level the ground game played up to.
I can’t overstate how well Dobbins performs when healthy, his run stuff rate is one of the lowest in the league and his footwork is amongst the best in the league. If he was re-signed tomorrow I would be a very happy man because I want to see what he can do with an interior line that can give him the time and space he deserves.
Another key issue was the lack of planning for Herbert to run and the failing to encourage him to do so as a correction during the game. This was quite frankly inexcusable against a team that was so man heavy on third down, there is no protection protocol when the postseason starts and I know Herbert wouldn’t have been the one to turn this down. I was adamant that Justin’s legs would be a key weapon that the offense relied upon to the point I would have advised anyone to take the over on Herbert’s rushing yards prop bet but it was so far out of the game plan that he may as well have been late career Drew Brees.
The lack of quick game that has been a season long issue was disappointing. It is THE best way to make up for a bad running game and the most frustrating thing is that I know Roman has it in his playbook because he showed it during the last three games of the season where he used to take pressure off the pass protection and open up run lanes, particularly against the Denver Broncos. How is this not the first adjustment you go to when the Texans are running Quarters and sending heat off the edge via apex run blitzes?
This decision was most egregious in my opinion and it resulted in a horrid statistical combination: Hebert’s average time to throw was 3.57 seconds, the longest of his career, and his average depth of target (12.6 yards) was the 2nd highest of his entire career. This, in a game where he was pressured so often and so quickly, represents a complete failure to understand how Roman could have beaten such a talented defense.
Justin Herbert’s performance
I wanted to avoid this topic as enough ink has been spilled on the Justin Herbert discourse but I feel like it wouldn’t be right to analyze the offense without putting this to bed. First of all let me just say that in mathematical terms a sample size can never be less than three so for anyone to say Justin Herbert is unable to get it done in the playoffs is fundamentally flawed in their logic.
Next let’s add in some needed context before we take on the task of evaluating the quarterback’s performance. As I highlighting in my charting, there were some big plays that made the game go a different way than it could have. The Chargers’ receivers dropped X passes overall but it was 5 huge passes that swung things by an obscene 21.2 total EPA according to Hayden Winks at Underdog. This was a problem all season too as the Bolts finished with 33 dropped passes, the 5th most in the league.
My charting found that Herbert was primarily responsible for six negative plays and partly responsible for a further 4 negative plays. When you compare that to the number of plays he was given credit for (3 primarily, 6 in total) then you get a score of -5% which, when compared to the mean of 50% comes out at a sobering grade of 45.
Aside from system inconsistencies and roster limitations there are two flaws in Herbert’s game that I see as the biggest inhibitors of his ascension to the elite levels of other AFC quarterbacks like Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson and the dark lord himself. The first is being able to take speed off the ball to be able to float, dink or drift a pass into his receivers’ hands. This blemish of his game actually comes as a result of his first-class arm talent that allows him to throw a ball on a rope to just about any area of the field. He is one of maybe three players in the league that can keep a ball parallel to the floor over 35 yards to incredible levels of accuracy, as shown below.
My issue comes when zone defenders muddy passing windows and Herbert is not able to put air under the ball to access receivers who are outside of a direct passing angle. In the Texans’ game there were a few examples of this limiting the ceiling of the play call but this was the one that stood out to me:
Justin’s other biggest performance gap is in his setting of the pass protection. I remain unsure on how much of this is within his control however Greg Roman indirectly confirmed he has some responsibility in calling protections during his last media availability before the Texans’ game. Any quarterback of his cerebral capabilities should be able to shoulder the majority of these calls but we have seen time and time again that this has been
In my opinion the offensive line were the biggest force multiplier for Herbert’s below average performance. We have seen him overcome bad game plans and poor offensive weapons (Week 18 of 2021 and Week 3 of 2022 come to mind) but when you add in constant pressure in his face that’s a bridge too far for anyone but the most elusive quarterbacks to overcome and right now Justin has found himself to be just shy of that tier.
When you combine his shortcomings on alternative ball flight angles, his inability to master pass protection and his unwillingness to let himself be an elusive quarterback in space, that’s where we find our quarterback falling just short of elite. The Texans were the best defense the Bolts have faced all season and for me it wasn’t Justin failing the magnitude of the moment, it was more him coming up against the lofty ceilings of his own development and the frailty of an offense still very much under construction. Where does the offense go from here
The obvious factor for me is that the Chargers were a year ahead of schedule and had only been afforded a single off-season to overhaul an expensive and disappointing roster with no long term planning opportunity. Joe Hortiz was named as a potential Executive of The Year nominee for what he did in that limited time frame. Now that ‘Chef’ has had a full year to plan what he will do with 11 draft picks and around 25% of the cap space, I think he will be able to put this offense in a position to climb several tiers.
