Jim Harbaugh’s Been Born Again in L.A.—but Can He Save the Chargers?
The most sought-after coach of the recent NFL hiring cycle has finally taken over in L.A.—and he’s already dealing with a quarterback injury and lackluster offensive talent. Will his winning ways be enough to overcome the L.A. Chargers’ curse?
First-year Los Angeles Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh was so excited for training camp in July that he showed up to the first day wearing cleats.
“It feels like being born,” Harbaugh said at the time. “It feels like coming out of the womb. You’re in there. It’s comfortable and safe, and now you’re out. You’re born. Lights are on, it’s bright, chaos, people looking at you, people talking at you, and it just feels good to have it happen.”
It was a pretty wild quote for a football coach, but Harbaugh has been known to do and say a lot of wild stuff throughout his career—and his life. At his bachelor party a decade ago, he won a game of laser tag by exclusively targeting a 10-year-old child. He recently confirmed tall tales about how he gets into cold tubs fully dressed, including his signature khaki pants. He infamously refused to eat chicken because they are “nervous birds,” but then reversed course in 2020, got a chicken coop at Tractor Supply in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and fell in love with the animals. As Harbaugh told the Pardon My Take podcast earlier this month, he came to respect the chickens for “the production that they have.”
This past offseason, with coaches like Bill Belichick available for hire and head-coach vacancies at numerous teams, Harbaugh was considered the NFL’s top candidate, largely due to his own production. Harbaugh’s résumé is unlike that of any other coach alive. He took over a 1-11 Stanford program in 2006 and by 2010 had them finishing 12-1 and winning the Orange Bowl. He was hired at Michigan, his alma mater, during one of the worst stretches in program history and led the team to an undefeated (and scandal-plagued) national championship last season.
And unlike so many college coaches who make the leap to the NFL, Harbaugh already has experience in the pros—and that experience was positive. Harbaugh took over a 6-10 49ers team in 2011, and they immediately made three straight NFC championship games. And with less than two minutes to go in the 2013 Super Bowl, those 49ers were even within 5 yards of taking the lead—against Harbaugh’s brother’s Ravens team.
In the past few years, Harbaugh has been a consistent candidate to return to the pros, having interviewed with Minnesota in 2022 and having been linked to the Broncos in 2023. After those jobs were filled by Kevin O’Connell and Sean Payton, respectively, Harbaugh was thrown around as a possibility for the Bears in 2024 since he is one of the top five quarterbacks in Chicago history. But the Bears ultimately kept coach Matt Eberflus, and Harbaugh chose to bring his “enthusiasm unknown to mankind”—a direct quote—to the L.A. Chargers in January.
“We’re in one of the great cities there is,” Harbaugh said. “Los Angeles, Southern California, they respect talent, effort, and winning. And it needs to be multiple. Multiple championships. We’re going to be humble and hungry, but that’s our goal. That’s our goal, is to treat people in a first-class manner and win multiple championships.”
Despite all of Harbaugh’s outlandish-isms, perhaps his most consistent saying is the family motto he made legendary during Michigan’s 15-0 national championship run last year: “Who’s got it better than us?”
Well, as Harbaugh has taken the helm in L.A., he’s joined a Chargers franchise whose unofficial motto over the past two decades has been “Who has it worse than us?” Now the rest of the league is being treated to a Large Hadron Collider type of experiment: finding out what happens when you blast Harbaugh’s unstoppable winning aura at the Chargers’ immovable loser energy.
Throughout its recent history, the Chargers organization has been synonymous with despair, disappointment, and despondence. They have blown so many games in such a consistent, heartbreaking pattern that a few years ago, I wrote a piece chronicling all of their failures since 2006. The lowlights include (but are not limited to):
- From 2010 to 2020, the Chargers had the three biggest blown leads on Monday Night Football.
- In 2016, the Chargers had an 0-4 stretch so preposterous that The Wall Street Journal said their odds of losing all four games were 1 in 30 million.
- The Chargers lost three separate games in 2020 after being up by 17-plus points.
The Chargers have been so pathetic for so long that they’ve birthed a verb: Chargering. “The history of this team when I got here,” former Chargers coach Brandon Staley told The Athletic in 2021, “it was like, someone’s going to get hurt, they’re going to blow a lead, something catastrophic is going to happen. There’s this Chargering, and there’s all these external factors that I know in my life, they’re just all excuses.”
