Brandon Staley firing: Chargers opening offers star QB, but lots of flaws

The Los Angeles Chargers, fresh off a 63-21 beating at the hands of the Las Vegas Raiders on Thursday night, fired third-year head coach Brandon Staley along with general manager Tom Telesco on Friday morning.

Los Angeles just fell to 5-9 on the season with a fifth loss in their last six games.

“Our fans have stood strong through so many ups and downs and close games,” Chargers owner and chairman Dean Spanos said in a statement announcing the firings. “They deserve more. Frankly, they’ve earned more. Building and maintaining a championship-caliber program remains our ultimate goal. And reimagining how we achieve that goal begins today.”

Staley finishes his time in L.A. with a 24-24 regular-season record. A coaching tenure filled with high expectations and dramatic letdowns—headlined by a blown 27-point lead to the Jacksonville Jaguars in last season’s playoffs—comes to an end with less than a month to go in the 2023 regular season. Outside linebackers coach Giff Smith and director of player personnel JoJo Wooden will take over as interim head coach and general manager, respectively, the Chargers announced.

And that brings up the question of who Los Angeles will hand the team over to on a full-time basis. Because there will be no shortage of interest in the openings.

The Chargers have a luxury that other teams in need of a head coach or general manager this offseason presumably won’t have—a franchise quarterback. Justin Herbert, who will miss the rest of this season with a finger injury, is widely considered one of the best quarterbacks the National Football League (NFL) has to offer. The 25-year-old is second in the NFL in passing yards (17,223) and fourth in passing touchdowns (114) since entering the league in 2020.

Herbert’s former backup, Chase Daniel, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday that the Chargers coach opening will be the “most coveted job available.” One of the NFL’s top insiders agreed.

“This is really going to be…a very coveted job,” NFL Media’s Ian Rapoport said on NFL Network in reaction to Staley’s firing. “You have Justin Herbert and you have all those weapons. Obviously, this is one that everyone is going to want. There’s only 32 [head coaching jobs], they want all of them. But this is certainly going to be coveted.”

But there are issues whoever takes the keys to the Chargers next will have to address.

For starters, the Chargers are roughly $40 million over next year’s salary cap, according to Over The Cap. And the year after that, Herbert’s $262.5 million contract extension is on the books, so the days of building a roster around a QB on a rookie deal are over. Speaking of the Bolts’ roster, the next GM-coach combo will be tasked with retooling an aging, top-heavy group of players.

NFL Draft analyst Matt Miller wrote Friday on X that the Chargers have a roster “that looks good on paper [but] has been a nightmare with overpaid, overrated players.” Keenan Allen (31), Gerald Everett (29), and Austin Ekeler (28) are L.A.’s top-three leaders in receptions this season, the oldest trio in the NFL, according to Mina Kimes, an NFL analyst at ESPN. Kimes also noted on X that the Chargers “need to get younger and faster on both sides of the ball without many resources.”

“I would be surprised if this were a situation where a new coach came in and they suddenly won 11 games,” ESPN’s Bill Barnwell wrote Friday afternoon on X. “There are real issues with this roster.”

The Chargers have three more games left on their 2023 slate—all against teams currently above .500. Smith and Wooden may be auditioning for full-time positions over that stretch. Or maybe offensive coordinator Kellen Moore eventually gets a shot at the top job. Either way, L.A. will have new decision-makers at the top this offseason.

And they will have plenty of work to do to get the Chargers back to the postseason.