With a theoretical improvement coming our way through acquisitions at key positions, the questions that remain are whether Greg Roman and Justin Herbert can provide stable foundations for everything else to build from? Can the Bolts win playoff games with Greg Roman at the helm?
For all the contextual grace I have afforded Roman for his offensive architecture, his performance as a play caller has, at times been subpar with his average performance leaving a lot of meat on the bone in terms of opportunities for points. He is solely responsible for this because, in my opinion, he has forced himself away from relatively easy wins that were working for consistent yards in search of clever answers that could result in explosive plays. I cannot get on side with what he was trying to do against the Texans no matter how I twist my perspective and that game will certainly leave a mark when it comes to trusting him to win games where the rest of the team aren’t at their best.
Whilst I have been surprised by the effectiveness of Roman’s play-action concepts, the foundational issues of an ineffective run game is a black mark on the Greg Roman’s resume because until now he had always been considered a run game guru. The roster he and the front office inherited was not built to run gap scheme and power their way through the faces of their rivals and it showed consistently throughout the season. Whenever J.K. wasn’t dancing around penetrating defenders, it wasn’t pretty however there is room for optimism.
I have talked before about how close this run game was to executing the scheme but the execution consistently let one or two details slip to result in middling production. Whether that is coaching or talent deficiencies is something we will find out once the staff make some changes to the personnel. I expect at least four new starters across the Bolts’ 11 personnel with two of those being on the interior.
One area where Roman has to improve more than anywhere else is how he strings together play calls. When he is on script Roman ranks as 12th in EPA/play compared to when he is off script he ranks 23rd. Unfortunately this isn’t a new problem, the data from his 2018 season shows the same level of disparity. Between these datasets and the tape it is apparent to me that his play design is good and he can manipulate defenses in the right ways but he struggles with how to stay with the game flow and adjust to what defensive coordinators are throwing at him.
Roman’s dropback passing game was thrust into the spotlight because of the misfitting roster talent and it was mostly better than expected. He has some problems with route spacing which he still needs to figure out but I was pleasantly surprised by the adjustments he made towards the end of the regular season to build in more quick game and expand the cross field routes beyond his beloved mesh. That said those components dropped away completely when it came to the only meaningful game so I’m not sure this is something Roman really wants to put at the forefront of his playbook.
Considering his schematic reliance on tight ends and the running game, Roman was fairly impressive operating under mismatch roster conditions and I think we should consider it a successful if not fruitful first season. That said the upward trajectory of this offense will only be realized if the right pieces are added to allow Harbaugh’s vision for the offense to be fulfilled. Therefore the question of whether Roman will be able to win playoff games is a hard one to answer but based on his experience and the production this year I think I am leaning towards yes. How can Justin Herbert ascend to the next tier?
In Justin Herbert’s case the good news is that some of the aspects we have highlighted in the section above can be overcome with time. Quarterbacks tend to start their peak at 26 years old with the ultimate zenith being around 29. Josh Allen is a good case study for how his improvement in these areas can jump with more experience. The Buffalo Bills’ MVP candidate had a sack rate that ranked 21st across his first two years, then it dropped to around 10th for his next three years before he then led the league over the last two seasons including a historically low 2.8% rate this season. It took five full seasons under the same head coach before he comfortable calling pass protections and then a further two to master all aspects of it.
Allen also rebuilt his throwing motion from the ground up to bring in a consistent launch point at the front of his motion so that he can use weight distribution from that pivot point to alter the flight angle of his passes. All this has meant he has been able to utilize an arcing ball path to access throws he didn’t have available to him. Therefore if Justin is willing to seek outside help this off-season he can potentially unlock these techniques that have so far evaded him. Herbert is generally regarded as having one of the cleanest throwing operations in the league so it shouldn’t be as much of an adjustment to get him to take some RPMs off passes that require more touch.
On his last throw of the season Herbert attempted to do exactly this but he didn’t quite judge it right and it led to his fourth interception of a miserable night in Houston. I see this is a positive though as it shows he was willing to adjust his style to garner different results when the line drive wasn’t open.
