The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Chargers go big, for a change, with Harbaugh
Before Wednesday, it had been 22 years since the Chargers filled a coaching vacancy with a really significant hire, a big name, big reputation coach that brought with him big expectations.
In fact, it was Jan.
28, 2002, when the Spanos family hired Marty Schottenheimer to change the culture of their San Diego football team, just a few days after he’d been fired by Washington with three years left on his contract. Schottenheimer signed a four-year, $10 million deal — significantly, his former team picked up some of that financial obligation — with the idea that he would transform a club that had languished the previous five years under Mike Riley and Kevin Gilbride.
(The new guy, Jim Harbaugh,
might remember what it was like before Marty got there. Harbaugh was the Chargers’ QB1 at age 36 in Riley’s first season, an 8-8 campaign in 1999, and split the starts with Ryan Leaf in a 1-15 grind the following year, Harbaugh’s last as an active player.)
Hiring Marty worked, sort of, though the postseason hex that bedeviled him in Cleveland and Kansas City not surprisingly followed him to San Diego. He needed a couple of years to straighten things out, but the Chargers were 12-4 in 2004 with Drew Brees at quarterback and 14-2 in 2006 with Philip Rivers under center. They lost their only postseason game both seasons — we’ll leave Marlon Mccree out of this, thank you — and then Marty’s feud with general manager A.J. Smith blew the whole thing up.
There’s a message here. Those who heard the news