Still Not Tough Enough: Chargers Pushed Around by Champs

PITTSBURGH -- They watched, and they kicked at the grass and thought about how it all could have been different. The players on the San Diego Chargers defense watched their brilliant, tough, never-say-die quarterback, Philip Rivers, move the ball with ease on the Steelers late in the game, making a game interesting when it had no business being such. They watched, and they thought, "If only."

If only they hadn't put Rivers in that 28-0 hole. If only they'd been able to get a first-half stop on third down -- on fourth down, for that matter.

"One stop!" Chargers safety Eric Weddle said after Pittsburgh's 38-28 win. "If we could have just got one stop. Our offense is going to keep us in games, and for us not to be able to get stops, it hurts. I mean, they're converting third down after third down after third down. That's hard to handle."

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The Chargers do care. It did hurt their pride that the Steelers held the ball for 77 percent of the first half -- that midway through the third quarter the score was 28-0 and everybody in the building was wondering why the Chargers had even made the 2,100-mile trip if they weren't going to actually play the game.

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"It was turning into something of an embarrassment," Chargers running back LaDanian Tomlinson said.

So yeah, in case you were wondering, the Chargers do feel shame. They feel the sting of their own underachievement. They don't like being the butt of jokes -- the team that chokes in December and January, the ultra-talented roster that never puts it together. It bothers them that they can fly all the way out here and play an NFL football game on national TV and, when it's over, have to answer questions about why Rashard Mendenhall, a second-string running back who spent last week's game on the bench because his coach didn't think he could learn the playbook, barely even noticed that they had a defensive line.

The problem is, they don't do anything to make the jokes stop.

The Chargers were a popular preseason Super Bowl pick this year. You looked at their roster and you thought, yeah, maybe they were the best team in terms of overall talent, quite possibly in the whole league. You looked at their division (before you knew Denver was a juggernaut) and you figured they'd roll up a bunch of wins, coast into the playoffs and have a real shot to hold up that Lombardi trophy in early February.
But you forgot something. Namely, that these are the Chargers, who have proven nothing. The Chargers, who have always let you down. The Chargers, who got punched in the mouth by one AFC North team at home in Week 2 and then got bludgeoned by another on Sunday night at the confluence of the Ohio, the Allegheny and the Monongahela.

"We've played some very physical football teams over this first couple of weeks," Chargers coach Norv Turner said. "But I don't think you ever want to get into a situation where people are able to run the ball the way they were able to tonight."

Holy Understatement, Batman. The Steelers don't run the ball this easily in practice. With starting running back Willie Parker out, Mendenhall rolled up 165 rushing yards on 29 carries. Pittsburgh ran 36 rushing plays to the Chargers' 8. They had 32 first downs to San Diego's 17, and they got 11 of those 32 by running the ball.

"That's any defense," Chargers linebacker Kevin Burnett said. "The first thing you do, any defense, any day, you stop the run. You have to."

But the Chargers couldn't, and the Steelers knew it. In the ultimate indignity, the Steelers had a 4th-and-1 on their own 30 yard line, up 14-0, with six minutes left in the first half, and they went for it.

"Wouldn't you?" Burnett asked. "I think the stats speak for themselves. They ran for about 400 yards on offense. We couldn't stop them. They couldn't be stopped. They went for it on 4th and 1."

And they got it, of course. Ben Roethlisberger blew through San Diego's tissue-paper defensive front for three yards and a cloud of humiliation, and the Steelers rolled along. Ten plays and five minutes later, Mendenhall rambled into the end zone for his second touchdown and a 21-0 Steelers lead.

"We have to play better to beat the top teams in the AFC," said Rivers, who threw for 169 yards and three touchdowns in the final 23 minutes of the game to help fantasy leaguers everywhere win the week and NBC hold its audience. "We played two in the last couple of weeks, in Baltimore and Pittsburgh, that we didn't win either of."

And so they're 2-2, and two games back of Josh McDaniels' Told-You-So Broncos in the AFC West. And their veteran defensive tackle, Jamal Williams, is out for the year and appears to have been replaced with some sort of cardboard cutout. The Chargers have issues, and a bye week, and so now they're going to spend two weeks waking up in a cold sweat from Rashard Mendenhall nightmares.

"We've just got to, collectively, man for man, as a whole, everybody in this room, play better on defense," Burnett said.

If they don't, they're not going to be able to stand toe-to-toe with the Rust Belt beasts of the AFC. And somebody like the Steelers or the Ravens or Bill Belichick is going to go the Super Bowl while the Chargers watch on TV. And everybody's going to make those same old jokes about the Chargers being California soft, even though their quarterback is tougher than calculus and their offense has a chance to be as good as any in the league.

And their defense knows it. Which is why they were kicking themselves late Sunday night.

"It just kills you, is all," Weddle said. "I mean, you get down 21-0, 28-0, this is the NFL. You're not going to be able to come back from that."

The Chargers, along with the rest of us, have identified the problem. Now, the question is: Can they fix it?