The biggest factor for any quarterback who is the focal point of their offense, is their relationship with the offensive coordinator and therefore his scheme. Mahomes, Jackson, Stafford, Goff and Stroud have all been able to grow with their system over multiple years. The longest tenured of those are able to eventually impress themselves onto it after going through the process side by side with a familiar face. I would argue vehemently against depriving Justin Herbert of this opportunity once again. From what I know about Harbaugh the thought of changing a single coach hasn’t even crossed his mind. Conclusion
I am an eternal optimist when it comes to the teams I support, I have been convinced that the Chargers are one off-season away from a championship roster many times only to be let down but this time feels different because Jim Harbaugh and Joe Hortiz have given us reason to believe. I always had faith in the defense being a good unit under Jesse Minter and they exceeded that expectation but when it came to the offense I was less hopeful because of the talent Roman had to work with. I had read many postmortems on Greg’s time at the Ravens that all pointed to his inability to play without the talented players at key positions and it left me unconvinced that it could exist in a modern NFL that requires a balanced offense to be successful.
What I failed to account for in that uncertainty is that Jim Harbaugh knows how to build teams that win and Greg Roman knows how to build offenses that succeed, even if the team that finished the season were not in that vision. Together they made an a bit part offense finish 13th in EPA/Play whilst embedding a completely different offensive language.
Another factor that brings me hope for the direction of this offense is that I underestimated just how much the league-wide shift back towards the ground game would make the appointment work even better. Under center play action football was the centerpiece of 5 out of the final 8 teams in the playoffs and the Chargers will be one season ahead of the other teams who are trying to emulate that success with a coaching staff that has that at the foundation of their careers.
Considering all of this I think that Chargers’ fans should join me in my unceasing idealism because under Jim Harbaugh’s careful control the team have the foundations for a push to the next level. They made the playoffs in their first season whilst the offense was having to transition from one side of the schematic spectrum to the other. Therefore with some added talent and continuity for Justin Herbert, I think the pieces are coming together for another jump.
by Ryan Watkins | Jan 29, 2025 | Articles, PowderKeg Pod Written | 3 comments
HOUSTON, TX - JANUARY 11: Los Angeles Chargers running back J.K. Dobbins (27) is brought down aby Houston Texans safety Calen Bullock (21) and Houston Texans defensive tackle Folorunso Fatukasi (91) during first half action during the Los Angeles Chargers and Houston Texans AFC Wild Card playoff game at NRG Stadium on January 11, 2025, in Houston, TX. (Photo by Ken Murray/Icon Sportswire)
After the season ended in a second Wild Card loss in three seasons Chargers fans will rightly be pondering where this team goes from here. Both losses were painful moments however unlike the 2022 heartbreak the initial disappointment was replaced by a sense of optimism. Jim Harbaugh turned a team who picked 5th overall into a double digit winning side despite being constrained by salary cap issues and a roster that couldn’t have been further from his style. If it wasn’t for the miracle performed by Adam Peters and Dan Quinn I think people would be more appreciative of that turnaround.
I thought the defense was lights out for the majority of the season and their performance in the playoff game was to the stellar standard we have come to expect from Jesse Minter’s unit. I’m excited for where that side of the ball goes with some further tweaks and additions. The fact that Minter elevated the defense to that level allows the Chargers to invest more on the other side of the ball which was less impressive.
Credit to NfeloGreg Roman’s offense didn’t have the same immediate impact as his counterpart play caller but that was somewhat to be expected. Minter’s scheme had component carryover from Staley’s system and he was able to keep things simple because of the unfulfilled roster talent he inherited. Roman did not have the same starting point and whilst there were moments throughout the season where it looked like coming together, his offense ultimately failed in spectacular fashion at the most critical moment.
This article will therefore conduct a full analysis of who the offense were in the regular season, what happened in the playoff game and where they go from here. Strap in, this is not a light read! The Chargers’ 2024 offense
The problems of the Chargers’ offense are complex, as they often are, and the blame was therefore inevitably going to be shared to a much higher degree than anyone is willing to admit. As anyone who studies tape can attest to; reviewing the game to a high degree of detail across a whole season affords you the clarity about who a team really is. For me this was the first time I have fully understood what an offense was trying to be and the crux of it is that Jim Harbaugh and Greg Roman were trying to fit square pegs in round holes because their round holes didn’t add up to any kind of offense that can earn a playoff berth.
Kellen Moore is a very competent offensive coordinator who is looking like getting a head coaching job this hiring cycle. Even Joe Lombardi was a contributing part to an offense that made the playoffs. Neither of those could build a sustainable offense in LA that could win meaningful games even though they were stylistically given the right pegs for the right holes. During their collective time the Chargers assigned around 40% of the salary cap spending on offense despite having a quarterback on a rookie contract that was taking up less than 3.8% of the cap.