Staley’s Chargers, of course, blew a 27-point halftime lead in the playoffs in January 2023—a larger blown lead than the infamous 28-3 lead the Falcons blew in the Super Bowl against the Patriots. And Staley was fired last season after the Raiders dropped 63 points on his team on Thursday Night Football.
The Chargers even blew their lead on moving to Los Angeles. They had the inside track on the NFL’s return to L.A. But owner Dean Spanos was outmaneuvered by St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke. The Rams moved to L.A. first, playing four seasons from 2016 to 2019 at the legendary Memorial Coliseum. The Chargers, meanwhile, moved in 2017 and ended up in a soccer stadium, Dignity Health Sports Park (née Stubhub Center), which holds just 27,000 people. Now both teams play at the $5 billion spaceship-esque SoFi Stadium. But Rams owner Kroenke owns the building, the Chargers get just 18.75 percent of the proceeds from the personal seat licenses they sell, and the Rams receive all non-football revenue.
Not only were the Chargers delayed in getting a stadium, but they also have been delayed in building their team headquarters. Like so many people who move to Los Angeles, the Chargers got to town without a firm place to stay. So in 2017, they did the team equivalent of crashing on someone’s couch. They set up shop in a temporary headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, that stared at the back of an Ikea. Depending on the traffic, Costa Mesa is almost as close to their old home in San Diego as it is to their new one in L.A.
But after spending the past eight summers in that temporary home, the Chargers finally have their own place. This year, L.A. moved into its permanent headquarters: a mega-facility called “The Bolt,” which cost more than $250 million to build and sits on a 14-acre plot in El Segundo. The structure has three floors and three practice fields. The balcony has a view of the Hollywood sign (and no view of an Ikea). The lobby has a three-story video screen that, when I visited in August, was emblazoned with “Welcome to training camp at The Bolt” in what must have been 600-point font. All of this is so new that their address—1 Chargers Drive—doesn’t come up when you search for it on Uber or Lyft.
But even with all of that, the biggest change at Chargers training camp this year is still the guy running the show. Harbaugh is box office. When he speaks at the podium, a phalanx of corporate sponsors rotates on the screen behind him, including “TICKETMASTER TICKETMASTER TICKETMASTER TICKETMASTER.” His hiring took fan engagement to a new level. One sales rep told me that after the news of Harbaugh’s hiring, the Chargers’ ticket sales skyrocketed. “We were out here feeding families.”
Harbaugh left his chickens with a neighbor when he departed Michigan to return to the NFL. But he brought with him his college shtick. Harbaugh decided to put each player’s high school recruiting grade—anywhere from zero to five stars—on their respective lockers (stars are important to Harbaugh, who said last December that “Jesus would have been a five-star player”). The Chargers now use college-style poster board signs in practice to indicate the level of tackling they want on a given play. Harbaugh has DJed in practice; players recently came out to “Last Time That I Checc’d” by Nipsey Hussle.
And he’s as hands-on a coach as ever. When the team was practicing the NFL’s new kickoff rules during a recent joint practice with the Rams, Harbaugh gathered the referees together and started mimicking catches on the goal line for clarity on what constituted a touchback.
One of the main targets of Harbaugh’s new regime seems to be the Chargers’ ridiculous injury history over the past two decades. Harbaugh brought his strength coach and consigliere Ben Herbert with him from Michigan. Ben has no relation to Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert. He looks less like the starting quarterback and more like a henchman in a Fast & Furious movie. His job, he said multiple times in his opening press conference, is to make the Chargers “harder to break.” And that philosophy is echoed throughout the team’s workout facility.
In a distinctly Southern California feature, the Chargers have an outdoor weight room where the extra barbells and benches rest (and lightly rust) in the El Segundo sun. Looming over the machines is a massive concrete wall with four giant signs, each containing a classic Harbaugh mix of motivation and maniacal attention to detail. The one in the top right reads:
THE HURT PLAYER
THE OUT OF SHAPE PLAYER
THE UNMOTIVATED PLAYER
THE UNCONFIDENT PLAYER
AND THE BAD PLAYER ...
