“The Athletic Football Show” is previewing all 32 teams leading up to the start of the 2026 NFL season. Here is a preview of the Los Angeles Chargers. The quotes are edited for clarity. You can watch the whole preview on YouTube and in the embedded video below, or listen to the full AFC West preview wherever you get your podcasts.
Derrik Klassen on what about the Chargers most excites him: Justin Herbert gets a play caller that we all know is good.
If Mike McDaniel can do it with Tua Tagovailoa, I’m sure that he can do it with a quarterback like Justin Herbert, so seeing what that looks like is exciting. And not even the “Wow, Justin Herbert might go nuclear in this offense” thing. I’m excited to see an iteration for McDaniel. He’s always had those tweaks to his offense, right?
But with such a new batch of ingredients, this could be appointment-viewing-on-Monday-morning-type stuff.
Dave Helman on what he’ll be watching during the first month of the season: It makes a ton of sense to think that Chris O’Leary is just an extension of Jesse Minter because Minter was his coach at Indiana State. He got his first job under Minter and is intrinsically tied to Minter.
O’Leary took Minter’s foundational aspects of defense to Western Michigan … ball disruption, tackling, effort and angles. Those are the pillars that Minter likes to coach. (It was) to the point where O’Leary tagged Chargers video last year, showed it to his Western Michigan defense and said, “This is what the scheme looks like at the best possible level.”
Understandably, we think the defense will look the same.
However, O’Leary’s still has to call the defense. And so he’s going to have his tendencies, his preferences and his ideas of what he might do differently from Minter, or, to be blunt, he might not be as good at this at the NFL level as Minter is.
How he calls his defense and the subtle differences between what it looked like under Minter and what O’Leary will do, I think that’s a situation where the first four or five weeks of data and just watching their games will tell you a lot about how he might be different.
Robert Mays on what would be a successful season for the Chargers: I think in a lot of circumstances, I would be O.K. with (a playoff berth). Where it feels like, “Alright, we took a measurable step forward as a team this year because we didn’t get blown off the field (in the playoffs). There’s progress being made.”
But how long do we think McDaniel’s going to be here? Two years? If it goes well offensively and he’s just out the door, does this feel like a missed opportunity if they were just plucky in a playoff game?
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