Contrast that to the 2024 Chargers where 26% of the salary cap was spent on the offense despite Justin Herbert taking 7.6% on his own. When you consider the only off-season that this version of the Chargers have had, this gives further context. Their free agent spending on offense did not surpass $13.5 million despite signing 10 players. Overall the Chargers spent the 30th most money on offense in 2024. That is after losing $35.7 million of their 2023 salary cap spending on Keenan Allen, Mike Williams and Gerald Everett.
Also whilst the draft class may headlined by two star additions in Joe Alt and Ladd McConkey, Joe Hortiz opted for defense and therefore didn’t add another offensive player until the 6th round. This is a very common draft strategy and not one I am critiquing in the slightest however it meant that the offense was left with starters in two positions and almost no depth elsewhere. That is a good analogy for how the talent for this side of the ball performed over the season especially given the bare bones they were asked to start with.
This is how the Chargers’ offensive skill players were ranked ahead of the 2024 season:
- ESPN: 32nd
- The Ringer: 19th
- Sports Illustrated: 29th
- Sharp Analytics: 31st
There is one thing that I need to say before we go any further; the consensus group-think opinion that Greg Roman didn’t play to his roster is fundamentally untrue and quite frankly unfair. To demonstrate this I looked at his use of personnel, below is a table that shows the changes Roman has made to his system between his 2022 Ravens team to the 2024 Chargers.
If you asked any coordinator at any level to make changes that significant, they would tell you it’s going to be a challenge to be competitive without significant investment.
He also adapted heavily in season. In the first run of games Roman tried to adapt his style to the Chargers’ roster with lighter personnel and more shotgun looks. However once he saw it wasn’t working to where the team needed it to, he pivoted to a something that more represented the core values of his offense. His heavier personnel under center play-action system started to push this offense to a place it wanted to be.
The results show that once Roman was able to embed his system, it started to come together. Over the first four games of the season he used shotgun at a rate of 73.9% with an EPA/play of -0.091, 22nd in the league and a success rate of 38.5% which ranked at 28th. However once he was able to further align with the play style that Harbaugh and Roman have excelled with that picture changed. Over the last three games of the season the shotgun rate dropped more than 16% all the down to 57.7%, the results speak for themselves with an EPA/play of +0.170 (4th) and 51% success rate (5th).
Additionally Greg Roman is not behind the times in his usage of modern scheme manipulations as I have seen people suggest. This season Roman used motion at 9% higher rate than he did a few seasons ago at the Ravens, well above league average. He also put a lot on his players in terms of variable looks to keep defenses guessing over the course of the season. He used the most formations in the entire league which is especially impressive as he only had one off-season to install all of them. Greg Roman’s 2014 pre-season install playbook was 788 pages long, how much of that do we reckon was able to be realized this season?
Offensive formation variations compared to the tenure length of each team’s systemI think the biggest success of this season has been Roman taking one of Justin Herbert’s weakest parts of his game and turned it into an active strength. Greg Roman has given credit to Herbert for this improvement:
“I got to honest with you, and he might get mad at me for saying this, but I really feel like he has improved incredibly from the day one, when we got here, to now.” Roman said about play-action ahead of the Wild Card game. “He wasn’t really into the play-action a whole lot. So the ball handling, the fakes, all the various actions that you will use… I really feel like he has brought his game up”
Whilst Herbert is a star pupil that can absorb a lot of coaching, this should not be overlooked. In Week 1 Justin Herbert opened the season with a play-action rate of 13.8%, one of the lowest marks of any quarterback this season, yet he ended the season on 32.6% which was the highest rate in the league. He improved with every single game culminating in an elite performance against the Broncos. Justin Herbert used play action on a career-high 47.2% of his dropbacks against Denver, per NFL Next Gen Stats. He finished 12 of 15 for 155 yards which propelled the offense into scoring 34 points on the number one defense in the league at the time.
According to Pro Football Focus, Herbert posted a 96.0 grade on play-action passes this season, easily the highest mark by a quarterback in the NFL. PFF charted Herbert as having 194 play-action dropbacks in 2024, the second-most in the league.