ALL LOOK ALIKE.
—Dave Adolph
The sign above that one reads:
WANT TO BE HARDER TO BREAK?
- STRONG SHOULDER GIRDLES
- STRONG HIP GIRDLES
- STRONG HAMSTRINGS
- STRONG ANKLES
- LONG AND LOOSE QUADS AND HIP FLEXORS
- ANKLES TAPED
- KNEE BRACES FOR O-LINE AND D-LINE
- DAILY PRE-HAB AND RECOVERY ROUTINE
THESE THINGS, IN OUR MINDS, WILL MAKE YOU HARDER TO BREAK. UNBREAKABLE ... NOT POSSIBLE … HARDER TO BREAK? … VERY POSSIBLE
Not everyone around the facility has noticed the signs. “Those must be new,” center Bradley Bozeman said in August. “I haven’t seen those yet.”
Bozeman, who has been in the NFL for seven years and previously played for John Harbaugh in Baltimore, said Jim Harbaugh and Ben Herbert’s emphasis on strength training is different from anything he has seen in the NFL. “Definitely the most different mentality and focus on [training],” Bozeman said. “You’re working smaller muscle groups, things you don’t typically work. But you’re still working larger muscle groups and doing the same things you were, but in a completely different light.”
Despite what’s on the posters, though, the Chargers are still very much breakable. Injuries struck L.A. early this offseason: Rookie second-round receiver Ladd McConkey, who had various right foot and right ankle injuries in high school and at Georgia, tweaked his right knee in camp; defensive end Joey Bosa injured his hand in one of the final plays of the team’s joint practice with the Rams. And most importantly, quarterback Justin Herbert suffered a plantar fascia injury in early August. (It’s worth noting that Herbert does not have plantar fasciitis; he has an injury to his plantar fascia, much like Dwight Schrute was assistant to the regional manager, not assistant regional manager.) Herbert is out of a walking boot now, but the recovery timeline for that type of injury is notoriously difficult, and it could be painful for months.
The options behind Herbert are bleak. Thirty-four quarterbacks have thrown 25 or more passes this NFL preseason. Among those 29, Chargers backup quarterback Easton Stick ranks dead last in passer rating. Stick and third-stringer Max Duggan have been so ineffective in camp that the Chargers decided to sign 30-year-old quarterback Luis Perez, who won the XFL championship for the Arlington Renegades last year. Perez, who has been with the Chargers for less than two weeks, has thrown the majority of their preseason passes.
The Chargers need Herbert to return, but even when he does, this team still has huge question marks. This offseason, the Chargers jettisoned Austin Ekeler, Keenan Allen, and Mike Williams, who combined have caught half of Herbert’s career completions. Herbert will be playing in Week 1 with almost no experience throwing to the Chargers’ top two tight ends (Will Dissly and Hayden Hurst), two of their top three receivers (McConkey and DJ Chark), and all three running backs (Gus Edwards, J.K. Dobbins, and Kimani Vidal).
The Chargers are one of the youngest teams in the NFL, with a league-high 30 rookies on their 90-man roster. They are in a division with the Chiefs, who have an astonishing eight straight AFC West titles in addition to three Super Bowl wins in the past five years. And they even have a difficult task in Week 1, facing the Raiders at home. Between the Staley overtime game in Week 18 in 2022 and the 63-point bonanza in 2023, the Raiders have handed the Chargers two pantheon-level humiliating defeats. And the Raiders also have more L.A. fans than the Chargers do—you may hear a pro-Raiders crowd even though the game will be held in the Chargers’ home building.
The only thing that can change that is winning. And that is exactly what Harbaugh promised at his opening press conference back in January.
With a rookie starting right tackle, a rookie starting receiver, and a quarterback with a foot injury who’s being backed up by a 30-year-old XFL star, the Chargers don’t seem championship-bound this season. But they’re determined not to be a punch line anymore, either. The Chargers are literally in a different place now, and with Harbaugh, they seem to be in a different place figuratively, too.
“We’ll be at 30,000 feet before you know it,” Harbaugh told All-Pro safety Derwin James before practice a few weeks ago. “Just get a little glide today.”