From Chargers.com
From Chargers.com
The ground game is another area where Roman tried to make in season adjustments. He started the season with his gap scheme leading the way but when teams had the tape, he introduced more zone. This is where the problems started because whilst four of the Chargers’ offensive starting offensive lineman were part of zone run system last season, they were woeful at the reach block technique it requires. Roman and his staff quickly recognized this and went back to his core gap scheme as the primary tool for attack which meant they ended the regular season as 5th in gap run rate.
This all tells me that Roman was adapting as much as he could have done whilst also building towards a future where Jim Harbaugh’s vision for the future can become a reality within a very short rebuilding time frame. This dichotomy of living in both the present and the future was a very thin line to tow. Doing enough to win 11 football games, with an incomplete roster, all whilst pushing towards a complete offensive shift within a span of a single season should be earning Roman credit, not calls for him to lose his job.
Final EPA/Play rankings for the Chargers’ 2024 regular season:
- Total Offense: 12th
- Passing: 12th
- Rushing: 18th
The combination of tape, data and context tells us that considering the transition this offense is going through, the unit actually over performed under Greg Roman’s leadership. This statement will likely earn some strong feedback however it is true when you take this all into consideration.
Fair Criticism
There are very fair and justified criticisms to be made of the Chargers’ offensive output this season and I agree with the general consensus that it was far from good enough especially on the ground where Greg Roman was supposed to add the most value as a run game “guru”. Whilst I am putting forward an argument why Roman’s performance in his inaugural year as the Bolts’ offensive coordinator hasn’t been the disaster is has been portrayed as, that does not absolve him from any constructive criticism he has been deserving of.
Over the course of the season my biggest gripe has been with Roman, and Harbaugh, getting game plans wrong. I have been very vocal whenever this happened along the way but this all came to a disastrous nadir in the playoffs. The Texans’ game was the worst example of this which came at the worst time possible. The bare faced result against the Texans shows us that when push comes to shove, this offense failed on multiple fronts and it simply was not good enough.
Let’s dive into the tape from the Wild Card Weekend loss to understand what happened and try to work out where the fair share of the blame lies.
What happened against the Texans
I want to start by giving Demeco Ryans a fair share of the credit. I certainly underestimated just how fast and brutal his unit were prepared to be. They stayed true to the course for the most part, they played quarters on early downs and man on 3rd down. The match-up was there to be had but they were outclassed by a superior unit and there were key tactical changes that helped lift them even after their offense tried to give the game away in the first half.
The ways that the Texans adjusted their usually rigid system tell us a lot about how teams see the weaknesses of the Chargers offense. Demeco Ryans went for a 5-0 front on third down with 2-man or Robber behind it essentially copying the Raheem Morris’ game plan for the Atlanta Falcons’ smothering of the Chargers weak offensive weapons. This was a challenge to essentially say “You have no viable tight ends, no running back receiving threat and only one receiver who can separate against man coverage, who we will bracket”. Which are all true assumptions and the decision to attack them paid dividends.
To really interrogate this offensive performance I charted every single dropback in order to assign credit and blame per play with the intent of understanding what went wrong at a unit-wide level as well as evaluating individual performances. It was an eye-opening process which I conducted using Greg Roman’s 2014 and 2016 playbooks as a basis for the language and rules. What I found from this exercise can be summarized as follows:
- The biggest contribution to the failings of the offense was the offensive line with 30% of the negative plays involving their mistakes. This is especially damning with the added context that the line had added help with max protection being called on 17% of all passing plays.
- Neither Roman (28%) or Herbert (24%) covered themselves in glory on dropback concepts and played a large part in why this game plan failed. I will go into each of their individual performances.
- The pass catchers weren’t necessarily to blame too often (15%) but their failure to get any separation against man was a consistent problem that Justin Herbert was trying to solve via sheer misplaced faith.
In unsurprising news Ladd McConkey was the only player who contributed more than he squandered with a +29% rate. The fact that the next nearest player was 21% below that mark tells the story of this game. I think we can all agree that the only positive part of the offensive performance was Ladd McConkey’s incredible display. The rookie was absolutely brilliant and deserves all the praise coming his way however I see no one acknowledging that getting him the ball was a big part of Roman’s game plan.
As you can see from the compilation above Romans’ passing architecture for this game was predicated on exposing singular moments often referred to as a ‘Void Attackers’ which was a good plan (on paper) to beat Demeco Ryans’ reliance on Quarters. This theory is based in using one route to drag the man match defender out of the passing window which allows a second route to fill the void leftover. Some examples of this would be Dagger, Sail and Over. Ladd was the focal point of these concepts and he could have had even more success than his already impressive 197 yards should the pass protection have survived any longer than a few seconds. Evaluating Greg Roman’s game plan and execution
Whilst I am defending Roman in some aspect across the span of the season, there are failings in this game that reflected what went wrong in critical moments throughout his first season in LA.
The first decision I evaluated was the most perplexing to me; on the first drive Roman copied the Ravens blueprint by running Trap runs for pretty good results but then completely went away from it. Ryans shed some light on this after the game as shown below but I was disappointed not to see a counter to that adjustment. Having studied his system I believe he most likely saw the Texans’ modification and pivoted to a different section of his game plan but to abandon all central targeted gap exchange runs seemed like an over-correction to me. This has unfortunately been a consistent theme for the season for Roman’s offensive brain trust and it should be a flaw that the staff identify during their self scouting this off-season.
Giving up on the run so early but still expecting play-action to work was a poor decision that compounded the error into a complete stalling of the offense. The play-action was a foundational component of this offense even when the ground game went to pot, establishing the run early in the first half was an integral game plan for the 2024 Chargers as it has been for both Harbaugh and Roman throughout their careers.
I am astonished that no one in the post game press conference pushed the question about why J.K. Dobbins was essentially benched in the second half. Even if he got a few gap reads or pass protections wrong, it was not the time for discipline. This unfortunately highlighted a season-long issue for the bolts. The offensive line ranked as the 24th in run blocking grade and whenever J.K. wasn’t on the field that’s the level the ground game played up to.
“I’ve learned from some things so hopefully next time, if I’m with the Chargers and we’re in the playoffs, hopefully next time I can do a better part helping the team win. Hopefully, the ball does come my way the next time, if there is a next time.”
J.K. Dobbins on FanDuel TV’s ‘Up & Adams’ show regarding his lack of touches in the Wild Card game
J.K. Dobbins on FanDuel TV’s ‘Up & Adams’ show regarding his lack of touches in the Wild Card game
I can’t overstate how well Dobbins performs when healthy, his run stuff rate is one of the lowest in the league and his footwork is amongst the best in the league. If he was re-signed tomorrow I would be a very happy man because I want to see what he can do with an interior line that can give him the time and space he deserves.
Another key issue was the lack of planning for Herbert to run and the failing to encourage him to do so as a correction during the game. This was quite frankly inexcusable against a team that was so man heavy on third down, there is no protection protocol when the postseason starts and I know Herbert wouldn’t have been the one to turn this down. I was adamant that Justin’s legs would be a key weapon that the offense relied upon to the point I would have advised anyone to take the over on Herbert’s rushing yards prop bet but it was so far out of the game plan that he may as well have been late career Drew Brees.
The lack of quick game that has been a season long issue was disappointing. It is THE best way to make up for a bad running game and the most frustrating thing is that I know Roman has it in his playbook because he showed it during the last three games of the season where he used to take pressure off the pass protection and open up run lanes, particularly against the Denver Broncos. How is this not the first adjustment you go to when the Texans are running Quarters and sending heat off the edge via apex run blitzes?
“Justin Herbert was pressured on 19 of 36 dropbacks (52.8%)” and “Herbert faced 11 quick pressures (30.6%), including 5 unblocked pressures, resulting in his highest quick pressure rate faced in any career regular or postseason game.”
According to NFL Pro
According to NFL Pro
This decision was most egregious in my opinion and it resulted in a horrid statistical combination: Hebert’s average time to throw was 3.57 seconds, the longest of his career, and his average depth of target (12.6 yards) was the 2nd highest of his entire career. This, in a game where he was pressured so often and so quickly, represents a complete failure to understand how Roman could have beaten such a talented defense.
Justin Herbert’s performance
I wanted to avoid this topic as enough ink has been spilled on the Justin Herbert discourse but I feel like it wouldn’t be right to analyze the offense without putting this to bed. First of all let me just say that in mathematical terms a sample size can never be less than three so for anyone to say Justin Herbert is unable to get it done in the playoffs is fundamentally flawed in their logic.
“The Chargers posted the 8th worst Reception % by any team in any playoff game since 2000 (43.8%)”
From The 33rd Team
From The 33rd Team
Next let’s add in some needed context before we take on the task of evaluating the quarterback’s performance. As I highlighting in my charting, there were some big plays that made the game go a different way than it could have. The Chargers’ receivers dropped X passes overall but it was 5 huge passes that swung things by an obscene 21.2 total EPA according to Hayden Winks at Underdog. This was a problem all season too as the Bolts finished with 33 dropped passes, the 5th most in the league.
My charting found that Herbert was primarily responsible for six negative plays and partly responsible for a further 4 negative plays. When you compare that to the number of plays he was given credit for (3 primarily, 6 in total) then you get a score of -5% which, when compared to the mean of 50% comes out at a sobering grade of 45.
Aside from system inconsistencies and roster limitations there are two flaws in Herbert’s game that I see as the biggest inhibitors of his ascension to the elite levels of other AFC quarterbacks like Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson and the dark lord himself. The first is being able to take speed off the ball to be able to float, dink or drift a pass into his receivers’ hands. This blemish of his game actually comes as a result of his first-class arm talent that allows him to throw a ball on a rope to just about any area of the field. He is one of maybe three players in the league that can keep a ball parallel to the floor over 35 yards to incredible levels of accuracy, as shown below.
My issue comes when zone defenders muddy passing windows and Herbert is not able to put air under the ball to access receivers who are outside of a direct passing angle. In the Texans’ game there were a few examples of this limiting the ceiling of the play call but this was the one that stood out to me:
Justin’s other biggest performance gap is in his setting of the pass protection. I remain unsure on how much of this is within his control however Greg Roman indirectly confirmed he has some responsibility in calling protections during his last media availability before the Texans’ game. Any quarterback of his cerebral capabilities should be able to shoulder the majority of these calls but we have seen time and time again that this has been
In my opinion the offensive line were the biggest force multiplier for Herbert’s below average performance. We have seen him overcome bad game plans and poor offensive weapons (Week 18 of 2021 and Week 3 of 2022 come to mind) but when you add in constant pressure in his face that’s a bridge too far for anyone but the most elusive quarterbacks to overcome and right now Justin has found himself to be just shy of that tier.
When you combine his shortcomings on alternative ball flight angles, his inability to master pass protection and his unwillingness to let himself be an elusive quarterback in space, that’s where we find our quarterback falling just short of elite. The Texans were the best defense the Bolts have faced all season and for me it wasn’t Justin failing the magnitude of the moment, it was more him coming up against the lofty ceilings of his own development and the frailty of an offense still very much under construction. Where does the offense go from here
The obvious factor for me is that the Chargers were a year ahead of schedule and had only been afforded a single off-season to overhaul an expensive and disappointing roster with no long term planning opportunity. Joe Hortiz was named as a potential Executive of The Year nominee for what he did in that limited time frame. Now that ‘Chef’ has had a full year to plan what he will do with 11 draft picks and around 25% of the cap space, I think he will be able to put this offense in a position to climb several tiers.
With a theoretical improvement coming our way through acquisitions at key positions, the questions that remain are whether Greg Roman and Justin Herbert can provide stable foundations for everything else to build from? Can the Bolts win playoff games with Greg Roman at the helm?
For all the contextual grace I have afforded Roman for his offensive architecture, his performance as a play caller has, at times been subpar with his average performance leaving a lot of meat on the bone in terms of opportunities for points. He is solely responsible for this because, in my opinion, he has forced himself away from relatively easy wins that were working for consistent yards in search of clever answers that could result in explosive plays. I cannot get on side with what he was trying to do against the Texans no matter how I twist my perspective and that game will certainly leave a mark when it comes to trusting him to win games where the rest of the team aren’t at their best.
Whilst I have been surprised by the effectiveness of Roman’s play-action concepts, the foundational issues of an ineffective run game is a black mark on the Greg Roman’s resume because until now he had always been considered a run game guru. The roster he and the front office inherited was not built to run gap scheme and power their way through the faces of their rivals and it showed consistently throughout the season. Whenever J.K. wasn’t dancing around penetrating defenders, it wasn’t pretty however there is room for optimism.
I have talked before about how close this run game was to executing the scheme but the execution consistently let one or two details slip to result in middling production. Whether that is coaching or talent deficiencies is something we will find out once the staff make some changes to the personnel. I expect at least four new starters across the Bolts’ 11 personnel with two of those being on the interior.
One area where Roman has to improve more than anywhere else is how he strings together play calls. When he is on script Roman ranks as 12th in EPA/play compared to when he is off script he ranks 23rd. Unfortunately this isn’t a new problem, the data from his 2018 season shows the same level of disparity. Between these datasets and the tape it is apparent to me that his play design is good and he can manipulate defenses in the right ways but he struggles with how to stay with the game flow and adjust to what defensive coordinators are throwing at him.
Roman’s dropback passing game was thrust into the spotlight because of the misfitting roster talent and it was mostly better than expected. He has some problems with route spacing which he still needs to figure out but I was pleasantly surprised by the adjustments he made towards the end of the regular season to build in more quick game and expand the cross field routes beyond his beloved mesh. That said those components dropped away completely when it came to the only meaningful game so I’m not sure this is something Roman really wants to put at the forefront of his playbook.
Considering his schematic reliance on tight ends and the running game, Roman was fairly impressive operating under mismatch roster conditions and I think we should consider it a successful if not fruitful first season. That said the upward trajectory of this offense will only be realized if the right pieces are added to allow Harbaugh’s vision for the offense to be fulfilled. Therefore the question of whether Roman will be able to win playoff games is a hard one to answer but based on his experience and the production this year I think I am leaning towards yes. How can Justin Herbert ascend to the next tier?
In Justin Herbert’s case the good news is that some of the aspects we have highlighted in the section above can be overcome with time. Quarterbacks tend to start their peak at 26 years old with the ultimate zenith being around 29. Josh Allen is a good case study for how his improvement in these areas can jump with more experience. The Buffalo Bills’ MVP candidate had a sack rate that ranked 21st across his first two years, then it dropped to around 10th for his next three years before he then led the league over the last two seasons including a historically low 2.8% rate this season. It took five full seasons under the same head coach before he comfortable calling pass protections and then a further two to master all aspects of it.
Allen also rebuilt his throwing motion from the ground up to bring in a consistent launch point at the front of his motion so that he can use weight distribution from that pivot point to alter the flight angle of his passes. All this has meant he has been able to utilize an arcing ball path to access throws he didn’t have available to him. Therefore if Justin is willing to seek outside help this off-season he can potentially unlock these techniques that have so far evaded him. Herbert is generally regarded as having one of the cleanest throwing operations in the league so it shouldn’t be as much of an adjustment to get him to take some RPMs off passes that require more touch.
On his last throw of the season Herbert attempted to do exactly this but he didn’t quite judge it right and it led to his fourth interception of a miserable night in Houston. I see this is a positive though as it shows he was willing to adjust his style to garner different results when the line drive wasn’t open.
The biggest factor for any quarterback who is the focal point of their offense, is their relationship with the offensive coordinator and therefore his scheme. Mahomes, Jackson, Stafford, Goff and Stroud have all been able to grow with their system over multiple years. The longest tenured of those are able to eventually impress themselves onto it after going through the process side by side with a familiar face. I would argue vehemently against depriving Justin Herbert of this opportunity once again. From what I know about Harbaugh the thought of changing a single coach hasn’t even crossed his mind. Conclusion
I am an eternal optimist when it comes to the teams I support, I have been convinced that the Chargers are one off-season away from a championship roster many times only to be let down but this time feels different because Jim Harbaugh and Joe Hortiz have given us reason to believe. I always had faith in the defense being a good unit under Jesse Minter and they exceeded that expectation but when it came to the offense I was less hopeful because of the talent Roman had to work with. I had read many postmortems on Greg’s time at the Ravens that all pointed to his inability to play without the talented players at key positions and it left me unconvinced that it could exist in a modern NFL that requires a balanced offense to be successful.
What I failed to account for in that uncertainty is that Jim Harbaugh knows how to build teams that win and Greg Roman knows how to build offenses that succeed, even if the team that finished the season were not in that vision. Together they made an a bit part offense finish 13th in EPA/Play whilst embedding a completely different offensive language.
“I think Greg Roman has done a job that is revolutionary in football, I think the way he has mixed the trap, the power, the wham plays, into the pistol offense and into our conventional offense has been revolutionary in many ways.”
Jim harbaugh on Greg roman’s offense in 2013
Jim harbaugh on Greg roman’s offense in 2013
Another factor that brings me hope for the direction of this offense is that I underestimated just how much the league-wide shift back towards the ground game would make the appointment work even better. Under center play action football was the centerpiece of 5 out of the final 8 teams in the playoffs and the Chargers will be one season ahead of the other teams who are trying to emulate that success with a coaching staff that has that at the foundation of their careers.
Considering all of this I think that Chargers’ fans should join me in my unceasing idealism because under Jim Harbaugh’s careful control the team have the foundations for a push to the next level. They made the playoffs in their first season whilst the offense was having to transition from one side of the schematic spectrum to the other. Therefore with some added talent and continuity for Justin Herbert, I think the pieces are coming together for another jump.
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